I'm stuck into studying for exams. Santa is ensconced at the mall, he's a chatty kind of guy, likes to wander around and hug unsuspecting passersby. Because of the location of my booth, I am witness to little exchanges between parents and kids. "But he's a nice Santa, why don't you want to go and talk to him?" I'm sure he'd be hurt if he knew how many of the small ones were terrified of him. We tell them, don't talk to strangers, then we want them to go and sit on the lap of some old guy in a red suit... mixed messages...

I'm also in the middle of filling out forms to become a volunteer at William Head, the federal prison mentioned earlier.

Tomorrow I'm going to William Head, the minimum security federal prison in Metchosin, to a Restorative Justice Symposium. There will, I'm told, be drug dogs but no searches... yikes. I can't bring anything except myself and picture id. Other people from my restorative justice class are going, too, but no-one I really talk to. Should be interesting.

I'm swimming in schoolwork, and people are starting their Christmas shopping so the booth is busy. Santa arrives at the mall tomorrow, I've been watching the mall guys build his castle all week. The mall employs about seven little men, all with bad teeth, thinning hair, and pot bellies, (except one, who is almost cute) and they wear brown work shirts with their names embroidered on them, and suspenders. They've been fighting over the construction of the castle, dickering about the tape lines on the floor and the placement of the little fences, etc, and I'm beginning to see strange parallels with the seven dwarves...

paintballing finally happened today, so Rach and her little friend Kaitlyn and I went to see the Looney Tunes movie. Jenna Elfman, some guy, ducks and rabbits, it was good. There were some good jokes, too.

the worst of the vertigo has subsided. I'm so happy.

It's late. I'm trying to finish my burglary paper... after this, one more set of six little papers and a final. onward and forward...

Ian's birthday today. He's ten. He woke everyone up at six, so he could open his presents. We gave him 2 way radios and Rachel bought him some fudge. I also made a large sticky cake, which is mostly eaten. He seems content. M is going to take him and his friends paintballing. I have rashly promised to take Rachel to the movies while that is going on. I think I may have to sit through spykids 3d. think sustaining thoughts for me, will you? 3d (shudder).

An excerpt from something else I'm working on tonight:

I took over as manager of my first gas station on a cold weekend in February 1993. The previous weekend, the station had been robbed, and on Sunday evening my boss requested that I go and sit with Jay, who was working at the time of the robbery. Jay was grateful for the company. We served the occasional customer, and listened to the Sunday Night Sex Show on the radio. Len, a man who had once sold me a van, came in and wanted to talk to Jay about the robbery, but Jay didn't have much to say about it. At about 10:45, while we were counting the cigarettes, someone wearing a black hooded sweatshirt burst into the store and poked a gun under the glass partition. I thought, for one wild minute, that it was Len, trying to be funny. Then it hit, it was real. The person with the gun was demanding that we open the door. While Jay opened the side door to let them in, I ran out the back door, planning, somewhat fuzzily, to head for a payphone at the strip mall behind the station. Someone grabbed me and dragged me back inside. Since I had disrupted the script by trying to leave, they felt it necessary to make me lie down on the floor in the back, and the one with the gun held it to my head.

The little group, probably four in all, cleaned out all the cigarettes and money, and left. Jay fell to bits, pacing up and down, repeating, �Not again. I don�t believe it happened again.� My own relief at still being alive made it possible to deal with the police and to call the owner and tell him. Later, on my way home, my calm broke, and waves of adrenaline kept cresting and breaking over me, and I put Pink Floyd in the tape deck and turned Comfortably Numb up really loudly. It was a ritual I was to repeat numerous times over the next month or so. It reminded me that I was alive, and that they couldn�t do anything further to me.

I'm procrastinating. Control Balance theory and Coercion theory: how they explain burglary. (my original, laziness theory still stands: don't want to work, ergo will steal your tv and sell it. beats working at MacDonalds.)

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

well, not really. but it was fun anyway.

The doctor says: it's your ears. If things are spinning, it's related to otoliths. He was talking about it being like a snowglobe, and the otoliths like the snow, and that mine are floating too much, if I understood correctly. He gave me a set of exercises to do to try and shake them back down where they belong and he wants to see me in a month...

Yesterday in Vancouver, after my class, there were extremely high winds. 100 mph, apparently. Skytrains were going slow, but I managed to get a bus (full of German schoolchildren) out to Horseshoe Bay to the ferry terminal just before the 7oclock ferry. Sitting upstairs in the departure area, and suddenly they announce that there will be no more ferries to Nanaimo.

After an abortive attempt to get my money back, since I had somehow lost my ticket, I headed off to the one motel in town. There were a number of people in the lobby, including one that I recognized as being attached to the German school party.

He got up to the counter, about 5 would-be motel-stayers ahead of me, and tried to persuade the proprietor to give them all the rooms that were left, for 28 kids. Without changing expression in the slightest, the proprietor told him there was only one room left. Although this man desperately wanted to make his problem the motel-owner's problem, Mr. German Schoolteacher ended up leaving with a brochure for the Holiday Inn in West Vancouver. The motel man then gave out five or six more keys to all the rest of us waiting. I don't know if I've ever been so happy to know that someone was telling lies......

The room was very clean, and the water was hot. I had a bed, and in the morning the winds had died down and I took the 6:30 am ferry. I even made it to work on time. If the school party had managed to book the whole motel, I would have been forced to go back into Vancouver, and I wouldn't have made the 6:30 ferry...

