Redicurous (Seinfeld) Month of June

So blogging has obviously not been on the top of my priority these days. I got busy with the usual end of semester stuff at a school, like final exams, report cards, and making sure that everyone passes, which they did and which I am pretty happy about. My students worked pretty hard this year in general (despite what I told some of them during the year. Those kids just needed some extra motivation) and everyone managed to get through their respective courses. I even had a kid get 100% in a course. And it was a real 100%, no bonus marks or extra assignments, just his ability to do and understand math really well. He decimated most of the math contests as well, including scoring the highest in our zone for the grade 9 Pascal contest, and tying for second place in our zone for the grade 12 Euclid contest. Did I mention he is only in grade 8? I would like to take credit for his remarkable successes, but I definitely cannot. I do hope he did learn some things in my class this year.

In general, I had a really good semester at Bayridge, and I thoroughly enjoyed being there. The staff and students were both excellent, and I was happy to be coaching again. I hope to be back there next semester, and I have my fingers crossed. I guess I haven't mentioned yet, but I got laid-off this year again, along with 77 other teachers at the bottom of the seniority list. I am hoping to be back, but I guess there are no guarantees.

Rugby has been going well, except we haven't had any games for 2 weeks, as we had a bye week and forfeited one week due to a shortage of players. Scored 2 tries the week before that though, so things can't be all bad. The weather hasn't been too ungodly hot yet either, which has made playing and practising all that much better. As we approach August again, we are starting to think about Queen's rugby again as well. I am looking forward to coaching there again this year, and I really want our varsity guys to have another crack at the title.

So as some people know already, Donna is going to working most, if not all, of the next year in Ottawa on her Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship. We are pretty excited about it, but it means that Donna will be commuting a little bit back and forth to see me, and be at home in Kingston. She started today, so we decided to come up to Ottawa together to enjoy the Canada Day festivities in our Nations Capital.

Holy crap do a lot of people come to Ottawa for Canada Day. Now this should not really be that surprising, and actually it should be a little bit up-lifting to know that so many people want to come to the capital to celebrate Canada Day here. We met up with one of Donna's friends for lunch (good pho, although Donna's bun was not as good) before heading downtown for the holiday. Now might be a good time to say that Donna and I need to do a better job of planning things out ahead of time. We have usually been fine saying lets just go and things will be awesome, but some planning might be in order. Take lunch for example. The original plan was to go to "The Works" this burger joint that is supposed to have awesome burgers. We get there and they are closed... along with just about every other retail and restaurant business in a 10 block radius. People here really take their Canada Day seriously. Thank goodness for hardworking Asians, because when we got to Chinatown, just about every Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurant was open, busy, and looked to offer excellent food.

By the time we got downtown, we managed to see the last act of the afternoon concert, as well as Stephen Harper's caravan of vehicles and Michel Jean's 2-vehicle convoy. Actually it was kind of funny to see all these dark cars lined up, then the PM gets into the only one with Canada flags on the front, and the Gov. Gen. gets into the only one with the Queen's flags on them. Awesome security measures eh? Speaking of security, it was pretty non existent at the outdoor concert on Parliament Hill as well. There were 2 lines of people being admitted onto the site. If you went through one line they checked your bags. This line was of course slow. If you went into the other line, then you didn't get your bags checked and it was fast. Interesting...

Anyway, the Canada Day Festivities were great, and we had a good time. We were lucky too, as Donna wanted to go into Rideau Centre (local mall) to check out a few things and maybe get some refreshments. Turned out to be a great idea, as we missed this huge rainstorm that soaked everybody outside. I am going to try and enjoy the next 50ish days of vacation, and I looking forward to going back to Vancouver in the next few days. I will try and post a few pics in the next couple of days.

By the way, congratulations to Amy and Marijan, who are about to get married, Sonia and Jeremy who will be tying the knot next month, and last but not least, Joe and Maggie and their new baby boy Sebastian who was born last week. Good job people.

Stay Frosty