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Pigeon Holed

I have been doing some asking around in terms of extra courses to take… and perhaps taking my Deaf qualifcations right now isn’t the best. If I want to teach in a primary class, specializing early on won’t help me out. Sometimes they make it hard for a specialized person to leave that job…. so I am reconsidering and am thinking of taking something more primary oriented… Hmm… I think I have decided on taking two courses though. For sure I will take Special Ed one (although it sounds specialized, lots of people take it… ).

Compound Word Query

I have a query for you. At work it has come up that perhaps a compound word is more than just two words that make up one word. Someone has started to wonder if a compound word that is two words put together to make one word related to BOTH words. For example, ice-cream is made of ice and cream. Earring is a ring in your ear. Weekend is weeks end. So… what about nightmare. Did it originate from someones encounter with horses at night?? Does the official defintion of compound word mean that two words are related in some way?? Anyone know?

Lost!

I disovered that perhaps I don’t wash my car as often as I should. Doug and I washed both of the cars on the weekend… and I can’t seem to find my car in the parking lot these days as it is just too shiny!!

No Teacher Testing!!!

but… that isn’t necessarily a good thing. I just heard that when I graduate I will get a temporary licence until they figure out what sort of qualifying thing I need to do to become a teacher! So… who knows when that will take place, or what it will be!! Yikes!

Call Me a Liar

Well don’t I feel silly. But strangely blessed at the same time. Recently, I had discovered A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania and was really impressed with it. I used the Bloglines toolkit “Subscribe to this Page”, which usually finds an RSS feed if there is one, but got back “there were no feeds for this page”. So without looking closer, I assumed there wasn’t a feed. Then today I got a personal comment from Kathleen Connally herself, setting me straight. She does have an RSS feed, and it does include the pictures. Rapidly, AWTDTP has risen in my photoblog rankings. This was the one photoblog I had found that really disappointed me because I really like her pictures - when we went to Pennsylvania a couple of years ago, I loved the environs, and her pics really capture the escence of it.

Ah hah! I found out what had happened - I searched from an archived page, whereas if I had searched from the main page I would have found the RSS feed. Lesson learned, thanks to Kathleen.

Decisions

I am going to take at least one Additional Qualification course this summer (they bump you up on the pay grid…and hopefully improve your chances of jobs). I am thinking of taking Special 1 and another course. The problem is, they are $800 each! But I found out that Western offers them distance ed. over three months (May-June) and if there was ever a time for me to do these courses, now would be the time! I will done school… don’t have employment yet… Hmm… should I take just one… or two?? Help!

CN trucks

Those CN trucks that have the railroad wheel attachments are so cool. I think it would be neat to be able to drive home from work on the train tracks. Can you imagine our little blue Ford Focus hatchback zooming along the train tracks at 120 km/h? I had this other idea that I want an ATV that could convert into a snowmobile in the same way. I like the idea of an ATV with a snowplow attachment, or a tractor with a snowblower. What other multipurpose vehicles can we think of?

Happy Easter!

Ah, long weekends… gotta love them! I should have spent my weekend planning what I will be teaching for the next three weeks… I am teaching full time the last two weeks of placement and starting a science unit this week… ah well, that’s what staying up late is for!

We had a good weekend so far… we went to see “The Passion Play” at the local Pentecostal church. It wasn’t as good as their plays have been in the past and it was quite long. They also used the Roman Guards to collect the offering… interesting tactic! Just kidding.. they did specify that it was NO PRESSURE. We also went for a walk around the neighbourhood then stopped off at Shoeess Joe’s for dinner. I guess we got there at the right time. They had just had 100 hockey players in… there is a huge kids tournament in Kingston and it was one of the few places open so they all went there!

On Saturday I had coffee with my friend Emily. I tried the new Caramel Mocha at Starbuck’s. Yumm… less coffee like than the machiatto… Went to the sale at Michael’s and they had some new stuff in… I watched the new Briget Jone’s movie… Doug cleaned out the garages, vacuumed the cars, built new plant stands for outside and watched Ocean’s 12.

Today… we went to church this morning… had KD for lunch…. went for an eventful hike. The hike was eventful for me. There was SOO much ice in the woods that I kept slipping and sliding. We had taken a detour through some vines and I ended up slipping anyway and wiping out. Doug says, “We’re over the worst of it” and 30 seconds later I wipe out in a mud puddle flat on my butt! This is early in the walk so I wasn’t amused. There were some challenging icy and muddy bits but overall it was a nice day for a hike. We washed both of our cars today … my Dad will be proud.

Anyway, nothing too exciting. Just enjoying the great weather and relaxing.

Photo Eye Candy

These photoblogs would’ve made it to my Bloglines, but bummer that it is, they don’t publish RSS feeds. So instead I give them referral credit only:

They may think that a referral is better than a feed-dependent fan, but I disagree. That’s all.

