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Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2013

I Believe I Can Fly

I'm so happy and elated that I might just take off!
Today has been a great day - mostly!

Okay, so I'm operating on waaay too little sleep, first off all - I just don't seem to manage to go to bed early, and I'm doing 1.5 to 2 hours of Maths a day. It's not that it's hard, it's just that it's a lot and we have to draw a lot, which takes time.

But anyway, so I woke up, wonderfully sleep-deprived - just enough so that I'm not falling-asleep-standing tired, but hui-I-might-not-be-completely-filled-up-on-sleep tired. I love that feeling, I have to admit.
But I should sneak a couple of hours in at some point, because the longer this goes on, the crankier and more exhausted I get... But at the moment everything's still fine!

First lesson: Spanish. Spanish is still super boring, because we're only doing review stuff, and only a few students had Spanish 10 last semester, so the majority has forgotten almost everything. Seriously. -_-
Second lesson: Entrepreneurship. I hate people I can't rely on. For our project we had to sell things during lunch. And I had gotten cups and straws for $10, while my other two 'co-workers' promised to get lemonade powder so that we could sell lemonade.
The thing is, I wouldn't even have had to do it, because of the ESL meeting, but I said I'll do it anyway. I had come up with the idea, and I had chipped in with the cups and everything.
And they didn't provide their end of the deal.
They got it figured out, but I have been the idiot trying to save everybody's ass often enough, so I just said "find a solution, I'll figure out how to pay my San Francisco trip", because my name had disappeared from the schoolcashonline account that is used to make any kind of payment.
It was apparently just a technical inconvenience, so I finally paid up. (Great thing nr. 1)

I helped them set the table up, and then excused myself to go to ESL.
I figured out that I already knew the new ESL teacher - our old one is on maternity leave - because I talked to her in the ESL room during lunch and she's one of the chaperones for the San Francisco trip! (GTNr 2)
She's super nice and genuinely so, while our old ESL teacher kinda gave me the feeling she wasn't taking us seriously. I hate that (and she strongly favoured the Mexican students and those in her ESL English class).
Third block: Creative Writing, and I used the free writing time to ponder the question of the school (It's like silent reading just that we're writing, and I absolutely love it).
I didn't come to a conclusion, and felt totally lost, so I resolved to asking Mr D for a bit of time after school, because he's brilliant to throw ideas around with.
We did a funny exercise: We got clay (that plastic stuff we used in kindergarten to mould stuff [Knete]) and he closed the blinds and switched off the lights, so that we were sitting in pitch black darkness (the blinds are pretty decent ones, better than usual blinds here, like the Rollos at home), and then we had to mould - a duck!
Mine got a price for general horribleness and was put up as one of the three worst ducks in the whole class, and I was crying because I was laughing so hard as Mr D was making fun of my duck. I really thought it was hilarious - and doesn't that say a lot about my growth here, because a year or two ago I would have burst into tears because I was hurt he would say such a thing? No, but art isn't my strength when I can see and bereft of my most important sense, what do you expect?

Anyway, it was an exercise to show us how our other senses are sharpened when one sense is gone.
Pretty great lesson, imo, and at the end I was like
"Mr D, do you maybe have a few minutes after school, I have a question?"
He: "Sorry, no, I have a meeting after school..."
Me: "Oh, so ... I dunno, should I come by tomorrow during lunch? Or something?"
He: "I could write you a late notice; why don't you just tell me now?"

So I reported my dilemma with the school, explained why I didn't really like the GN where I went to (teachers pretty narrow-minded [at least some of them and especially compared to Canada], teachers making me feel dumb for wanting to know more, year mates talking behind my back about me being a suck-up and a show-off [Maybe I'll make a post about that, too, I thought what he said was pretty great and would be good for me to remember], me being bored, my fear of falling back into my pattern of stressing myself ["When you got stressed, your personality changed visibly" - "Seriously? I never noticed" - "You start obsessing over details, asking questions trying to regain control over the little details where you can have control. You still ask those same questions, but you're way more relaxed"]) and we bounced a few ideas back and forth.
We settled on one option I don't want to detail here, because it's not sure whether it'll work out, but those needing to know will find an e-mail in their inbox in the near future!
So I missed almost half of my Math class, but I was feeling so much better afterwards. I hadn't even realized how much it had been weighing me down!

