Cutting Down Time Eaters

So, I've taken down my blog/webcomic links. I just can't spend that kind of time online anymore. :( I spend an hour or two every night clicking around, and that's time I need to spend doing other things.

Going insane

I spent this week basically at home...I would make a LOUSY stay/work from home person. It's not even that there are too many distractions (although there is that), but I'm just not efficient.

I also forget to eat. This could contribute to the general lack of efficiency.

Inertia is HUGE in my life. If I'm doing something, I'll keep on doing it. If I'm not doing something, I'll keep on doing that.I also have "shiny thing" syndrome where I'm all over the place. Hence why I have wet laundry in the washer, nearly burned the pancakes (as it is, there's three that are pancake crisps, only unburned since the heat was on so low) and didn't even go shopping for dinner until it was after five (good thing D's working late.)

I'm feeling...bleh. Maybe it's the rain the last two days...my Vancouver brain can't handle it after all the gorgeousness. Maybe I'm coming down with something. I've got something really important coming up on August 30th, and I'm not ready at all. I'm working every day on it, sooooooo....I've got 29 days to BE ready.

I guess I felt like I should've accomplished a bunch more stuff since I had the week off. As it was, we basically still ate out/had take out and the place is still a total disaster. Between Dave and I, we're probably working the equivalent of three or four full time jobs, so I guess it's understandable that things have slid a bit. I just had these big grandiose plans of cleaning the whole apartment, organizing a whack of things and getting all of my homework finished for the summer.

Epic. Fail.

Maybe writing it all out will make me feel better (as soon as I swap the laundry...)

Things I've accomplished this week:Train karate (every day)
grocery shopping
empty dishwasher (2x)
make banana bread
clean out fridge
put away laundry
garbage and recycling run
work on botany scrapbook (every day)
press flowers
wash bed linens
recycling depot
pickup flowers from Jen’s
get green card stock
go to school for a day (making up for a sick day
organize school binders
final exam homework
grocery shopping again

That looks pretty good actually. Huh.

I've still got a billion things on the list...but it's a little less depressing when I see it all laid out like that.

:D

I have been taking and posting pictures like whoa. So, wander over to my flickr site if you haven't been recently.

Today I was trying to catch salmon fry in a puddle (our creek overflowed, then receded). I didn't catch anything, but I got to see some water snails and some weird thing with a whippy tail that I need to post online and see if anyone can identify.

The beavers that live in our creek are still there even though there's been two days of city maintenance workers breaking up their dam. The creek has dropped a crazy amount!!

I saw a nifty neato little yellow bird today, but it flew off before I could get a picture.

School Work Can Be Fun!

There are SO MANY things I want to do someday...learn to scuba dive, various foreign languages, various art projects, various movement arts (dance, fencing, gymnastics etc). I want to be in a play someday. I want to learn aromatherapy to the point where I can blend scented relief for people quickly and easily. I have thousands of books I want to read. I have dozens of books I want to write, gardens I want to plant

Sometimes, life comes about and lets me fulfil a few of those ideas at once.

I've always been envious of scrapbookers, but I never started scrapbooking, even when I was working at Michaels. I've already got an insane stash of art and craft materials...how could I possibly justify a new (potentially extremely expensive) hobby, even if I have hundreds of printed photos from trips, special events, and so on. I would love to do a scrapbook for each year I have a class (since I have thousands of digital photos). I have always wanted to do a botany scrapbook with drawings, and pressed flowers and...ahhh... This ties in with my love of plants (I love them SO MUCH that I will cut them apart, squash them between heavy objects and keep them with me FOREVER!! A little creepy when one thinks about it...) and my love of order (not noticeable to anyone who's ever seen any place I've ever spent any time at all) which manifests itself in strange ways.

For school this summer, one of my assignments is a botany scrapbook. I've been spending the last several weeks collecting flowers and leaves, pressing them in a lovely microwave flower press I got at Lee Valley, and gluing them to bits of cardstock. Things are coming together quite nicely. Pictures of in progress are forthcoming, but I'm on vacation this week, (a post ALL for itself...I am under the impression that I would make a REALLY crappy homemaker, but I will allow you to judge for yourself when [if] I make that particular post. [seriously, horrible housekeeper. for realz.])

