Corner of Bourbon & Division

I thought I would be clever and check out my LJ flist from the airport. I can haz wireless, after all.

Sadly, the airport appears to have the same dim view of my LJ flist as my work does, and keeps re-directing me back to their homepage. Hosers.

Anyway, My flight is not canceled or delayed, which is good news. I was forced this morning to walk further than I would have wanted to catch the shuttle to the airport, as it was not stopping at the hotel nearest me, the way it usually does. Wacky schedule. Anyway, Halifax is awash in slush this morning, which I found out in my 20-minute walk to the Lord Nelson hotel. At least it was a 20-minute walk, which was nice, and I was not assailed by the howling winds that I experienced last year.

All in all, this has been a really good visit, and I am sad to be leaving. It's always hard leaving joane and shenlo behind. We spent all of yesterday together with rowen26, too, which was a lt of fun. I'm sorry it's all over, but life must go on.

Tonight I have to go back to my ASL class. I'm tired and don't feel like it, and I shudder to think of how confused I'll be after missing last week, but there are only three classes left, and so I don't want to miss it again. I may re-take the introductory level course in the fall: I really don't feel as though I've mastered this at all, and I don't want to compound the problem by advancing to the next level. I'll discuss it with my teacher if I get the chance.

I also really, really don't feel like going back to work. I still have four days off, then I start with a full seven-day shift on Saturday morning. Bleargh. What I would much rather have is about a month's worth of vacation time. I think that would be ample time to recover from the beating I've taken in overtime over the last year. Sadly, I only get nine days, so I guess it'll have to do.

Ah well. I have a cup of Tim Horton's coffee, a muffin, and a good book, as well as my knitting. Things could be a whole lot worse, really. :)

This is a backdated entry. No idea if it'll show up. Normally I don't bother with this feature, but since we're switching months I'm trying to keep things in order.

Anyway, yesterday was exhausting, if a lot of fun. I went to the Carnaval des Neiges with mellybean71 and sultrysong, accompanied by Th'Boy (their son) and Th'Teen (their niece, currently residing with them). It was a very cold, very sunny day. The kind that makes walking outside both a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of unpleasant if you're not wearing the right kind of gear.

I wore my rainbow hat and mittens, and thus served as a locator beacon for anyone who got separated from the group.

We mostly walked around, while Th'Boy hurled himself at various snowbanks with furious abandon, climbed natural and man-made obstacles, and ate his weight in sugar and sundry other things. We met up with some Cub leaders (or Scout leaders? I forget which kind) who plied us with marshmallows roasting in a fire.

There were people in REALLY scary costumes: a giant polar bear whose head kept threatening to fall off, smaller brown bears wearing purple and fuschia waistcoats and tu-tus with SPANGLES, and other vaguely generic-but-scary-looking elf things. I'm not sure who thought those costumes were a good plan, but what you do?

We stopped briefly for hot dogs, and I had some very tasty hot chocolate and the most delicious chocolate swirly bun EVER. It was piping hot and melty, and I just about died right on the spot from the sheer heavenliness.

Thoroughly frozen, we spent the last hour and a half of our visit at the Biosphere, to which I'd never been before. It's been modernized, and has some really cool activities for kids. I was very glad that it was free for the duration of the carnival, because I'm quite sure I wouldn't want to spend $10 on it: just not worth it. The exhibit and activities can be made to last 45 minutes or so (and are very obviously geared toward children and young teens), but the other 45 minutes were spent waiting in line so the kids could have their photos taken in a kayak in front of the picture of an iceberg. sultrysong and I had a coffee and chatted at a nearby table while we wait, which was really nice, as we hadn't had a chance to just sit and chat in a really long time.

Nonetheless, the experience was educational. I learned some new things about icebergs and about the Jacques Cartier bridge, and there was a cool fish tank (several cool fish tanks, actually) with an eel in it. The poor eel was looking pretty dejected, but it was still cool.

Once everyone was drooping with fatigue we walked back to the car (there were a few detours while we stopped again to chat with the Cub leaders, then some of us took a wrong turn back to the car) and mellybean71 stayed at my place for coffee, popcorn, and some ASL practice in anticipation of my test on Monday.

And that was my Saturday! It's always nice to have an entire day off to just hang out with friends. It was a good time.

My ASL class continues to be both interesting and really frustrating. Some of the signs are reasonably intuitive, which is good, but for the most part it's a case of "you just have to know it," which would be great if there were some sort of vocabulary list I could study. Unfortunately, the course doesn't appear structured that way: it's heavily memory-based, which means yours truly with her brain and short-term memory like cottage cheese is SOL.

I have come to a tentative agreement with a couple of the girls in my class to get together (perhaps this coming Sunday) and practice our signing. After today's practice quiz I have decided that I definitely need to spend more time doing the fingerspelling drills on aslpro.com so that I can get used to seeing the signs from the other side. I'm going to try to spend at least 15 minutes a day doing drills, so that I won't be caught unprepared. Today it took me several tried before I got the hang of it. If it had been a real quiz, I only would have had 70%.

I am having trouble with the lack of formal structure to the classes. I can appreciate how the teacher is working, but the lack of reference material is really stressful to me. I think that once I get the basics mastered, I may develop more confidence. Right now my memory is my own worst enemy.

The other disadvantage for me is that the whole class is silent, and uses gestures only to communicate. This is fun and challenging, but I am never entirely sure if I've understood the context of the sign exactly. I'm constantly wondering if the sign she's showing us is a noun or a verb, because contextually it might be both (Is she saying "review" or "to review?"). Hopefully this too will resolve itself in time.