Good day

Today was a rather great day! (Again, they're kinda accumulating?)

Although I (again) didn't get nearly enough sleep, I was in a pretty good mood this morning (I don't remember either my alarm clock going off nor me switching it off, but I woke up one minute after it was supposed to have gone off...) and made it to school just fine - my backpack was wonderfully light as I was able to leave my Math book and notebook in my locker (no homework due to test day!), and then we had Spanish.
I got 10/10 on my vocab quiz - which, please excuse me, was totally ridiculous.

We were allowed to complete it in group work, only for her to collect it and mark it. GROUP work - teacher approves cheating!

Anyway, no surprises there! Then we learned a bit more of the new grammar, also not really hard, and then it was Entrepreneurship.

We had to complete an exercise which CiCi and I couldn't take part in, so I wrote an e-mail to the guesthouse in Hermanus, South Africa, my parents and I stayed in when we travelled there, and I exchanged a couple of e-mails with their daughter before that exchange died down, and the mother at least still remembers me! (I just got the return e-mail!) And now I'm close to happy tears, because that was such a beautiful time and everything...

Lunch I spent, as always, in Mr Derksen's room, and we had a great conversation with two other students. Amongst the topics: Teachers who feel threatened by students (cough, coughIrlyPenzicough, cough) and Drama Arts :)

I got the pictures from Mr Wishlow, too - they're pretty blue, for some reason, so I hope Mr Manderioli can work with them!

After lunch, we had a guest speaker in Creative Writing. Professor Jake Kennedy ("Hi, I'm Jake") and his daughter visited us! (Her babysitter was sick)

And he read a couple of poems to us (they were from a series titled "Fuck off, asshole", and every poem ended with the line "Fuck off, asshole". They were poems from him to himself :D ) while his daughter was reading in the corner, and he was really cool.

One funny thing happened though:

Mr D's classroom

Jake was speaking and switched suddenly into this really ... old, big-worded English.
And that's exactly what Mr D always teases me about, and that was what we had talked about with Taylor before the lesson began.
And I was just thinking about it, when I heard Mr D's hissed Julia!, so I turned around and he was just grinning at me and waggling his eyebrows. I had to fight against the laughter so hard, it was really bad!

Well, the lesson was super interesting and we could ask a couple of really awesome questions, but since it took longer than expected, I was late for Math (okay, I might have had one or two more questions for Mr Derksen, and I listened to Lolu perform his spoken word poem - which was so breathtakingly and stunningly amazing - so it was more like half an hour than the five minutes I had intended). We just had a sub and I had a late notice, but I had missed the explanation of our new chapter:
Polynomial Functions.

What did I do? While she was busy explaining examples for the class, I grabbed my textbook and read through the key notes. And then I started on the homework. So I don't really have any notes, but I already finished half of the assigned homework, and it was ... one of the best Math lessons I've had here?
Yeah, Math is pretty boring, unfortunately. We just chew on everything for such a long time!

Andy picked me up and we cancelled my membership in the gym I was going to, because the stress of encountering Marina again would have been too great - illustrated by the fact that I almost had a panic attack (this weird taste on my tongue, body tingeling, heart rate speeding up) when I thought she'd come into the gym (she hadn't).

At home, all of Jenna's friends had already arrived for her birthday party sleep over (one month late, but there was no earlier date), so I dropped my stuff off in my room, played two rounds of Rummy with Bob and then there was Tacos for dinner.

I showered, watched a couple of minutes of the Blackhawks game and was seriously happy:

Explanation: The Blackhawks now have 17 games into the season (more than 1/3) without a regulation loss. They now hold the record for longest point-streak to open an NHL season!
And the LA Kings? They lost twice to the Blackhawks, thus 2/17 of the credit.
In my opinion the best response there is to such news :) (they were the only team to congratulate, though, I think)

And there was also this nice gesture from Marián Hossa, who everybody already feared had a concussion again!

I thought this gesture was just so great ...

On a related note:
The Rockets won 8-3 at Victoria tonight! Go Rockets Go!
Anyway, I don't believe I will get to go to sleep any time soon, so I'll go and tidy up my room!

Have a great weekend!

Julia