Meme!

One word answers only!

1. Where is your cell phone? counter
2. Your significant other? David
3. Your hair? varies
4. Your mother? teacher
5. Your father? tall
6. Your favorite thing? touch
7. Your dream last night? sick :(
8. Your favorite drink? cold
9. Your dream/goal? classroom
10. The room you’re in? diningroom
11.Your hobby? crafts
12. Your fear? spiders
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? WAHM
14. What you’re not? healthy
15. Muffins? cranberry!
16. One of your wish list items? laptop
17. Where you grew up? Coquitlam
18. The last thing you did? massage
19. What are you wearing? pedometer
20. Favorite gadget? iPod
21. Your pets? imaginary
22. Your computer? Vaio
23. Your mood? tired
24. Missing someone? David
25. Your car? Cavalier
26. Something you’re not wearing? (ear)rings
27. Favorite store? craft
28. Like someone? many
29. Your favorite color? purple
30. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
31. Last time you cried? today (while I was throwing up)

Home!

And thankful. There was a bitch of a storm starting just before the Coquihalla toll booth and going until Abbotsford. What should have taken about two and a bit hours took me nearly four. It was hellishly scary. I had visibility of about 2 feet for a while there.

Pictures of stuff coming later. I'm waaaaaaaay too tired. Hooray for cool air! I think it averaged around 36 degrees Celsius when I was in Kelowna (105 or so Farenheit.)

To recap: driving=bad, home=good

Because I have absolutely ZERO sense of direction...

When reading yesterday's lightning post, please read "south" as "west" and "north" as "east". Thank you very much.

...

And weirdly, I do solo road trips, usually get where I'm going, and so far also get back home from them. (knock on wood, since I'm actually still in Kelowna for another day.

I can see my fingers reflected in the screen (mental note: laptop with matte screen, and one with a card reader) and, damn, it's weird seeing my fingers just...do stuff. Nifty. I want to keep typing and watching them. Lalalalala....I guess I could watch them do homework.

Meh. :P

One more day of school!!

Sentient Weather

The lightning is mocking me.

And not only because when there's lightning I won't go swimming. I was trying to take pics of it when it was in the north, about three minutes ago, then I decided I should do work and anyway SCREW YOU CAMERA SHY LIGHTNING, so I went onto the porch where I'm facing south. Guess what? The lightning is suddenly in the south.

Stupid, sentient, mocking lightning.

It's nice and cool right now. YAY!!

Two more days of course...wow. That feels like a crazy lots amount of time, and it also feels like a crazy little amount of time.

There have been eight lightning flashes since I started this post.

Nine.

That's a lot, since I copy/pasted part of this from IM with (ten) my mom.

I think I'm going to stop liveblogging the flashes of lightning now. As awesome as they are (and they're seriously, really [eleven] freaking awesome), I really, really should get some stuff done (TWELVE! And that was a GOOOOOOOOOD one.)

Maybe I'll try takeing a couple (thirteen) south facing pics....

(edited to add: fourteen and fifteen hit just as I clicked post...sixteen...)

(edited again to add: YEAH! Southern lightning must less inhibited. I got three or four pics at the same time lightning struck, and two of them show the forks! I'm super stoked, and now I should go inside to get my WORK DONE!!! and not be distracted by a bunch of STATIC ELECTRICITY! Pictures will be posted when I get home, since I have no cord, and as far as I can tell, my mom's laptop doesn't have a card reader for my camera.)

Not sleeping outside tonight!!

Ok, holy crap...apparently there are BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS in Kelowna, and apparently there was one RIGHT BESIDE THE DOOR AT THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE today. Holy crap on a crap stick. I guess I'll just bake tonight.

Gahhhhhh....nnnnnnghhhhhuuuuuhhhh...

Before Day One

(from an email I sent my mom this morning. I currently feel much better, although very tired.)

I feel like death. :P I got to sleep around eleven upstairs after taking a shower and not drying off in an attempt to combat the HEAT. I woke up around two to spider nightmares, realized it was insanely hot and couldn't sleep, drank some water and splashed water all over my tank top and me. That didn't help, so I went downstairs to try since it was cooler down there...spiders were still on my brain, so THAT wasn't going to happen. So, after some deliberations and more attempts at falling asleep, I set up a mattress on the back porch with the chair cushions and watched a bit of lightning before I slept from around 4 until 530, when it was liiiiiight...waaaahhhhhh...

