currently on the floor in my living room: three chewed bones, one purple bandanna, one blue scarf, one chewed bottle cap, three drawings by Rachel, approximately 76 pieces of lego, four pages of notes on the Inuit, one Harry Potter birthday napkin, one spaceman helmet, one electronic guitar tuner, one green balloon.

I'm studying, dammit. housekeeping can be someone else's problem...

wrote my final yesterday in the course I've been complaining about. never did get the midterm back.... one final left, on Tuesday. This afternoon I'm reviewing Conflict of Interest guidelines (and falling asleep, hence the catalogue of things on the floor...)

top of Ian's Christmas wish list: Snow.

little old man comes up to me today, says, "Do you have a good memory?"
I reply, "Sometimes, why?"
"Well, maybe you can tell me," he says, "have I already bought a ticket this week?"

the thing that sucks about distance education: I've written two papers and one exam for a particular course. I received one paper back, with a mark of 13/15 but no comments. I still haven't got back either the midterm or the second paper. And on Friday, I have to go and write the final. If I were inclined to worry, now would be the time. However, with acceptance already arranged to the school of criminology, it doesn't matter much now, since this is not a criminology course I'm referring to.

Good King Wenceslas is being practiced on the clarinet in the background. The kitchen's full of dishes and I still have two chapters to read tonight, according to my happy little study timetable. In fifteen minutes, I have to go fetch Rachel from Brownies........

They didn't turn the player piano on until the afternoon today... for which I am truly thankful.

I won the grand sum of $10.36. which means I haven't actually made a profit yet :)

Today (I suspect the universe of getting me back for complaining about the Christmas Muzak) the mall staff came and parked a player piano three feet from my booth and now it's happily playing Christmas music to itself at full volume, making it hard to think, let alone serve customers. It's like being stuck in a giant music box...

Although I approached it with very little hope of obtaining courses, the registration went well today. The end result is one distance education criminology and another one that will entail me going to SFU on Tuesdays from Jan -March. Should be interesting

Today I had one of those days when I wish the public would just go away and leave me in peace. and I ate all my wine gums by so I was without snacks.

I bet on some more hockey games... I think I have the hang of it now, so I should stop. (but I want to win one...)

just for fun, and since I have to explain to people how to do it and my knowledge was a little lacking, I've been betting on sports. I'm like a bookie... I haven't won a single thing, yet, I picked three hockey teams to tie the other day and none of them did, except Anaheim who I wasn't betting on. So the next day I bet on two football teams, got them both right, bet that Anaheim would win in the hockey since I figured, hey, they tied, they'll be psyched up to win and damn if they didn't go and tie again! The deal with the oddset is that you have to get all three right, though. I even picked the winner in the Grey Cup, despite the fact I didn't know even who was involved until I got the little brochure thing that comes with sportsaction......

Papers are all done. I finished the last one this afternoon, but it doesn't have to be mailed until Wednesday, so I've got time to play with it. Now I just have finals, but not until December 6th. (Although that's not terribly far away, now). Ian's birthday party went well, his little friends had a good time, cake and balloons and M took them to play lazer tag at the arcade, then back here to play video games. 9 yr old boys never change... When one of the boys' mothers came to pick him up, she said that his birthday will be soon, too, so I guess Ian'll get to go to that. I worry a bit about his social life, he's kind of a serious boy, and not much into sports except his beloved karate. But the boys he had here today seem to be a good fit for him, both quiet and very well-mannered. One of them has been living with his mother for the last few years, in Japan, and so I guess he's a bit of a misfit too.

here I am, writing a paper on family law. today was very busy at work. yesterday not so much, so I amused myself eating pistachios and making origami penguins. then shooting them with elastic bands. also calculating that on average they play Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer every forty-seven minutes on the *)^%$$ muzak. argh. tomorrow is Ian's birthday party...

today they started playing the Christmas muzak at the mall................

procrastination time again. I'm supposed to be writing a paper on euthanasia and public policy dilemmas. I have this one and then two more due on the 27th and that's all the work for the term. Then two finals the first week and a half of December. So far my marks have been better than I hoped. I figured it'd be harder after having been out of school for ten+ years.

