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December, 2006

  1. Have yourself a merry little Christmas…

    December 24, 2006 by Louise

    Today was a beautiful day. Our whole little family got together and celebrated Christmas a day early. My mother looked beautiful. My sister and her kids (plus my nephew’s girlfriend) were on time and doing great. My brother, sister-in-law, and their two boys had finally gotten enough sleep (nephews had been sick all week so hardly anyone had been sleeping at that house) and were in a great mood. My dad was in fine form. Oh, and Rob and I were there, too.
    We opened gifts, ate (wayyyy too) much, played, coloured, shared stories. It was just a beautiful day.
    (more…)

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  2. … For the rest of us

    December 23, 2006 by Louise

    According to Those In The Know ™, today is officially Festivus. So uhm… happy Festivus, all of you. I hope your airing of grievances and feats of strength went well.

    I’m on Christmas Vacation. Two weeks of not waking up at 5:30 am, going to bed at a time later than 8 pm, and uhm… watching TV and eating lots of foods and jumping around like a crazy lady (I have very bizarre ideas about what to do with my free time, apparently). Rob and I finally managed to put our tree up today; we got our outdoor lights up yesterday. We’ll actually decorate the tree tomorrow. Procrastinators? Naw.

    We’re going to my parents’ tomorrow for an early Christmas dinner; my brother and his kids couldn’t make it on the actual day, so we’re having it a bit early. On Monday, Rob and I will wake up and have our Christmas, and he is going to be working at 5 that day. All I can say to that is “The ducats. The DUCATS!”… otherwise I’d be forcing him to call in dead.

    All the gifts are wrapped, all the relatives have been phoned, etc. etc. etc. It’s all good. I’m tired right now though, and thus ends this post. Have a good Christmas, those of you who celebrate.

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  3. In case you were wondering…

    December 18, 2006 by Louise

    Yes, make sure to try and look your best during your period, ladies. And no swing dancing!

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  4. My Buddy and Me

    December 16, 2006 by Louise

    I’m still feeling rotten, with my backache and all, and still feeling very sad that Rob’s parents can’t visit for Christmas.
    But, I am still a lucky girl. I’m relatively healthy, not living in a box (or a basement), and I get to know that every day for the rest of my life I will wake up knowing that my best friend is right there beside me.
    How fantastic is that?

    bestfriends2

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  5. Boo!

    December 14, 2006 by Louise

    I do try to be a bit upbeat here at jeezlouise (yeah, no I don’t. I just vent about what’s going on), but today I’m not going to. Because today? Utterly 100% sucks.

    1) My back is sore (again!) and I can barely walk. Thus I’m home from school today, which I don’t love.

    2) Rob’s mother got hurt at work yesterday, and can’t travel. Yeah. They were supposed to fly in tomorrow. Now, we aren’t going to see them over the holidays, and Rob was so excited to have Christmas with his family, for the first time in three years. I was excited, too. Huge disappointment. Also there’s the part where we had bought their tickets as their gift, and now their gift is worthless to them.

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  6. The “real” post

    December 11, 2006 by Louise

    I’m considering it to still be Sunday, even though it is 12:13 am. I haven’t slept yet, so there we have it. This will be uber-long and by the end you will be yelling “OKAY SO WHY NOT JUST SAY YOU HAD AN OKAY WEEK AND THEN SHUT UP ABOUT IT WOMAN!”

    A recap of my week:

    Monday: Snowstorm. There was still school though. See, it wasn’t REALLY a snowstorm, because the weather station in the province’s capital wasn’t having a snowstorm, and the place where our school board is was having a rainstorm, and everyone KNOWS that if it’s not storming there it’s utterly impossible for it to be storming anywhere else in the province (although by some freakish heathen voodoo, the area where I teach got over 20 cm. of snow, plus high winds). Took us an hour and 45 min. to get to school, nearly 2 and a half to get home. Luckily I wasn’t driving because I’d have just gone Whitney Houston Batshit Crazy ™. I’m very good at driving in snow, but very bad at being patient with other drivers who are being stupid. So I just sat in the backseat and worked (and deep inside got all impatient with other drivers who were being stupid).

    Tuesday: Was supposed to get my evaluation back from my principal, but she wasn’t able to do it that day, and since it had been over a week since she’d been in to observe I was starting to freak out. WAITING FOR A WEEK! This was also the day when Rob started displaying symptoms of the Horrible Flu That Is Invading Canada. I sprayed him with Lysol and locked him in the basement.