Managed to squeak out another hour or so of dozing between glaring at birds and the lit up clouds when my cell phone went off. Now, I'm feeling gross because I'm exhausted and still sick, nervous about class, and my mouth tastes ick from my antibiotics.

Random Mishmash of Otherness
The class was absolutely phenomenal. I'm so excited about teaching this stuff, it's awesome. This is totally the right path for me.

According to the scale here, I weigh about 171 lbs. I like this scale. The one at home says I'm 174 or so.

I'm debating another swim before I try and get some sleep (had one after dinner tonight). I'm also debating if I'm going to be sleeping on the back porch again, or if I should at least attempt an actual bed tonight. Decisions, decisions. I think part of it will depend on whether the drunk neighbours continue celebrating Canada Day in their backyard.

I love having use of a laptop. Last night, before attempting the aborted inside sleep attempt, I was hanging out by the pool fooling around online (which is exactly what I'm doing right now! Yay!), as I am wont to do. I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, and a cat was hanging out with me. Hee! Ironically, I'm doing a whack of hand written stuff because of class notes, and because some of the other notes I'm taking lend themselves better to hand written. Ooh, plane just flew overhead. Nifty.

PS, I also love having a pool. Kersplash! Swim tonight? Yes/no? I have to cover it still, so I might as well get another quick use out of it before I go inside to die a little bit of heat. Hrm...regardless, I'd better sign off, since I want to do a bit more work before bed. Good night, Lower Mainlanders!! Happy Canada Day!

Safely in Kelowna

Timeline for today so far.
1130-leave Port Coquitlam after the doctor's appointment (whee! a week of the antibiotics that taste like gah!)
1230-Pass through Hope
100-Coquihalla toll booth
130-arrive Merritt, eat at A&W...they've got a decent veggie burger...who knew??
215-leave Merritt (busy at the A&W)
400-arrive in West Bank and try to find my Oma and Opa's old house.
430-find the house by memory (10 years after the last time I was there!), take pictures
500-find where I'm staying, unpack car
515-phone around to let people know I'm here now
534-get off phone, get into swim suit
535- dive into pool...ohhhhhh yeahhhhhhh
538- hear thunder (pretty far away, but why take chances?)
538 and thirty seconds- jump OUT of pool
542-sudden massive rainfall and much closer thunder.
544-get online

Time to figure out where I'm going for class tomorrow...or supper first? Hmmm.

What happened to the sunny Okanagon I've heard rumours about??

Holy crap, the rain is coming down like CRAAAAAAAAZY, and the lights are flickering. HOORAY FOR LAPTOP!!!!

School

Tomorrow I leave for Kelowna to start a one week course. I'll be there from Monday to Saturday, coming home either Saturday or Sunday, then I'll start a two year program on Monday.

*whimper*

Oh, and I'm sick like yikes. I took three days off school in the second last week, then was almost better when I got WHAMMED with illness again. Summer colds are the worst. :P I've got a doctor's appointment on my way out of town. Hee.

??

The kids were strangely quiet today...a bunch of them didn't come to school and the secretary couldn't get their parents on the phone. I guess there's something going around. We had a shortage of substitute teachers today too...a couple of people just didn't show up, so we were covering classes today.

* * *

Recess was weird. There was a lot of movement in the bushes and one of the kids swore that she saw a bear wandering around. I had supervision and saw a bunch of people walking toward the school as if they were drunk or something. At 10:30 in the morning? Luckily we came in before they got there. They were moving pretty slowly.

Some of my kids had been talking about zombies the last couple of days, so that was on my mind...and I never want to be that grownup who says "NO SUCH THING!" and then gets killed...sooooooooo...it's been a bit on my mind.

* * *

I'm home now, sixteenth floor. I'm looking toward Metrotown and there's a lot of cars just...stopped. There were accidents all over the place and I couldn't get through to home for nearly an hour. I'm not sure what the hell happened. There's power, but it's intermittant...that explains the accidents and traffic. There must've been a lot of accidents, beyond what the radio talked about before it went dead this afternoon. There are people walking around with blood on them, looking shellshocked.