My mother-in-law tells me I'm middle-aged. ? Who decides these things? My parents have bought a new modular home and had it moved to a spot about 30 minutes away. My mum's retiring in June, so as to have more time to do the important things (ie drink) and my dad's pension has kicked in as he's 65 now. He's enjoying the bit where the government deposits money in his bank account at regular intervals. The house purchase has required him to come and stay here with us three times in the last little while, and we've had fun. He was even here on Ian's birthday.

what I do with my days:
Watch little old ladies rummage through their handbags for their bingo tickets.
Discuss with little old men where they are going to take me on holiday when they win big.
Tell people how to get to a. the washroom or b. Walmart.
Tell people how to play the Super 7.
Watch belly buttons go by. No-one wears shirts that cover, anymore.
Listen to the piped music. Including, today, You Light Up My Life. Ack.
Get blamed when people don't win. A number of bus drivers are threatening to run me over if they see me in the street.
Try not to need to go to the bathroom. (Can't leave unless I find a guard to watch the till, can't leave to find a guard, you get the idea.)
Tear apart lottery tickets. This is fun.
Tear up lottery tickets that are done. Ditto.
Roll up coins that the little old ladies found in the bottom of their capacious handbags.
Contemplate shooting passers-by with stray elastic bands.
Explain that, no, I really can't tell in advance whether it's going to be a winning ticket..............

good things today:
not being sick any more (had a sinus thing, ick)
juicy fruit red gum
sunshine after a week of fog
another paper back, another nice mark
10 million dollars on the Super 7 on Friday (everybody wants a ticket)
meeting a few friendly folk, including a namesake
pumpkins and spiders and webs and gravestones in my front yard... floodlights, too. we rock.
dog snuggles in the morning

So I'm back at work. I'm now the lottery lady. Different bus ride to work, same length but in the opposite direction, different bus driver, although my old downtown bus driver comes by my new workplace every day, and we greet each other. There are fewer strange people on this bus, too. No toque people. (have you ever noticed that truly strange folk always wear woolly hats, even in August? And they talk to themselves. Or you, if you happen to catch their eye)

My first real day went quite smoothly. And my new employee showed up for work on time, and is working at this moment. My territory manager visited me, and turned out to be a sweet lady, with no affectations, we got on just fine. She told me I don't have to do half the things the person who trained me showed me, so that should make my life easier. And I had some good chats with customers, always my favorite thing. A couple of old guys told me they'd be back to 'take care of me' if they won the 10 million on the 6/49 tonight. I'll be like Anna Nicole Smith, yeah...

From one end of things to the other, today. Spent some of the morning helping Rachel's class read. "Stella is our new dog. When we say sit, Stella rolls over..." then from there I went to the library to research the Nisga'a (original residents of the Nass Valley, on the British Columbia North Coast) and their aboriginal title legal battles. I got a bit sidetracked reading missionary accounts from the 1890's, funny stuff, the reverend guys complaining about the "manners" of the Nisga'a and the Tsimshian. No idea that the Nisga'a probably thought these white folk were just plain crazy, always wanting to talk about the bible... At one point, the reverend is talking to a chief, and he tells him that the bible speaks against adultery and theft and drunkenness, and the chief says, "So why are you white folk always bringing rum to sell to us?" The reverend did not record his own answer...

this morning in the mail, four of my termpapers returned... I got 2 A's and 2 A+'s... lost some marks for punctuation :)

I have errands to run today, and I don't have to work again until next Wednesday. The guy whose lottery store it is right now was trying to get me to work a few more days for "training" but I said, no, I didn't think I needed them, thank-you. I've broken a tooth and need a dentist appointment, which is already made for next Monday... I know that he was just hoping for a bit more free labour. And I feel a bit mean in refusing, but I'm getting over it.

just for fun, a portion of the email my brother sent in response to my comment about the bed...

