I have just purchased the third mobile phone that I have ever owned in my life – or more accurately, in the twelve years that I have had mobile phones. That is apparently an appalling statistic, owning three mobiles in twelve years. I am apparently well below average … in mobile phone ownership, mobile phone ownership, not everywhere in my life! (I just knew where your mind was going there!)

And what’s more, I have cancelled my landline phone and now only have the mobile. Just like the youngsters, aren’t I? I believe I have mentioned this in the past: I am getting older kicking and screaming. Denial all the way, that’s how I’m doing it. I am pretending that I am 25. Still.

So I have packed away all my other old phones and now I must cart my iPhone everywhere I go, even in my house. My house is three stories, so if I don’t do that, if my phone should ring, I will have to possibly run up or down a flight or two of stairs to answer it. Not fun – especially not in socks.

Speaking of ringtones, I didn’t particularly like the ones that came with the phone, so I have learned how to download and activate ringtones from various websites. For free, too, because I am frugal. (Which sounds a lot nicer than “cheap”, which is actually what I am. That’s why I cancelled the landline, you know: too expensive to have two phone systems and totally unnecessary, really.) I spent a lot of time hunting all over the intarnets to find the snippet of the song that I wanted, 42 whole seconds worth. Ironically, my voice mail kicks in well before those 42 seconds are up, so I would never hear the entire song fragment if I chose to not answer a call.

I am starting to text like a demon, too. It’s much easier with an actual keyboard, even a touchscreen one, than it was on my old mobile where I had to hit the “1″ button three times to type the letter “c”, for example. That old school stuff is quite time consuming, so I really didn’t text a whole lot. But I sure do now.

And I email right from my mobile! I google things! I play Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds! I check my hockey pool (I’m currently tied for first place, just in case you’re interested)! I download apps with which I do things like check my bank balance and pay some of my bills! I take photos! I listen to music!

What I don’t actually do a lot of, surprisingly, is talk on the phone.

So … um … call me sometime, okay?

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!

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???

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?

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!

PG’s Pimpmobile is dead.

You remember the Pimpmobile, don’t you? That’s the 1986 Chrysler Fifth Avenue that PG purchased in the fall as a winter car, the car that I wouldn’t be seen in. Ever.

And now it has died on him (he thinks it’s the transmission), and he will not be repairing it. As he put it, “There’s no fucking way I’m going to put any more money into that piece of shit!”

PG is now down to only one vehicle, his trusty Porsche. Which is not equipped with winter tires and so is not really a good winter car. Which he is slowly transforming into a strict racing car anyway. Which means he now needs to get another, more appropriate vehicle for winter driving. Which means that I have no idea what he will end up with. If nothing else, it’ll be a surprise!

So. Let’s have a moment of silence for the Pimpmobile.

Pimpmobile, you were a crappy, ugly car. See ya!

I was sitting at my kitchen desk, doing something incredibly important on my laptop. I think I may have been playing Angry Birds. Or maybe Bejewelled. It doesn’t matter (and I obviously don’t remember), but the point is that my kitchen desk is beside the patio door to my tiny back yard.

Now, as I mentioned, it was raining very hard at the time. I could hear rain just cascading down and crashing on the patio – and I realized that I shouldn’t actually be hearing that. I should have been hearing the rain on the roof perhaps, or hitting the patio, but I shouldn’t have been hearing what sounded like a small waterfall.

Oh crap, not again, I thought. Obviously, the gutter above the patio door was plugged again so the rainwater couldn’t flow down the drainpipe again and was just pouring over the side of the gutter and hitting the patio below again with great noise and velocity. This has happened before, more than once. I don’t know why the stupid gutter keeps plugging up right there, but it does plug up fairly regularly and then I get that charming Niagara Falls effect, right in my backyard. I should put up some coloured spotlights and charge admission already.

Well, I couldn’t do anything about it right then, but as soon as the rain stopped, I resolved to get my stepladder and climb up there and see what was going on with that gutter.

