Saturday, April 02, 2005

i've been negligent in my updating, and it certainly isn't due to a lack of material. okay, here goes:

1) i was working late at school two mondays ago, as is often the case on mondays, and my sweetie came over to school so that we could have dinner together. he had with him a coupon for a restaurant on the waterfront, aqua riva. the coupon seemed to read that, with the purchase of one entrée, a second entrée under $20 would be free.

i raised the concern that, in my cons, black jeans and t-shirt, i wasn't exactly dressed well enough for fine dining. he replied, 'do you think i'm dressed well enough?' as he pulled on his torn jeans and loud top. for some reason, that was enough to convince me to go.

we headed into the fancy restaurant, where the bread is served in these specially made conical metal sculptures, and already i became self-conscious about us being utter riffraff. we were shown to our table, where i looked at the menu to find that only one entrée was priced under $20.

to alleviate the confusion, but also to out us as riffraff, jeff asked the waitress about our coupon. she patiently explained that up to $20 would be taken off the price of the entrée, and brought us some bread in a fancy conical metal basket.

we ordered, and as we waited for our meal, we were trying to have a normal conversation while being starkly aware that we sorely stood out from the rest of the restaurant patrons. at one point, my sweetie was telling me about how he had to take out the garbage because it was "stinky. highly stinky," and just as he uttered those words, our waitress came from behind him to refill our water. i buried my head in my hands, desperately trying to stifle my laughing. the waitress seemed bemused as she walked away.

after we finished our meal, the waitress brought the dessert menus; i wasn't planning on having dessert, since the meal was going to be expensive enough, and the desserts were all about $8 each, but she sort of shamed or bullied us into it. my sweetie decided that he'd go for the cheesecake, and when the waitress came back, she said, "i recommend the tiramisu, the crême brûlée or the berry crumble."

"oh," said my sweetie. "and i'd already settled on the cheesecake."

"i wouldn't recommend the cheesecake. in fact, the cheesecake and the pecan pie are my least favourite choices."

"um, i guess i'll take your second choice, then."

"the crême brûlée? sure."

she smiled and walked away, and i started laughing at our continued riffraffery. "they should just put a sign on our table that says 'riffraff,'" i said, just as, of course, the waitress came from behind me this time, to refill our water. my sweetie sort of lost it and started laughing fairly hard at that point.

we paid for our meal, left the waitress a substantial tip, and eventually bussed home after i concluded upon returning to school that i wasn't conscious enough to do any more work on our tech project.

2) we went to victoria on thursday for a field trip to see trafford publishing (a print-on-demand/vanity publishing company) and abebooks, both of which are making bucketloads of money in an industry that, as we keep being told in management class, is continually losing cash. i went on wednesday night and stayed with HG, whose father and stepmother have a lovely bed-and-breakfast-type home in metchosin, a half and hour's drive from victoria. our history instructor booked a conference room at the quality inn for our thursday lecture. afterwards, a few of us stayed behind, walked around victoria and had dinner together. it was loads of fun, especially since there were several among us who were getting to that delirious stage of exhaustion where everything is funny. it was also kind of bittersweet, 'cause we knew that we'd all be parting ways in a couple of weeks.

3) i am so grateful that christians think jesus died and came back to life; the four-day easter weekend was something i really needed, not that i did much beyond work on my history paper. the thing's a piece of shit, but i don't want to think about it or work on it any further.

4) we more or less finished our tech project document yesterday. i'm pretty happy with it; it's quite comprehensive and its 70-page length really drives home how much work we did on it. now, we just have to plan our presentation. we have a few things in the works. in anticipation that our project would be pretty much impossible to execute, we called ourselves 'sisyphus solutions,' so at our presentation, we're going to start off by pushing a giant papier-mâché boulder up the stairs of the auditorium to the the of rocky. when we get to the top, we're going to hoist the boulder up above our heads.

we also have plans to dress like techies: black jeans hiked up to our nipples, black t-shirts tucked into our pants, socks with sandals and tape on our glasses. it'll be totally hot.

5) so begins the week from hell. two exams, one paper, one big presentation. oy. i haven't even picked a topic for my last tech paper. i'm sort of discouraged by the fact that i didn't do particularly well on my last one. but, when it's all over, we all get to head over to our prof's house in coquitlam and get sloshed on his vineyard's bad wine! i can't wait!

6) i was planning on taking the two weeks off i have in april off -- that is, no work on anything. much walking outside and vegetating. unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be possible. i have a backlog on editing i have to catch up on, a bunch of physics journal stuff i need to take care of, and just a couple of days ago, i heard from my old thesis supervisor completely out of the blue. he wants me to help design an easy newsletter template for the physics department.

if i'm to make any money in freelancing, i have to stop feeling guilty about charging people for work that i do. i don't know why i have that problem.

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