    Wednesday: Finally got a chance to sit down and hear my review. Turns out I’m a good teacher. Seriously. She spent half an hour saying nice things about me, my teaching style, etc. A couple of little tweaks to make (I need to clean off my desk. Um. Yeah. I know it) but the kids really love me and they’re learning and they’re having fun and they’re really lucky to have me at their school … but.
    Yeah, there’s always a but, isn’t there?
    She doesn’t like the way I dress. Too casual. I have an image to project.
    Why is it I’m focusing on that? She had SO many good things to say, and then kapow, one little fifteen-second part of the conversation and for the rest of the day (okay, week) I went around feeling as though I look like a shlub (I probably do) and everyone thinks I’m ugly. Then of course I get all defensive, with the “Look I don’t have MONEY to spend on clothes because if you want to buy “professional” fat-lady clothes it’s like, seventy bucks for a dress shirt. Ninety for a pair of pants. That’s usually my budget for an entire SEASON’S worth of clothes”. and “SURE everyone else has nice clothes– they also live with their parents and don’t pay rent” and just really bitter ‘poor me’ thoughts. NONE OF WHICH I ACTUALLY SAID OUT LOUD what do you think I’m stupid? Don’t answer that.
    A friend of mine pointed out that Old Navy has a career section with nice (and not expensive) plus size careerwear and I figured out that I could buy like, fourteen outfits for $300, which isn’t bad AT ALL. Only problem is that the Old Navy in PEI doesn’t have a plus size section, and you can’t shop online with them from Canada. Dorks.

    Still going to the gym. Haven’t lost a pound. But yeah, it’s only been two weeks. ENOUGH ABOUT MY FATNESS.

    Oh also at some point on this day I let Rob out of the basement. Mostly because I was sick of hearing his pathetic womanly cries from down there “oooooh, I don’t have a bed oooooooh it’s cold down here” blah blah blah. Suck it up, Princess.

    Thursday: Rob stayed home this day because that flu? Was a million times worse than it had even been the day before. On the way in to work I got to nap in the backseat because I wasn’t driving (I only drove on Wednesday this week! Woo! But that means I drive two days this coming week. Boo). I suppose it’s silly to nap on the way to work but I love sleep and I just can’t get enough of it. Plus I get up at 5:30 in the morning and that is just not right.
    Anyway. There I was napping in the backseat when we swerved a little, and I heard and felt this horrific BANG. That of course woke me up and I asked in rather… less-than-genteel terms what had just happened.
    A huge chunk of snow had come off the mudflap of the truck in front of us (they think– they didn’t see that happening but there was a truck in front of us and then it went around a curve and then we went around a curve and then there was this huge chunk of dirty black snow crap flying towards the car) and the driver’s choice was to put the car into the ditch or hit the snow thingie. Thinking that it was just snow, after swerving the tiniest bit to see if maybe she could get around it, the driver decided to just hit the thing. And discovered that it was solid ice. She stopped the car, we all got out to look, and there was a huge dent in her front bumper but nothing else that we could see. Now she’d just bought the car back in May and it was a brand new 2006 so this was pretty upsetting. We drove on for the next two minutes and got to somewhere where the car could be put up on a hoist. It had driven her entire radiator back into the engine. Wrecked all the plastic underneath. Broken up the air conditioner. She heard on Friday that it was going to cost her upwards of $2000 to get everything fixed. Also if the chunk of ice had hit the car anywhere other than where it had, it would have been much worse, the airbags would have deployed, and we’d all be in the hospital.
    So yay for not dying!

    Friday: When I got home from work I brought my stuff in, then realized I had forgotten something in the car. Since I hadn’t locked the car, I didn’t bring my keys with me to go get the thing. Then, as soon as I pulled the door shut behind me realized I had just locked myself out of the house. No car keys, no house key. I did, luckily, have an extra sweatshirt in the car and two quarters. I walked to the nearest place with a payphone (Friday was another horrible freezing snowy day) which will count as my exercise since the gym closed at 4 pm anyway for some reason that day and did I mention that it was STUPID AND COLD out?
    Phoned my mom, because they have an extra key to our house, who gave me my dad’s cellphone number (MY DAD HAS A CELLPHONE NOW! HELLO, 21st CENTURY? MY DAD IS MISTER ROBOTO!) and I called him and he came and rescued me. All in all it only took an hour and I was back in my nice warm house.

    Saturday and Sunday were spent napping and being lazy. Well except for Saturday. Because Saturday I tortured Rob by looking for a Christmas Card Holder and we both got increasingly more and more irritable because store after store, we weren’t finding one. Actually I HAD found one, at the first store, but then I went to the washroom. A word of advice: Never go to the washroom if you want to actually buy your damn card holder, people. Cashiers will LIE, and you will end up without one.