The rain petered out later that afternoon, so I did exactly that. Of course, I’m very nervous of heights anyway, and of course the ladder wasn’t quite long enough for me to actually see right into the gutter, so of course the operation wasn’t destined to go as smoothly as I had hoped. Still, I did my best.

I reached up into the gutter and felt around. Yep, all clogged up with what felt like mud. I certainly hoped it was just mud! I didn’t really know what to do then. Apparently I hadn’t thought this through carefully. I decided to scoop out some mud with my bare hand. I stood there at the top of the stepladder, my hand dripping with gooey mud mixed with some twigs and leaves. This was certainly going to make a mess if I just dropped it down to the patio – maybe I could just toss it into the flowerbox at the edge of the patio? Surely that was what people did when standing at the top of a ladder with a handful of mud?

So I did. Only I missed. My handful of mud, twigs and leaves hit the fence. And here I’d been concerned about making a mess. Oh well. I’d have to hose that off later. But right now, I was pretty sure that there was more goo that I could scoop out of the gutter.

So I scooped again. As soon as I did this the second time, water began rushing down the drainpipe, its access no longer blocked. Yay! No more Niagara Falls! And surely this time I could properly toss my handful of mud into the flowerbox, couldn’t I?

Nope. I couldn’t. Not even close. Now there were two big blobs of drippy, muddy mess on the fence.

And that’s when I thought about monkeys throwing their own poo and, shall we say, the similarities with my current situation. And that’s when I almost fell off the ladder, I was laughing so hard.

For one, the window in the door to my classroom was boarded up.

“Hmm,” I thought. “This is weird.”

For another, my chairs had all been stacked up against the back wall. I was pretty sure that I remembered leaving them where they usually are, around the three tables. But, you know, we older women do forget things …

Then I saw that the computer cart had been moved more to the middle of the room – and that it was wide open, with power cords strewn on the floor. I glanced inside, a little nervous now. I didn’t see a single laptop on the top shelf. I bent down to get a really good look inside the cart, and as I did, I saw a single piece of tempered glass on the floor. I also saw that there were actually four laptops on the bottom shelf of the cart. There were supposed to be sixteen laptops in total.

Although I make this sound rather long, it actually only took me all of about three seconds to realize that my classroom had been broken into during the night, that most of the laptops had been stolen, and that somebody (the security company? school district maintenance people?) had come in and cleaned up the broken glass and boarded up the broken window long before I got there that morning.

I immediately started zoning out about whether or now I had actually locked the cart when I had left work the day before. I’m pretty religious about doing that, but occasionally I have forgotten, and now I was worried. However, I soon found the padlock to the cart, and it was still locked but had been cut with bolt cutters. So at least I hadn’t made it easy for them!

The classroom next door to mine also had the window in its door boarded up, due to having been smashed. In the dark hallway, the thieves apparently tried to get into the wrong classroom. There was another, bigger window beside one of the exit door that had been broken as well and was now boarded up, and this was obviously how they had gotten into the school.

A few minutes later, another laptop was discovered sitting on a table down the hallway. For some reason, it had been left behind by the thieves. So that meant that they had nicked eleven of the sixteen laptops that used to live in that computer cart. They also bent the doors of the cart enough that it is no longer usable and must be replaced.

Still later, in the playground below my classroom windows, one of our morning playground supervisors noticed a big, heavy garbage can lid pushed up against the wall. The metal casing around one of my windows had been pried off and was now laying on the ground. It looked like the burglars tried to climb up and remove the window glass to gain access. When that proved impossible, they went over to the school entrance door, broke a window there, climbed in, went down the hallway and eventually into my classroom and away with the laptops.

I went back to the office to talk to my principal and vice-principal about the incident, but would you believe that they knew nothing about it?!? The alarm must have gone off, the security company must have been alerted, the police must have been in attendance, somebody had obviously cleaned up whatever mess there was – but no one saw fit to inform the administration of the school in question?!? Both of them immediately started making phone calls, but they have learned very little in the two days since this happened. WTF?!?