There's a knock on the door...kind of scratchy. Dave's probably home with his hands full. Back in a bit.

* * *

(confused? go here.)

It's that time of year again...

Just applied for a whack of teaching jobs. Wish me luck!

Priorities

Files currently open on my desktop: report cards, report card comments.

Items currently sitting on my desk: ball of yarn, new project pattern.

Goal: if I finish my report cards by this weekend, I can start working on the new project.

Prognosis: I have very little self control. I am doomed.

(what if I just cast on and did...y'know, a swatch. To see how it looks? [it's not like it's...uh...a scarf or anything...where um...the swatch would be the start of the scarf...or anything like that. No, no, no.])

...yeah, I'm doomed...

Book Binge Review

In no particular order:

The Kitchen God's Wife- Amy Tan
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy- S.D. Perry
Not a Penny More, Not A Penny Less- Jeffrey Archer
The Feminine Mystique- Betty Friedan
Becoming Vegetarian- Melina Davis Harrison
Maria Montessori: A Biography- Rita Kramer (in progress, currently on page 273)
Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst!- Lois Lowry
Time Enough For Love- Robert Heinlein
Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook- Maria Montessori
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea- Jules Verne (in progress, currently on page 98)

Holy Hell.

I got this via Squid. A special needs boy is voted out of his kindergarten class by his peers...initiated by the teacher.

Oh my God...this is horrifying. I can't conceive of the kind of person who would do this to ANYONE, let alone a child... (I don't watch Survivor or any of those reality shows for this reason.) I make it my goal all the time in my class to ensure everyone is included. To deliberately segregate a child (NOT GROUNDS FOR EMOTIONAL ABUSE??????) via his classmates? Unbelievable. This woman should lose her teaching license. That is not ok.

I would like to meet the two children who voted against voting him out of the classroom. I'd like to think that I was that kind of kid. My mom told me once that I'd picked a very unpopular, seriously learning disabled, probably austistic/otherwise special needs boy to ride in our car for a field trip. When I was asked why by my mom, I apparently replied, "Because I knew no one else would pick him."

ETA: I am so sad and angry right now, for Alex Barton, his family and the rest of the kids in that class. I've been reading some other blog posts and news stories about this, and what strikes me is how so many people remember being horrible to another child, as children, and how they still bear emotional scars from that.

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy

I can't WAIT to be finished tutoring. Holy crap, I'm tired of it.

Tutoring today, then not until next Monday...yay! Kids karate today too...tiring Monday...looking forward to karate though. I like doing kids karate, even when my brain feels like it's going to leak out of my ears.

I would like my weekend back please. It was fun, but not restful. I'm currently reading a biography on Maria Montessori for the course I'm starting in the summer.

What the hell, also...I was out all day Sunday, under a tent-structure at an Ultimate tournament. I literally was out in the sun for two occasions at about 20 minutes each...I HAVE A SUNBURN! Damn this pasty white skin of mine. It's not super bad, but it knocked me out for three hours yesterday afternoon.

I got random accupuncture on the weekend too. I was hanging out with the physiotherapist for most of the day because our tents were adjoined and mentioned my messed up hip, so he did some physio stuff and then he poked me with an accupuncture needle. OMFG, that was the weirdest feeling evar. I didn't feel the needle after the first quick pinch, but then suddenly a muscle that was about eight inches away started cramping up. Craaaaazy. My leg felt like it'd gotten beaten up afterwards. Interesting sensation...not sure if I'd like to repeat it.

New...weekend resolution

The time that I previously spent on clicking webcomics and blogs hour after hour in the hopes that they've updated: to be replaced by writing fiction and/or doing actual work, since I've registered for a summer course, and will be registering in a two year program next week.

The end. True story.

Present

Pin Gift
Originally uploaded by Random Synapses

I got the most adorable present from one of my students today. She made this pin for me to thank me for teaching her how to knit. AWWWW!!!! It's even got a cable running on it...something I taught her how to do on Thursday (it's Tuesday now). She made one for my mom too, since my mom helps out with knitting club. I'm verklempt. :D