    Rob was at the checkout, and the cashier said to him “Oh, there’s no price tag on this one and it was the last one so if you want I could call Head Office but that will probably take, like, ten minutes.(PLUS I AM A HUGE LIAR)” so he said nevermind and didn’t buy it. He hadn’t been with me when I found it. If he had, he would have seen the nine thousand other exact-same Christmas Card Holders on the shelf. I only found out about the non-purchase of the Christmas Card Holder once we were in the car and even though I KNEW that he just wanted to get home I was all “Well damnit I am getting a damn card holder if it’s the last damn thing I do” so I swerved into the next mall’s parking lot and proceeded to spend the next three hours dragging him through every store in the damn place, looking for a goddamn card holder. Neither of us was pleased . We even argued with each other inside our own minds. Then later when the horror of the mall was over (we didn’t get the card holder) we told each other what we’d been thinking and laughed at our pathetic passive-aggressive fighting style. Truth is that I’m just too lazy to really fight about anything.
    Then today we went back to the same store because yesterday we forgot to buy batteries and SOS pads and windshield washer fluid and there they were, all nine thousand of them. Waiting. For me to buy one. And I did. Unfortunately the Cashier Liar wasn’t there or I would have … um… probably not said anything. But I’d have THOUGHT the hell out of it!

    I would’ve!

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  7. Sunday

    December 10, 2006 by Louise

    I will write a “real” post later today, I promise (uhm, not that I think there’s anyone at all out there actually waiting for me to post or anything). Just wanted to put this up. If you can’t see the video uhm… I don’t know what to tell you.

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  8. A little Saturday Strange

    December 9, 2006 by Louise

    WhazupitEITHERofthem???

    And this one is for Scrubby:

    I am her puppet.

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  9. World AIDS day

    December 3, 2006 by Louise

    World AIDS day was this past week. I know I didn’t blog about it on THE DAY, but I am now.

    I grew up in a time when, at first, you didn’t know HOW you could get AIDS– Ryan White was kicked out of school, because people thought that if he looked at them, they’d be infected. Panic everywhere. At my Catholic school, the nuns were telling us to not drink out of the water fountains without wiping them off first, because “you never knew”. Eventually we learned the truth and, though people were still concerned about the disease, they knew what precautions should be taken. All through high school, you could ask any of my classmates how to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS and they would rattle off at least ten answers. We knew that no sex was safe sex, but that there were safer forms of sexual contact. We knew about condoms, dental dams (dental dams! Remember those?) mutual masturbation, etc. etc. etc. We all saw the horrible torment Dwayne The Bully went through on Degrassi, and how Joey became his only friend once everyone else found out. We watched Life Goes On, and halfway fell in love with Becca’s dying boyfriend. Hell, we even watched that TV movie with Molly Ringwald in it. We knew what was going on… or we thought we did.

    It just seems as though, as progress was made in the prevention and treatment of AIDS, people started relaxing. Sure, maybe we don’t all need to go around with rubber gloves and masks on… but it’s as though people are forgetting that the disease is out there.

    Where I live, even the thought of HIV/AIDS seems like a far-off distant possibility… you don’t know anyone with it, or at least, you don’t think you do. Working with teenagers, I realize that even though we have known about this killer for over 20 years, many kids today are just not well enough informed. According to CANFAR, nearly 50% of North American grade 9 students wrongly believe that there is a cure for AIDS, if it’s treated early enough. Worse than that, 20% of ADULTS believe the same thing. I teach in a junior high. I’ve taught in high school. Most of these kids think that oral sex isn’t really sex, and that you can’t catch anything unless you have full-on penetrative sex (and that wearing a condom will completely protect you from any STD 100% of the time).

    I actually heard someone, an adult, say on TV the other day, “AIDS isn’t as big a problem as it used to be. Why are we still talking about it?”

    Here’s why.

    Every six seconds, someone in the world is infected with HIV.
    40 million people are living with HIV /AIDS right now. Approximately 2.2 million of these are children, under the age of 15.
    More than 50% of new HIV infections occur among adolescents and young adults below the age of 25.
    25 million people have died of AIDS since the discovery of the disease;
    3.1 million people died of AIDS-related complications in 2005 alone.
    5 million people were infected with HIV in 2005.
    25% of all people who are infected with HIV are completely unaware that they have it.

    It’s not going away. There is no cure. We still need to do something.

    Inspired by the lovely Karen’s post about World AIDS day, I am hoping to donate 1 shiny Canadian dollar to CANFAR for every comment left here between now and 11:59 pm (locally) Wednesday, Dec. 6th, 2006. Like Karen, I’d love to know where you’re from, so leave your name (make up a name, I don’t care), your city, your country. And go ahead, make me poor.

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