Holy Speedy Gonzalez

I don’t know if it’s related to Yahoo buying Flickr, but man, Flickr is fast! Or maybe it’s because I reinstalled Java, but this resolves my only significant frustration with Flickr. I’m fully in love now.

Uncorrigible

Today I learned the correct spelling and the real definition of uncorrigible. For some reason… I always thought it was encouragable… so I would reply, “Yes, I am encouraging, aren’t I?” Anyway, it seems that I am often told that I am uncorrigible. I went to the dictionary website and it says that uncorrigible means: not capable of correction. EEEKS! Umm… I’m afraid that suits me to a tee! or is it ‘T’? Anyway, I am not capable of correction. But I don’t think I really want to correct all of my silliness!

Protected: Moving Along (Password: Jenn and I met at Camp…)

You Really Don’t Know Your Neighbours When…

… you find out one of them passed away over a year ago and you didn’t notice they had been missing! Oops!

Phrases

I wrote down some funny, cute, etc. sayings while I was gone. They are downstairs but I will write the few that I remember:

On another note, I used to collect “Just the Right Shoe” miniature shoes. I waited and waited for them to create a Birkenstock but it never came… until last week! I found it in Michigan so now my shoe collection is complete!

Lord of the Black Ice

I’m in the midst (75% through) of a Lord of the Rings Marathon. I’ve watched all 3 movies (6 DVDs, 15 hours) in the 30 hour time period from Friday evening to Saturday night, plus 1 of the Appendices. This morning I watched another 2. This evening and tonight I’ll finish them up. That is such a great movie series, with such amazing historical (fictional and non) context.

I haven’t completely ignored Jenn. She’s been busy reading her book and we’ll go out for a bit this afternoon. And I’m not wasting the beautiful weather this weekend either - I went for a 2 hour hike yesterday afternoon across Lake Ontario. It was beautiful, and with the sun beating down on my black shirt I didn’t need a coat for a good part of it. The sound of ice melting, the glimmering sun off the ice, and the calm air, accented by the spring-esque twirping of birds was phenomenal.

Question of the day: If water froze black, would there be ice on our lakes? Would the ice form deep to shallow, rather than from the surface down? How bright would it be in the middle of the day? What other implications would exist?

Did you miss me??

I am back from my week away and am feeling more relaxed than when I left which is great! I start my next placement on Monday and have six weeks of hard work ahead of me (4 weeks of placement followed by my last two weeks of school!). So rest was definitely in order.

Here are some holiday highlights:

Who are you?

I have seen something similar to this on a few people’s blogs and thought it might be fun… please play along.

Some of you I kind of know. Others I am sure I don’t know at all. Why don’t we get to know each other a little bit. Why not answer the following questions in the comments below.

Name:
Age:
Profession:
Location:
Why do you read this blog?

What a Smart looking car!

I passed this car on the way home from work today. I must have it. It looked really nasty from the back, though - as if it was a regular car with an additional panel glued on, but when I passed it I was in heaven.

WordPress 1.5 Rocks

Plugin manager (and oh, the plugins!), theme manager (including themes like this), and all the standard features of WordPress 1.5. It’s so superior to previous versions of WordPress (ie. 1.2) which was already superior to MovableType which was already superior to Blogger. I honestly don’t know why you (and you and you and you and you) don’t change your blog over too (I didn’t include you, James, because you don’t blog enough, but thanks for your latest post!) - it’s $15 per year for hosting (including 25 Mb of webspace, all the functionality of PHP and MySQL databases, and Fantastico auto installer) and we got our lastest domain from Yahoo for $5 per year. It’s so worth the fun!

Jenn’s Gone! So sad. What will I do?

I served up a Quentin Tarantino movie night (Kill Bill 1, Kill Bill 2, and Pulp Fiction), with a highlight of Uma Thurman (have you noticed her toes? They’re not that pretty!) and a side of Samuel L. Jackson (did you know that he’s the piano player in the wedding chapel in Kill Bill?). There’s nothing like 6 hours of “alternative” violence with appropriately excessive sound effects and special effects of dying (aka splatter and gushing spray), and fully savouring the great soundtracks full volume.

I also went for a walk at Parrott Bay (a nearby conservation area) and found a couple of new trails. I also checked out this house for sale that borders the land - it’s got the winding driveway, extensive forests, enough acreage, waterfront, a beautiful bungalow, opportunity for development of the land, and it’s on a major road (which would make Jenn happy). Unfortunately, it’s >$300,000 so it won’t really work yet. It was fun to dream.

Today I plan on grocery shopping, going for another walk somewhere, and maybe doing some reading - all in an effort to not get lonely and stay productive. Within a couple of days, I’ll be well established in bachelorhood, but sometimes the first day or 2 can get kinda boring.