Kung hei fat choI

Yesterday was Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dragon. And of course, in the Vancouver area, we have a whole lot of people with Chinese ancestry, so Chinese New Year is kind of a big deal here. I believe that it’s traditionally the most important festival of the Chinese calendar, so it’s a big deal in a lot of places.

And elementary schools are quite excellent at making a REALLY big deal out of any holiday, regardless of the culture. So all over my school are dragon-y and lion-y art projects and little red envelopes (with fake money, unfortunately) and chopsticks and literally anything to do with Chinese culture. The kids who actually are Chinese are loving it all, and are teaching everyone else little phrases in Cantonese or Mandarin – which is really quite interesting in the French Immersion classes. Talk about multi-culturalism!

I was taking a little group of Grade Twos from their class down the hallway to my class first thing this morning, when we passed a bulletin board outside one of the Grade One classes. It was beautifully decorated with the cutest Chinese dragons that you ever saw, similar to this one I found on Google Images:

The ones on the bulletin board at school just had slightly different heads: they were several cutout pieces of green paper, glued together to make a 3D effect and garnished with googly eyes and pipecleaner tongues. They were just adorable, and the kids and I stopped to admire them. One boy wondered aloud how they had done the dragon mouths. I replied that I had no idea, and I touched one of the dragon heads to perhaps get a little closer look.

The head fell off in my hand. Apparently it hadn’t been glued on well enough. The kids looked at me in horror. I looked slowly from the small green dragon head in my hand to the kids to the rest of the dragon’s paper body that was still securely stapled to the bulletin board. I honestly didn’t know what to do!

Finally I said, “And this would be a lesson in why we don’t touch art on walls.”

The kids started to giggle then, and I did too. I quickly popped into the school office across the hall and asked to borrow the secretary’s tape dispenser. She just looked at me quizzically, so I explained the situation. She too started to laugh as she handed me the tape.

I retaped the dragon head to its body, while telling the kids with a grin that this was our little secret, that they were never to tell anyone what a klutz I was. They knew I was teasing, and a couple of them responded with comments that of course I was a walking disaster, but of course I would have to confess what I had done to the teacher of the class who had made the dragons.

So my morning started off like that.

At lunch, Chinese food was brought in for the staff, which was a very much appreciated treat. We have lots of plates at work, but we seem to be always running out of forks (I think people eat them along with their food. Or else they take them home by mistake. And never notice that they have one fork that is completely different from all their other cutlery. Or maybe ALL their cutlery is mismatched?). Anyway, knowing this, I had brought a fork from home.

After I finished eating, I put my plate in the dishwasher and washed my fork by hand. At this point, because I was afraid that if I put it on the table, some zealot might pick it up with their own dirty plate and fork and it would be gone forever, I put my fork in the back pocket of my jeans.

Now, you probably think you know where I am going with this narrative of the fork in the back pocket. But you are wrong! That’s not at all what happened.

What actually happened was that when the bell rang, I quickly went to the bathroom before heading back to my classroom. The fork fell into the toilet. I had to fish it out – but fortunately, I hadn’t peed yet.

So that’s how my afternoon started.

Please tell me that my Year of the Dragon is going to get better!

Some better tech news

Further to my post the other day about all this technology around me breaking down, and also to reference the recent break-in at my school, I’ve been told a little good news – sort-of!

It seems that it wasn’t eleven laptops stolen after all. Apparently, there was another one found in the hallway and the police took it for fingerprinting. So only ten were actually nicked.

Would have been nice if the cops had contacted my principal right away and let him know this, don’t you think?

And now I have learned that three of the very-definitely-stolen laptops were turned in to some school district office. They did have school district stickers and identification on them, so it would have been fairly obvious to whom they belonged, if they had been found by some random stranger. In any case, they have been turned in, and now the school district IT department is going over them very carefully to see if they can be salvaged, as they were apparently rather beat up on the outside. If they are repairable and it is cost-effective, they will be repaired and returned to me … eventually. If they are not, hopefully the insurance will still pay to replace them.

So that makes only seven laptops that are unaccounted for at the moment. But regardless, at the moment, it is also true that I have no laptops in my classroom for the use of the kids who need assistive software, since not all of those laptops that weren’t stolen had that software installed. This sucks big time. (Also, those remaining laptops have been locked away somewhere very secure, so secure that they haven’t told me where they are.)