I know that everything was insured and will be replaced as soon as possible, I know that some kids will be really inconvenienced for a while until that happens, and I know that it’s very lucky that my classroom wasn’t trashed as well, but those aren’t the things that bother me the most. What bothers me is that it is very apparent that the robbers knew exactly where those laptops were. This wasn’t random, they targeted my classroom. I know this because it is impossible to see into my classroom windows from the playground outside: my windows are too high, even if the blinds are wide open. I also know this because I have only had that particular computer cart in my classroom for the past two years: before that, the cart was kept in a different room. And only a handful of kids in the school even know this cart exists: those laptops had specific programs loaded onto them and were for the exclusive use of kids who receive learning support for writing difficulties, not for the general population. So, worst of all, I know that whoever stole those laptops is more than likely a former student of mine, someone that I probably taught within the past two years.

Someone who is likely no more than fourteen years old now.

And that upsets me too.

Then I went home.

Yep, my back still kinda hurt.

It kinda hurt all afternoon. My heart sank. I didn’t want to go there again. I’m tired of pain in my lower back already!

I called my chiropractor’s office, but she had already left for the day (at 3 pm?? What gives?? Does she keep a teacher’s hours now??). So I made an appointment for this morning. Then I took some meds for my back and settled myself very, very gingerly on the couch. I stayed there, on and off, all evening. My back kept kinda hurting whenever I moved. But at least it didn’t get any worse.

I was apprehensive about going to bed, because whenever my back acts up, I usually don’t get a good night’s sleep, and it’s worse in the morning. But to my surprise, it wasn’t worse in the morning. It certainly wasn’t any better, but it wasn’t worse.

I went to my chiropractor glumly. I even brought her a copy of the radiologist’s report from when I had my back x-rayed last summer. She read it carefully, then nodded. “It seems to be a wear-and-tear thing. You have these little bony spurs sticking out, and every now and then it’s like they seem to catch. And then it hurts and here you are.”

She performed her usual magic on me for fifteen minutes, then I went home. My back still kinda hurt. I was getting tired of walking stiffly and slowly – but hey, look on the bright side: at least I could still walk!

Then I went out for lunch with a good friend. We ate and talked for two hours straight. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so we had a lot to catch up on, it seems.

And when we got up to go, my back felt, quite abruptly, much better. So much better, in fact, that when I got home, I cleaned my bathroom. Because I could. Bend down with minimal pain, I mean.

The moral of this story is, I think, that lunch with a good friend is more beneficial to one’s back than a visit to the chiropractor.

I must remember this.

Because the truth is, nobody cares what you got. Not really. Oh, the more well-bred among us can feign interest exceedingly well and convincingly, but they are really thinking about whether or not Jeeves will remember to go pick up more silver polish. The fact that you have received a new bathrobe is truly of no interest to most people.

There is one exception, however. One situation where enquiring minds honestly DO want to know what you got for Christmas. One circumstance in which all and sundry are VERY interested in what you got for Christmas.

This is when two adults have been dating for a while. The time frame varies, but I believe that the older you are, the shorter it is. So, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that if you are in your early twenties, the time frame might be six months. If you are in your early fifties, the time frame might be one month.

And this last one would be the situation in which Porsche Guy and I are to be found. We have been together for way more than a month (might be around eight years, but we’re not really sure). Although we are actually quite fond of one another, we do not live together, nor are we talking marriage. That is not to say that neither of those two scenarios will ever happen, but rather that we are content where we are right now and do not feel the need to change things up.

And this is unusual. Apparently. And since we are obviously a couple of such long duration, everybody wants to know what the hell we are doing. Which leads me into … every Christmas, practically every person I know (the only exceptions being DD and my mother) asks me, in a very kind but very weighted tone, “And what did PG get you for Christmas … ?” If I am talking to that someone in person, there is also a quick glance at my left ring finger, usually just after that question is posed.

So, this year, with great delight, I would like to tell the intarnets what PG got me for Christmas.

A frying pan. A big 30-cm non-stick sauté pan with tall 5-cm sides and a transparent lid.

And that’s exactly what I asked him to get me.

I am thrilled.

Really!