Sikhs celebrating 400 years

About a third of my students are Indo-Canadian. Another third are Pacific Islanders. And another third Caucasian and others. This is much more multicultural than Alberta where visible minorities all together make up about 20 percent of an average classroom. It's nice here in this part of the world that for the most part, people do not seem divided by race.

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I feel grouchy. The kids at school are quickly getting past the "honeymoon" phase and starting to be real kids. It's not that I can't appreciate them for the kids they are... but I just felt a little worn out with the madness by the end of the day.

And feeling tired, after school I had to go directly to Human Resources to sign my contract. It took forever to get out of the school parking lot as I battled hundreds of parents and dozens of students with cars to get off the premises, and then navigated through a maze of construction sites to finally end up at HR five minutes late for my appointment after parking in a spot with a sign on it that said it was Reserved for the Chairman of the Board.

At HR, a very haggard looking photograph of me was taken for my employee ID badge and a folder full of forms was pressed into my hands. I thought I might take the forms home to read and sign them, but no. Instead I (and three other new employees) were taken to a little room where we had to fill out the forms under the watchful eye of the Personnel Specialist and also be dragged through a crash course on safety and even given a quiz! (After all my scriptwriting for various safety councils, this part was both ironic and bizarre.) I hadn't written the particular quiz I was taking, and only that could have made this part more ridiculous.

Almost two hours later my stomach was growling and I finally finished filling out the last of the forms and gave them back to the HR lady who looked at them and demanded I do a different one to replace one of them since I'd come from another province... and then finally released me. I bolted to the parking lot, wondering if my car would still be there or if it would have been towed away. Fortunately, it was still there and I raced home to meet with the men who were coming to pick up our defective dryer.

I arrived home about quarter past five, fifteen minutes late for the dryer people, and was relieved to see them still in the driveway. They'd been about to leave and I managed to catch them just in the nick of time. The defective dryer was taken away and the new one reinstalled.

Shawn arrived home minutes later and as I was distracted by his arrival, Puppy D seized his opportunity and stole one of my new shoes and ate its strap.

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Sometimes the boy dogs are so physical that it makes me want to strangle them. Little Puppy is dainty and gentle; she snuggles sweetly and kisses me on the cheek. The Boy Dogs greet me by jumping into my face and making my jaw crash shut. They leap in the air and nip me gleefully, leaving red pinch marks on my skin. They scramble across me and use me as a crash mat. I am covered in scratches from their toenails. Sometimes I want to pin them on the floor and crush them under my (broken) shoes.

It sounds, when I say these things, like I don't love the Boy Dogs and I do. But they're different... they're tiring. They're bouncy almost all the time when they're not asleep and sometimes I just wish they would sit still. Sometimes I still break apart when I get missing the way it was.

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It's only 9:15 but I think I might go to bed now.

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