Anybody know how long stolen property insurance claims take to process???

Not the best week, technology-wise

There have been technology problems all week in Pinklea-land. It has been quite vexing – not least for the fact that I have discovered that I am more of a computer addict than I thought I was.

First, my home printer seems to have expired. To be fair, it is three years old, which is ancient for a printer. Also, if memory serves, it cost me less than 100$, including tax. So, really, it has had a long life in printer terms, and it has served me well. However, although I don’t need to print stuff at home all that often, this week I needed to do just that, and I couldn’t. I ran it through its head-cleaning cycle several times. I unplugged it overnight so it could rest, hoping that it would reboot itself. I even went out and bought more ink, thinking that perhaps that would do the trick. I carefully followed the troubleshooting questionnaire on-line and all it led to was “You may need to replace your printer”.

Gee, ya think?! Good thing I still have some Christmas money left over.

Then, at work, all the classrooms in my hallway were without the intarnets until yesterday. That would be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with no access to anything on-line. Oh sure, I could have gone somewhere else in the school to check my email or download my phone bill or whatever, but there are always other people waiting to do just that type of thing on any available computer in the school. And the kids are always milling about everywhere you go, so I’d have no privacy if I wanted to read an explicit message from PG, for example (damn kids, they’re all over the school!). Besides, there were eight other teachers in my hallway who were also looking for intarnets access at the same time I was, so we had to take turns. As you can imagine, we were all pretty frustrated by Wednesday. But I have to admit, without being able to browse around some of my favourite websites whenever I had five minutes between classes, I did get a lot of little jobs done that somehow I’d never found time to do in the past months. It’s quite amazing how much time I waste on my computer at work – and even more at home, no doubt! Computers without intarnets just aren’t that fascinating, it seems.

Anyway, on Thursday morning, we were all back on-line. Yay! Except that my computer insisted that it was December 1969. And that it was 4:11 pm. Now, I cannot get into the system preferences of my computer to change little things like that myself. Everyone but the tech people are locked out of most of the settings of all the computers in my school district. I guess they don’t trust us. Maybe they think we’re all going to change our keyboards to the Cyrillic alphabet or something. Anyway, the date and time thing bugged me, but as they weren’t absolutely crucial to my digital well-being, I simply mentioned it in passing when I saw our tech guy striding down the hall around lunchtime. He, lovely man, popped immediately into my classroom and spent five quick minutes correcting that small glitch. Another yay!

That’s two out of my three technology misfires sorted. Now all I have to do is decide whether I want to go grocery shopping or printer shopping this weekend.

Hmm. This is a tough one. Let’s see: eat or print? Print or eat?

Let me think about it a little longer. Maybe I should google it?

Bright, shiny …

In my ongoing long-term quest to improve and beautify my home without spending very much money at all, I have a new acquisition that I’m very excited about. It’s something that I’ve been wanting quite a long time – not as long as new kitchen cupboards, countertops and tile backsplash, which I’ve been wittering on about for several years now, but it’s still been many months in the making.

I had been looking and looking and looking, both online and in person. I had been researching. I had been dreaming of owning this item, but I couldn’t really specify what it actually had to look like in order to please me. I simply trusted that when I saw the one that was right for me, I would know, more or less immediately.

And that’s exactly what happened.

DD and I were out for a walk last November, and we passed a home decorating shop that we hadn’t noticed before. As we went past the display window, I glanced in. There it was. The one that was right for me. I knew it right then and there.

With my birthday coming up and all, DD offered to buy this wondrous item for me, but I refused, as I knew it was out of her price range, her working only part-time and all right now. She then suggested that she purchase half of it and I could pay the other half myself. I thought about it and agreed.

So, a couple of weeks later, closer to my birthday, she and I went back to the shop and bought it. It was placed in an enormous, awkward box that could only fit in my car if the front seat was adjusted as flat as it could get. (As a side note here, BMWs are great cars for driving but actually pretty shitty for hauling anything bigger than a couple of suitcases. Just so you know.) But we got it in and got it home and got it out of the car and into the kitchen.

And there the box sat. For five weeks. Till yesterday. PG, with his amazing handyman skills that are so very much in demand that he has had very little time to do this job for me, finally installed this lovely item, my birthday present from DD.

Look! I now have a sparkly white chandelier above my table! And even though it’s not pink, it is shiny and I love it!