Seven random things about me

Okay, Ricardipus, I think I’m up to the challenge. Here goes:

1) I am a big NHL hockey fan, particularly of my hometown team, the Vancouver Canucks. (Porsche Guy loves the Toronto Maple Leafs, yet somehow, we co-exist.)

2) I love room-temperature champagne. (Especially the morning after the night before, eh, PG?)

3) If I wasn’t a teacher, I would own a combination bookstore and stationery shop. (A bit like Chapters, I guess, only smaller. Maybe just a singular Chapter.)

4) I once broke my right foot coming down the steps INTO a nightclub where I had just arrived to attend a friend’s staggette party. (I hadn’t even had a single drink yet. Despite the pain, I partied for hours, then went to the hospital for x-rays the next day.)

5) At university, in a statistics class, I scored the highest mark on The Big Test. (But to this day, I can’t figure out the tip on a restaurant bill.)

6) I collect those incredibly detailed little porcelain cottages designed by David Winter. (But only because they don’t show a whole lot of dust.)

7) I don’t like Halloween or dressing up in a costume. (But I do hand out treats to the costumed little darlings who ring my doorbell, so I’m not a complete Scrooge… er… Great Pumpkin… um … maybe UNgreat Pumpkin???)

She’s baaaaack…

I have finally picked up my do-over BMW 135i! This is the car that I first ordered last March, took delivery of in June, drove for eight weeks, totalled, and re-ordered in August. I have spent a total of five and a half months waiting for this car, and only two months actually driving it. But the wait is over. She is parked in my garage, next to DD’s Honda Fit. I drove her home like a little old lady. I love her! She is my dream car, after I decided 25 years ago, upon sighting my first BMW 2002, that one day I would own a BMW. Well, to be fair, I don’t actually own all of her yet (the bank currently owns just over half of her). But I have the driving privileges, not the bank.

And I don’t miss The Mighty Hyundai one little bit.

For whom the bell tolls

Have you ever thought about the fact that the only two places that have constant bells as signals are schools and prisons? (Well, okay, there may be more, but I really like that link between those two places.)

At the school where I teach, we have a warning bell in the morning, a bell to signal the actual start of the day, a bell for the beginning of recess, a bell for the end of recess, a bell to signal the start of lunchtime, a bell to tell the kids to come in and eat, a bell for the end of eating time and the start of the afternoon session, a bell to end the day AND yet another bell 15 minutes later. I’m exhausted just typing this!

I do think this is excessive. I don’t think anybody needs to hear that many bells a day. Why do we need a bell to tell us that school has been over for 15 minutes? Why do we need bells to let us know that recess or lunch has just started? Do we not all have clocks on our classroom walls? Failing that, do most of us not wear watches? Can some of us not tell time perhaps???

As far as I am concerned, we could function perfectly well at my school if we had three bells per day: one to call the kids in every morning, one to call them in after recess, and one to call them in after their playtime at lunch. That’s it. We don’t need bells to tell us when to dismiss them. After all, how many teachers have their kids lined up at the door every single day waiting for recess, lunch or the end of the day, and as the bell rings, open the door and shoo them out in a wild, galloping horde? Granted, there are some, but most of us kind-of go with the flow of the day: sometimes we’re quite organized and ready to go, sometimes the kids are slow with their end-of-the-day cleanup, and some kids are stragglers anyway, just to quote a few examples.

I have tried to get some changes to this system, but it seems that many of my colleagues don’t mind it this way. Many of them are quite astonished at the fact that some of us have taught at schools that did not have dismissal bells, yet all ran smoothly. Some teachers don’t seem to believe that the absence of a morning warning bell isn’t the end of the world. Others aren’t at all sure why that bell rings 15 minutes after dismissal, but because it’s always been that way at this school, they have never thought to question it.

But ironically, we have no bell to signal an announcement over the PA system at my school. Instead, we simply and quite suddenly hear somebody’s voice blaring. That’s where a prison is probably better than my school: prisons likely have small, friendly announcement bells. So maybe I should go teach in a prison – better bells.

Broken redux

Now it’s my VCR that’s broken. Rewinding a hour-long program takes about half an hour instead of a couple of minutes. I can hear the motor grinding and whining and I know it’s this close to giving up the ghost altogether. I’ve had it fixed about four times already, but the poor thing is about 15 years old, so maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and just buy a new VCR.

I popped over to the electronics store, thinking that for less than 15 minutes and 200$ I’d be good to go. Ha! Apparently, the VCR I have known and loved is almost extinct. Oh, there are a few last-year’s models kicking around here and there, but as the salesperson told me, “Canada is going digital in the new year and HD programming is more and more available, so it’s more cost-effective to get a PVR.”

Of course, I looked addled at that point. “Okay,” I managed to get out, “what exactly is a PVR and how is it different from a VCR?”

He went into great detail to explain this to me, and to give him full credit, I completely understood. (As a teacher, I’m always impressed when somebody can clearly and concisely explain something to me, because I know how hard it can be to do that.) But the biggest difference between the two technologies is, I believe, the 400$ more that it would cost me to purchase the PVR instead of the VCR.

I went home empty-handed.

If it ain’t broke…

Well, actually it IS broke. More precisely, THEY are broke. And I haven’t had them fixed.

It started with my built-in vacuum cleaner’s power head attachment, the one that cleans and beats carpet at the same time. One day, about three years ago, it just stopped cleaning and beating. No problem, I said to myself, I’ll just use the regular head that only cleans.

But then the actual vacuum canister itself stopped working. Oh, it made all the requisite noises, but it did not suck. I was built-in vacuumless. Fortunately, I have a lovely little Miele vacuum that I’d purchased prior to moving here and inheriting the built-in machine, so I was still able to vacuum to my heart’s content. So I didn’t replace the broken built-in.

Last winter, one of the sections of the lattice fence around my back deck blew down in a wind storm. Last spring, Porsche Guy took me to the local home reno outfit and I bought a new section, which he tied onto the top of his Porsche to bring home (the visuals of that little trip are stunning, to say the least). I painted the piece of fencing, and it is still sitting in my garage, waiting to be installed. Soon it’ll be a year that my deck has been missing that piece of lattice fencing, creating a lovely abandoned and dilapidated look to my back yard.

The shower door in DD’s bathroom keeps falling off, which is somewhat hazardous. It also scratches the finish on the tub every time it falls. Again, PG took me to the home reno mega-store and I bought new shower doors last summer. This time the box fit into the hatch, more or less, so the trip home was a bit less dorky-looking. And where are those spanking new shower doors now? Still in the box in the garage.

Now my garburetor is dripping water under my kitchen sink. Did I get it fixed? No. But I did put an empty yogurt container underneath to catch the drips. Can I still use the garburetor? Sort of – if I don’t mind wiping down everywhere underneath the sink after the liquidy mess is forced at great velocity through the crack in the garburetor as the blades pulverize whatever was in there.

And I’ve just had to extend my rental contract for The Mighty Hyundai due to the continued non-appearance of my BMW135i. Although I was told my new car would be here in mid-October, I really have no idea exactly when and I’m having trouble finding out any information at the moment, as my salesperson seems to be AWOL.

Maybe his phone is broken?