Well, just to update quickly from this weekend, I thought I’d post quickly before having to return to making up study guides and final exams as well as a pile of grading which is only going to get bigger come Friday. At any rate! Sunday night while the husband and I were relaxing from the long car trips back and forth, we heard someone banging on our back door, which is really unusual. So we hop up to check it out, and it’s one of our neighbors informing us that the shed behind our house was on fire. Great!! It’s a really old, dilapidated shed which really doesn’t get any use at all and is already sort of falling apart, but that doesn’t mean we should let it remain on fire. So Ian ran in and grabbed the thing that was on fire and tossed it in the alley while I filled up buckets of water to pour over everything. Damage was minimal: some particle board got the corner burnt off (that’s what Ian pulled out) and its proximity to a green plastic wheelbarrow melted off the corner of the latter. I left a retarded message on our landlord’s answering machine about it, and Ian called back to tell them to ignore my retarded message. Ian figures it was a cigarette tossed out of a car window towards our trash cans which missed, horribly, but I think it could have been kids messing around in there since our neighbor said she saw some kids playing in there a couple days ago. Though one of my students says there’s a bit of an arsonist setting fires around town lately. Who knows. It’s out and I’ll keep an eye on it or something.

So that was the rest of Sunday. Yesterday, the French department (i.e., Keri and me) had a pitch-in French dinner which turned out really well. We had a lot of students who brought a pretty good variety of dishes. It was mostly cheese and bread, as usual, but we had a few students bring desserts like cream puffs and one student even brought poutine. Ian made mini-quiches which were good, and I made little flowers to stick in them using barbecue skewers and scrap paper. We used them as a means of distinguishing between the meated and meatless versions. It was fun. Ian and I returned home exhausted, however, so we just sat around for most of the evening and both retired early.

So far, I’ve been in the office since eight and have typed up one study guide, posted study guides and worksheets to two of my classes’ websites and then posted homework on the other two. I’m going to finish typing up the study guide for my 201 class today, I hope, and I’ll probably come up with something for 202. I’m also typing up instructions and worksheets for my latest idea: French Mad Libs that the students create themselves. It’s quite an undertaking, but I hope everyone enjoys and gets a good review of grammar and parts of speech out of it as well as vocabulary. We’ll see how it turns out at the end of the week when they trade and try it out. But before that, I’ve got SIRS (student evaluations) they’ve got to do as well as papers to hand back and blah blah blah, I’m way too busy this week, but at least it’s only one more week and one more day. I’m getting there. I’ll just crochet a little extra in the evenings to help relax. It’s a fun hobby. So now, off to the worksheets! I’m gonna need some arthritis medicine later…