"...OH MY GOD. Yup it's comfy, and we got it for 2000 and it was regular 3000, but we are paying over two year so it feels cheap. Yah right. ANyway, it is a damn fine bed. So incredibly comfortable when you get into it it grips you around the body and holds on, and the covers just pad around the edges and boom, you're both sound asleep and warm, something to do with a layer of wool?..."

Unfortunately the apartment said bed resides in had spraying cats as former residents... nothing like the smell of boy-cat urine... hold on, I missed an inch of carpet.

Today and yesterday I worked at the candle store. Not much doing, really, everyone was off scoffing turkey. So I worked on my paper on sentencing patterns... as in jail, not as in grammar :)

More training. With real people this time. Made a few mistakes, but overall it went pretty well. I'm happy that I will be working alone again, and it doesn't look like anyone will object if I bring my books and study a bit... Papers are snowballing right now, one due on Wednesday but I've been trying hard to get it done early as there's another one due on the 21st and then 4 more before the end of November. Then finals. The end of my first term!

If my little brother happens to be reading this, all I can say is the bed better be damn comfy if you paid that much for it...

The kids are jumping down the stairs onto a large beanbag their gramma gave them yesterday. I threatened to take them to the kid pound earlier and put them up for adoption, when I was trying to work on my paper and they kept coming and bouncing around and making silly noises. The topic was the competing meanings of the word "possession" in a parental child abduction case, and I was beginning to think that I should just write "oh, to hell with it, just let the father have them, you silly woman"....

So. An innocuous little piece of news, the Queen dropping the puck at the hockey game on Sunday night.

Well. I had to go to lottery training in Richmond on Monday morning 8:30 am, and the logistics of trying to get from Horseshoe Bay to Richmond in 25 minutes after taking the first ferry in the morning weren't good so I decided to stay overnight in Vancouver. Picked a hotel, went to check in. Funny thing, though, it said it was close to the Greyhound station and it most positively wasn't. Quite a little hike, in fact. Across the bridge and everything.

I checked in and ate supper, and then went to watch tv. The hockey game finished, and some lunatic with a set of bagpipes started skirling and wailing in the parking lot outside GM Place, and I swear he knew maybe two songs, one of them that Scotch Porridge Oats thing and the other I can't place but I know I've heard it before. I looked out the window but I couldn't really see anything, and damn if the guy didn't keep playing those same two songs over and over until almost midnight.

When quiet seemed to be restored, or at least as much as it ever is in downtown Vancouver, I went to bed but I couldn't really sleep. So I lay and watched the headlights make patterns on the ceiling for a while, and I think I finally drifted off. Must've been about 1 am or so, the fire alarm went off. Just like when I used to live in residence at the UofA, that incessant ring. I got out of bed and wandered around a bit, wishing it would stop, but it didn't. So I put my pants on and stuck my head out into the hallway. An assortment of really big men were also poking their heads out of all the other doorways. Hockey players? Maybe. I wouldn't know. So we milled around for a bit, wondering what to do, and eventually one of them said, "stairs, maybe?" and we all started down. When my feet hit the concrete, I realized that I'd forgotten my shoes and my wallet. If we ended up outside all night, it'd be not much fun....

We didn't, though, they turned it off eventually, and the firetrucks came, loudly singing in the night and I think it was about 2:30 I got back to sleep again. Things were further complicated in the morning by the fact that the alarm clock given in the room didn't work, and I had to take a hugely expensive cab to Richmond....

today I'm doing Charter of Rights and its interpretation by the courts. (the reasonableness yardstick. It's reasonable for a person to be patted down before boarding an airplane. It's not reasonable for the police to do a body cavity search on a routine traffic stop. Get out of the car, honey.)

I also went downtown and conducted most of my business, and asked Serra if she'd like to come and work with me again. So all is underway.

The dogs are drinking my coffee.