The last few weeks have seen a few interesting things happen around our place. We heard from Parker that he got several awards at the award ceremony at school. These are the academic awards from grade 9 that they present in the fall. Parker was awarded Honour roll, best mark in Geography, and best mark in French! Quite a good performance overall.
Now, if only he could have remembered to go the the awards ceremony...!
This is Parker having his typical-sized breakfast at 12:30 (also a typical time to rise on a weekend). After eating a plain piece of bread, he made 2 sandwiches with lots of meat (chicken and roast beef), 2 puddings (he had 4, but we said they were for later), a large bowl of cereal (refilled after), two juice boxes, and a huge glass of milk.
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| He is now so tall that he has to bend down to reach the table... |
Adam had some good news, too. After years of telling him that he needed to get out there to search for a good job, and that one wouldn't just land in his lap... you guessed it! A job just landed in his lap. He got an email out of the blue from the engineering company (where his cousin's husband works, and where he went to Take Your Kids to Work day in grade 9) asking if he was still looking for work. He said yes, and now has a full time permanent position working as an assembly technician at the company called 9Point8 (a division of Applied Kinetics). 9Point8 is the manufacturing division that currently makes specialized bicycle parts (particularly a special seat post). He sort of does anything that they need him to do, including CAD, machining, assembling, etc. Fits exactly what he likes doing, with a group of equally techie guys. He has now shelved his plans to go back to college in September, and has cancelled the math course at Mohawk that he was to start last week - the idea was to get ahead in math, then hopefully get credit for the course in the fall. Adam decided to keep his part time job at the No Frills grocery store (at which he had been getting almost full time hours) to keep himself busy. All this after last week getting his keys for the grocery store so he could close the store in lieu of a manager.
Here is Adam putting up the Christmas lights at our place and his grandmother's place. At least it was reasonably warm this year for this task.
Maddy didn't have any good news for us when we arrived home from our weekly Tai Chi class on Tuesday night. She decided that empty chocolate wrappers in the garbage (left over from Halloween) were too much of a temptation. She spread them over several rooms just to make sure she found all the good bits to eat. It is too bad that the boys are usually more hungry than she is... there was probably nothing edible in the bag!
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| Oops. |
Her is Maddy modelling her new sweater. It is actually part of a 2 piece outfit, with a waterproof shell that goes over top. She rarely gets new clothes (she hates wearing clothes), but she had grown out of her older jackets. When we put anything on her like a sweater, she stands perfectly still like she is a statue. She has to be physically pushed to get her moving!
I got some news at work from the new Assistant Dean. She dropped by to confirm with me that I will indeed be teaching 2 courses in January. The courses are actually one course, but it is divided into 3 sections of about 70 students each, with different topics in Cell Biology covered in each section. The course was previously taught with a faculty member for each section. This year I am doing 2 sections on my own (and I am not faculty). The third section is being done by 5 faculty members, presumably because it is so much work!
Yesterday, Wendy and I went for our 5th Bruce Trail hike with our friends Terry and Theresa. We drove down to the Thorold/Niagara area (about a 55 min drive) and arrived to find this sign.
There was a very nice lady sitting in her car at the parking lot (she was a provincial officer), and she told us that the whole area was off limits unless we wanted to get impaled by an arrow. We tried to find another location to do a hike, but most of the areas we could choose were also off limits. Neither of us had brought the entire Bruce Trail Map book since the next 2 hikes were on one page, so we couldn't get the details of the locations for the later hikes to start somewhere else. Instead, we decided to take a selfie of our group while we thought of options. The provincial officer, probably bored out of her skull sitting in a car all day, kindly took the picture for us!
Theresa and Terry had what we considered was an inspired idea of what to do. If you can't go hiking 10 km, what else could you do but...
.... go shopping!!!!
And shopping, we did. There was an Antique Market that we had seen next to the highway every time we had traveled this way for hiking. So, off we went to spend a considerable amount of time at the Prudhomme's Antique Market. Lots of very interesting stuff to be dug through, and many great bargains.
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