Math ... was pretty unremarkable, because we actually have already done that stuff; the only problem I am facing there is that we had a totally different approach, but I need to comply by the Ministry standards here.

After school, since I had some time to kill like always, I went to inquire about my final grades before we get our report cards tomorrow (technically today).
Spanish: Final Exam - 98.1%, Final Mark - 100.7%. Best mark in her two classes, I am proud to say! (I love the advantage Latin has given me)
In Japanese I didn't actually get my grade, but my teacher told me I had done "very well" and had an A overall.
I'm looking forward to the report cards tomorrow!


I'm not actually finished with my homework, because there was the most-anticipated and strongest game in the NHL at the moment on, but it's mainly drawing some stuff, and I might use it to lull me to sleep.
It's tedious, repeating all that stuff over and over again, but what can you do?

We had tacos for dinner - absolutely delicious, let me tell you!

So... that was my day.
Below follows only a bit of hockey, because I need to get rid of all these feels!

So, the match-up tonight was Blackhawks vs San Jose Sharks.
The Blackhawks have 7 wins in 9 games, and only two Shootout losses, which don't count as real losses - shootouts (SO), as I detailed in my last post (If I'm not wrong) come after overtime (OT), and as soon as it is tied and has to go to overtime, both teams get one point, and the winning team gets a second one. So the Hawks have had a start of six wins in succession and have had at least one point in every single one of their games. (People also say, they're undefeated in regulation, meaning nobody has yet defeated them during the regular 60 minutes).
The Sharks have a similar record - they started out with 7 wins in 7 games, making just as the Hawks a new franchise record, but then they got a shootout loss and, yesterday, their first regulation loss - which made the Hawks the only team so far to be undefeated in regulation and also giving them the lead in the league.
San Jose was pretty close behind, though - only one point.

I have to admit that I had given up the game after five minutes of play when the Sharks were up 2-0. Coach Q of the Blackhawks called a time-out, gathered his team and gave his goalie a moment to calm down,  and after that, the Hawks were on fire.
Rookie Brandon Saad, who had been pretty good in all the past games after replacing a guy who twisted his knee in his first or second game on the top line with Jonathan Toews (Captain) and Marián Hossa (one of the top goal scorers and second in points, just behind Patrick Kane), finally got his long-awaited first goal, and that was kinda all it took for the Hawks to light it up.
The Sharks scored to make it 1-3 only 38 seconds after Saad's goal though, and I was ready to tear my hair out. 8 seconds later? 2-3. 42 seconds later? 3-3.
With the two best teams in the league who have both had great defensive play, having 6 goals in not even 13 minutes was kinda a miracle for the announcer who went nuts.

Thankfully, the scoring abated after that. Second period? Patrick Kane scores - which was pretty lucky.
They were playing four-on-four because one of the Hawks, Jamal Mayers, had gotten a legal hit but Duncan Keith (Defenseman) wasn't pleased about it and started a fight with the player who had hit Mayer, for which he got 19 (!!) penalty minutes. The perpetrator was thought to have delivered an illegal blow and was ejected from the game until they did video review.
So Kane had the puck, was skating towards the net, when the Sharks stole it from him - only to have the captain himself fish it out from between his feet in a move of total beauty, send it to Kane and see it dumped into the net. The goalie (fun fact: He was the goal tender in the Hawks' net when they won the Stanley Cup in 2010, and one of the opposing players was Patrick Sharp's best friend, before he got traded) never stood a chance.
And later in the third period, the Sharks pulled their goalie in order to get one more skater on the ice, and Kaner recorded an empty-netter (again with an assist from Toews), so the Hawks won it comfortably 5-3 after falling behind 0-2.
Now they are the league leaders without a regulation loss and three points on their next opponent.
I'm really, really happy, although that game was killing me - I was trying to do my Math homework, and I constantly got distracted because it was so nerve-wracking!

And now I seriously need to head to bed.

Love y'all,
Julia

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