Category: Uncategorized

President’s Choice pistachios are packed in a resealable bag.
Ha.

Yes, Pierre Bourque may be the man behind the unpopular one-island-one-city mergers. Yes, he may look a lot like The Penguin. But at least he’s not the out-of-touch hegemonic whackjob responsible for this.

What I did this weekend:
~ took Robert to ballet
~ prepared the menu for the coming week
~ based on said menu, prepared the grocery list
~ shopped
~ went to Indigo and knocked at least six names off the present list
~ went to TB’s birthday party
~ went with Dina and her MIL to a fair trade fair and knocked a few more names off the list
~ invented a new version of my MIL’s cheese and onion bread pudding
…oh, and corrected 52 essays.
What I did not do this weekend:
~ laundry
~ get enough sleep
~ see Casino Royale
~ endear myself to my family.
Three more weeks!

Ahem.
Yay, me.

via Shatnerian (ta!)

If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
I’m sitting in class while my students write their mid-term test.
I had an annotated bibliography to submit today for the Performa course I’m taking. The bibliography is supposed to be based on ten of the articles I’ve collected so far for the literature review at the end of the course. So I have lovingly prepared a binder filled with articles (well over the required ten), and I figured I would get started on the bibliography and finish it this evening, while I waited.
Then I turned around and the bibliography had somehow finished itself by mid-afternoon.
A plateau is a high form of flattery.
So I turned my attention to preparing a PowerPoint presentation for a workshop I’ve been asked to give tomorrow on the English Exit Exam (a provincial exam that all students must pass in order to graduate from Cegep). I have a short presentation already in the can that I’ve used in my classes before, but I needed to incorporate more information on the requirements of the exam. Again, I figured I could work on perfecting the presentation this evening.
Except that it’s done.
A backward poet writes inverse.
Of course, I have marking – leftover rewrites, a few late submissions, and the rest of the short-answer tests my star pupils wrote last Friday.
Now, in an ideal world, this line would read “but that’s done too!”
Well, it isn’t, because in a moment of sheer brilliance this morning, I left all my marking piled neatly on my desk.
At home.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
So here I sit, with nothing to do but clean up the comment spam and peruse the jokes sent to me by well-intentioned friends:
A grenade that fell onto a kitchen floor in France resulted in Linoleum Blownapart.

It’s the middle of the semester ~ it feels like it’s been mid-term for weeks. I’m pooped. I’m in that seemingly endless correcting cycle. I dream of essays, and not in a good, “Hi Miss, I’m your student Ben Affleck and I wanted to talk to you about my essay” way.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that all the extra work will (a) pay off in the foreseeable future and (b) not be repeated next fall. As I did last fall, I am teaching a full daytime course load plus one. That may not sound like a lot – one extra course – but consider that a full load is only three courses to begin with. Imagine taking your current workload and adding a third. If you work a 37.5 hour workweek, that means adding an extra 12.5 hours. No wonder I’m so tired.
To make matters worse, the World’s Greatest Mother-in-Law (TM) went home yesterday, which means we’re on our own. No more home-cooked meals, no more Grandma-assisted homework, no more rum & Coke appearing magically at exactly the right time (OK, the timing part isn’t hard).
But the bright side is multi-faceted. It is the middle of the term, after all, which means one more pile of essays and I’m over the hump. The pile in question is from my Montreal Writers group, which is probably the most fun group I’ve ever taught (I’m trying not to dwell on the ‘it’s all downhill from here’ side of that particular coin). So far, despite the perpetual corrections, I have not suffered any (major) paper cuts. The extra work is not, perhaps, paying off as instantaneously as I might have hoped, but it is paying off, in that I’ll only have to teach one summer course, rather than two, to complete my year.
And my boys continue to be wonderful.

Photo courtesy of Dina
Robert turned seven on Monday, and once again we were fortunate to celebrate with friends and family and an awesome cake.
Ah, well, back to the essays.

See, here’s the thing. I am a teacher. A professor, as it were. As such, my job is to profess.
Aloud.
Using my voice.
Which appears, at the moment, to be leaving me.
I don’t know what I did, voice, but you can’t leave me. I need you.
Whatever it was, I’m sorry.
Grumble.

As of yesterday, around 3 o’clock, Colin is nine.
NINE.
Years.
Ack.

from a student essay on retailers’ strategies:
“Good customer service leads to good mouth-to-mouth advertising.”