Kirsten is dealing very nicely with a current situation, but it's driving me nuts... She has two little girlfriends, Caitlin and Brooke, who have started tormenting her in subtle and not-so subtle ways. A few weeks ago she approached me with the idea of having a Halloween party at the house. I said ok, and she went off to start planning it with her friends. They soon fought over the preparations, and to make a long story short, cancelled the party as far as Kirsten knew. Then, suddenly, it was back on, at Brooke's house, but they were refusing to let Kirsten take part, and on Thursday at school invitations were ostentatiously handed out to most of the class except for Kirsten. Yesterday the party happened. Next door but one. Kirsten was resigned, and fished out Mad Gab and made us all play it. This morning, the phone rang, and it was the girls who had stayed overnight at the party, making prank phone calls to upset Kirsten.

Ok, so don't invite her to the party. But then don't call and taunt her, that's just cruel.

Kirsten, predictably, doesn't want me to talk to parents or teachers. I'm respecting her wishes. These girls are going to grow up to be the office bitches somewhere, I'm sure....

frogs, I've decided, should be green. so, a color change.

I'm still supposed to be researching armed robbery, but the search takes me off on bizarre tangents. Did you know that it's been scientifically proven that your personality at 3 is exactly the same as your personality at 26? So if you tormented the cat and crayoned on the walls at 3, you'll be prone to much the same behaviour at 26. Within age-appropriate limits, of course. You'll probably have a girlfriend to torment, and your own room to stencil.

Yup, armed robbery. Apparently, surprisingly, it has to do with wanting money but not wanting to work towards getting it. Never would've guessed that.

Work is still busy, but I'm settling in. I'm hoping not to have to work tomorrow, as I worked all day today so Liz could go to a wedding in Vancouver. I ran an ad in the human resources website and got a whole bunch of hopeless folk looking for work. Just a tip for anyone looking for a job: smile and say hello when you approach your potential future employer. Don't walk up and interrupt a customer to say "Are you hiring?" I'm serious, the woman I gave the job to was the only one out of 35 who smiled at me and said hi. I had already decided to hire her before I read her resume. Even though the ad specified "Experience preferred", I got folk who were in their fifties and seemed to have never held down a job. One woman described her last five years or so as "artist with limited success". People are funny.

good books today. On how people are made violent. Why they commit armed robberies. People tend not to want to sit next to me on the bus, however.

hoo, boy. lots to do. Roy was here. Unfortunately, while he was here, someone broke into his house and stole his computer, tv, and dvd player. He suspects the cable guy. kidding. luckily they didn't let his cat out, and Robyn wasn't home at the time.

well, lots of work got done today. Happily I will be able to hand in my six short papers tomorrow for the Restorative Justice class. That means, however, that I've got not much time left this weekend to do anything holidaylike, as I spent yesterday working on a presentation for my criminological theory class, and Saturday I worked. Oh well, at least I got to sleep in...

my mother is being her usual provoking self. What's wrong with me that I let her push all my buttons all the time? she's got email now, and she sent me one last week saying that she wondered if I remembered a playdough recipe that she could use with the 18 month old twins that she babysits. I poked around on the net, and came up with a few, but they all involved cooking the dough in a saucepan, so I wrote back and said, "I don't remember, did we used to cook it?" Her reply was, "No, we used it like play dough. Never mind, you obviously don't know what I'm talking about".

Huh?

So I wrote back, saying, "no, silly, I mean do you cook it to make it?" and got no reply. Apparently she also emailed Kim, her former secretary, and Kim, she told me on the phone, "being Kim, went straight on the net and sent me a recipe the same day".

She also told me that being with the twins is just like being with her grandchildren. Strangely enough, her grandchildren live 20 minutes away, and she shows little or no inclination to be with them. The last time I invited them over, they said, "We don't want to drive all that way just to sit with kids and dogs."

Time to move to Arizona. Me, I mean.

good things today:

three people won the super seven, which now goes back down and we can all relax...
getting to go home early from work
walking home in the rain
subsequently, hot shower, hot coffee, warm dog
quiet, with opera (not Oprah) and laundry when I got home
new friends at the lottery booth, one who brought me white chocolate
Roy's coming soon
leftover potato salad
Halloween preparations
the Saturday crossword from the Globe and Mail awaits
laziness............................................

yesterday on the way back from class in Burnaby I caught a ferry by jumping onto the cardeck from the rapidly rising ramp... had to walk through a barricade with flashing red lights to do so. And I got home early. (don't worry, I was in no danger, the ferry workers gave me permission, and someone helped me down, and I Did have a ticket...) Next I want to try driving my car over one of those bridges that folds up. Oh, wait, I don't have a car. probably for the best.

I have a doctor's appointment. I've had vertigo nastily since August, it's probably time. However, it's not until the 30th.

I'm sad today. Don't know why, exactly, just wanted to share that. I think it's because I've been so busy. I want to curl up in bed with the dogs and watch the rain. Instead I'm working on all my papers. Rachel's gone to Brownies, M and Kirsten have gone to feed Jane's cats, and Ian is meeting nice people online and shooting them. Warcraft. I can hear the gunfire, intermittently, from the basement.

Despite my self-induced panic, the transition has gone quite smoothly in the new booth. The new owner took over my old one on Wednesday last week, so I got my staff back. Liz likes the tvs at the new booth, although I'm not sure how she's going to like how busy Saturdays are. At least at Rutherford now (my new mall) we have two lottery machines so I can come and help her, which I did on Saturday.