Ridiculously Busy

Life in the Barton-Rotteau household has been sped up and we don't like it.
It has been a strange adjustment to Andrew working all day as well as my summer hours which are also all day. We end up doing laundry and grocery shopping at weird times (11 pm or 6am). The joy of having Saturdays off also means a bit of pressure to "do" something with those precious 7 Saturdays. So last weekend I had my first Saturday off and decided to go visit Heather in Kitchener which I thought would be a simple hop on the bus and go to Kitchener trek. Unfortunately Greyhound has decided that going to downtown Kitchener to the bus station which is located conveniently beside the train station is no longer a priority. They have decided to build a new terminal out at Sportsworld which is on the outskirts of the city near the 401. So when trying to use their website and putting in that you want to go from Toronto Downtown to Kitchener Charles St (Downtown) It sent back an error. Not a message that says "we are no longer servicing downtown"...no...just a complete error page. So I send an e-mail to Greyhound and say that I'm having difficulty and they send back, "sorry to hear you are having difficulty, better luck next time"!! Yes I should have kept the message but I just deleted lest it make me angry enough to hurt the computer. So I send an e-mail to Heather and she apprises me that Greyhound is no really going downtown that much but it is no trouble to pick me up at Yorkdale mall in the north of Toronto near the 401. So we have a plan. Then I find out that our friend Lori who lives in Saskatchewan will be in Ontario that weekend with her 8 month old daughter. So we make arrangements to meet.

For the first 2 weeks of summer I had Friday afternoons off...I don't know how it happened but it did and I wasn't questioning it. The school has since then managed to find me a nice 2-4 pm class on Fridays to put an end to any notion of afternoon off. But last Friday I was done at 1;30 and I met Heather up at Yorkdale and we went to Kitchener to pick up Riley, Heather's 12 year old who has skipped right over pre-teen into teen. We decided to go the the Mongolian Grill, which I have heard stories of from Andrew and his friends but I had never been. It is like a stir fry buffet. There are all the ingredients laid out on a buffet along with about 20 different stir-fry sauces and every spice and hot sauce imaginable. You fill up a bowl and then go to a circular counter that surrounds a 4 foot wide shallow wok with a hole in the middle. the surface is basically flat and the cooks take your bowl of food and cook it for you stirring everything with large wooden sticks. At anyone time there could be up to 15 people's meals being cooked but kept separate from each other. They have a slick system that allows them to know whose meal is whose and you get back a steaming stir fry to eat with rice or tortillas that are on your table. It was really delicious and fun to try new things and combinations. I usually don't enjoy buffets because i feel like I don't eat enough to make it worthwhile but I managed to eat 3 bowls of stir fry so I think I did respectably. (Andrew says that Brad's record is 12 bowls). We went back to Heather's house, watched a movie and had a good visit.

The next morning Lori, Her husband Darryl and their baby Sarah Grace came to visit. We had a good catch up and played with the baby. Heather had to go to work that afternoon so I had decided to go back to Toronto and try to impose some order on my life. So Lori and Darryl and I went out for lunch and then they would drop me off at the new bus depot. Well we found a restaurant near where there should be a depot but were only a couple of bus shelters beside a big construction site. We went into a restaurant and checked and were informed that yes that was where the Greyhound was leaving these days. After lunch Lori and family had to go meet her parents so I assured them that I could manage from there and walked over to the bus shelters where there was a note that said the change in Depot would happen next week and a schedule. A schedule for going From Toronto To Kitchener BUT nothing about when the buses left Kitchener to go back to Toronto. Apparently once one gets to Kitchener there is no reason to leave. So I phoned Andrew and had him look up when the next bus departed. It 2:00 at this point and the next bus departed at 2:50. So a 50 minute wait isn't too bad and I had plenty of student's essays to correct and grade to keep my occupied. Things went swimmingly for 40 minutes while I sat quietly and covered essay with green pen corrections. Then the dark clouds started to appear and a rumble in the distance. 5 minutes before the bus was due the sky opened up and dumped water. Now I'm in a bus shelter , yes but a 3 sided one and the wind was driving the rain into the shelter. I opened my umbrella a stood up with my bags on the bench in the hope that they would stay dryish. There was really no other alternative because if I went back to the restaurant on the other side of a large parking lot I would surely miss the bus. So by the time the bus arrived I was soaked from the waist down. I paid the driver cash and squished down the aisle to the back. Happy to be finally on my way and to have not been hit with
lightning in the process. On our way the bus had to stop periodically because the windshield wipers were not working properly...not something you want to have happen while on a bus hurtling down the 401. Eventually I made it home. On Sunday Andrew and I went to see Hellboy which was delightful and you almost wanted the movie to pause so you could get a better look at the imaginative creatures.

Monday mornings I don't teach but have paperwork to do and organizational stuff but I was phoned in to fill in for a teach who had hurt herself over the weekend. My favorite... walking into a novel class with a bunch of kids you have never met and try to talk about a book you haven't read. The rest of the week just flies by and here we are back at the weekend. Yesterday I repotted plants because all of my inside tropicals were rootbound and the things I planted on the patio were experiencing various degrees of success. So I got rid of the sick and dying and fertilized the strong but as yet not blooming. I hope to have flowers across the balcony by August. Today we were planning to see Batman at the IMAX theater but it is pouring rain and I think the movie theaters will be packed so I may veto that idea in favor of watching DVDs in the quiet of our home where the coke doesn't cost $3.25 and Popcorn isn't $5.50 (for Small sizes!)

Next weekend we have a family get-together for Andrew's Sister Robyn and Al in Niagara Falls. Then we are going to Point Clark for the long weekend to celebrate my birthday.

On another note, Andrew's new job is going really well and he enjoys both the work and the people he is working with. He spends most of his days going through the Ministry of Education documents and finding loopholes and exploiting them or creating documents for his school that incorporates Ministry policies so when the inspection comes they are doing everything up to code, which he seems to enjoy so all is good there.

I write again when we next stop for a breather

M.