It has not been a Good Day.
Oct. 10th, 2004 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
framlingemFirst, the other bloody fish bloody up and died on me.
Then I had stomach cramps. I figured I'd probably better just try a glass of water rather than breakfast... apparently water was a bad idea.
Who throws up water when they've been perfectly healthy until shortly before hand? Me, apparently. I hadn't even chugged a pint of the stuff like I usually do (I get my eight glasses... four glasses at a time *g*). Nope. Delicate little, ladylike sips. It took me fifteen minutes to drink about a hundred mLs. Five minutes later, I'd estimate there was less liquid in me than there was before I had a drink. Not a good sign.
Food was out of the question, so I did a meme to give my stomach time to settle down, then parked myself on the couch with another glass of water (room temperature, guaranteed to be as non-irritating as possible), and drank it over the course of an hour. I swear that glass lost more to evaporation than it did to me. I drank another glass of water over the next hour, then decided to try diluted fruit juice - I was starting to get shaky, which is a Bad Sign.
It's been diluted fruit juice all day, and I had a sweet potato all picked out for supper and everything. I was really, really looking forward to that.
Hope I get better fast. I was going to order myself a pizza for Thanksgiving, but pizza may not be the best idea.
Only good part of today was interviewing Mum about gardening. See, my term paper in my Cultural Geography class is to either make a model of a non-Imperial Chinese city (cool, but I wouldn't know where to start, really.), or use gardens which are typical of two different places as a cultural landscape and analyse them in terms of what they say about the society (and evolution thereof) of that particular culture. Nick gave us a list of different types of garden, and I plan to contrast English with either Imperial Chinese (lots of bridges, water features, statues hidden in trees, large rocks) or Buddhist Japanese (large rocks, little rocks, littler rocks, all very carefully arranged and raked, with bonsai trees in pots). English and Japanese would be interesting, because while they look very different, there are actually a lot of underlying similarities to them (labour-intensive - but indicating different things! -, a very deliberate planning stage - for different reasons! - , extremely organised). On the other hand, I very much like Chinese style gardens, and have actually walked in a Forbidden City's garden (where some Chinese tourists wanted my friend and me to be in their pictures with them, because they'd never seen a westerner before - my friend is very tall, blonde, and blue-eyed).
At any rate, I learned a lot about English gardens that I didn't know already, and it turns out that one of Mum's college friends is now a professional horticulturalist with her own English 'country' garden (not, apparently, to be confused with an estate garden, a 'house' garden, or a rockery garden), and Mum has given me her email address so I can ask if I can ask her some questions. I also have a cousin Andrew who is a groundskeeper for an estate in Scotland, but have decided not to ask him questions as, while he knows a lot about gardening and is excellent at his job, he is not very good at explaining and gets embarrassed easily while talking, and does not write very well either and gets embarrassed about that. Very nice person, though, from what I've seen. (I haven't spoken with him very often. I was fifteen the last time I was in Scotland.)
Anyhoo... it's going to be a fun paper. Just from speaking with Mum I've got all sorts of theories about class structure, inter-nobility competition (neener neener, I've got more kinds of roses than you! Oh yeah? Well, I created a _new_ species of rose! Beat that!... as Mum put it, it's not so much keeping up with the Joneses as it is keeping up with the Smythe-Joneses.), Imperialism and Colonialism (it is very fashionable for the wealthier merchant class and nobility to have peacocks from India, golden pheasants from China, and all sorts of exotic fruit trees in the greenhouses), and patience. Fascinating.
Plus it takes one's mind off of the pain in one's gut.
Then I had stomach cramps. I figured I'd probably better just try a glass of water rather than breakfast... apparently water was a bad idea.
Who throws up water when they've been perfectly healthy until shortly before hand? Me, apparently. I hadn't even chugged a pint of the stuff like I usually do (I get my eight glasses... four glasses at a time *g*). Nope. Delicate little, ladylike sips. It took me fifteen minutes to drink about a hundred mLs. Five minutes later, I'd estimate there was less liquid in me than there was before I had a drink. Not a good sign.
Food was out of the question, so I did a meme to give my stomach time to settle down, then parked myself on the couch with another glass of water (room temperature, guaranteed to be as non-irritating as possible), and drank it over the course of an hour. I swear that glass lost more to evaporation than it did to me. I drank another glass of water over the next hour, then decided to try diluted fruit juice - I was starting to get shaky, which is a Bad Sign.
It's been diluted fruit juice all day, and I had a sweet potato all picked out for supper and everything. I was really, really looking forward to that.
Hope I get better fast. I was going to order myself a pizza for Thanksgiving, but pizza may not be the best idea.
Only good part of today was interviewing Mum about gardening. See, my term paper in my Cultural Geography class is to either make a model of a non-Imperial Chinese city (cool, but I wouldn't know where to start, really.), or use gardens which are typical of two different places as a cultural landscape and analyse them in terms of what they say about the society (and evolution thereof) of that particular culture. Nick gave us a list of different types of garden, and I plan to contrast English with either Imperial Chinese (lots of bridges, water features, statues hidden in trees, large rocks) or Buddhist Japanese (large rocks, little rocks, littler rocks, all very carefully arranged and raked, with bonsai trees in pots). English and Japanese would be interesting, because while they look very different, there are actually a lot of underlying similarities to them (labour-intensive - but indicating different things! -, a very deliberate planning stage - for different reasons! - , extremely organised). On the other hand, I very much like Chinese style gardens, and have actually walked in a Forbidden City's garden (where some Chinese tourists wanted my friend and me to be in their pictures with them, because they'd never seen a westerner before - my friend is very tall, blonde, and blue-eyed).
At any rate, I learned a lot about English gardens that I didn't know already, and it turns out that one of Mum's college friends is now a professional horticulturalist with her own English 'country' garden (not, apparently, to be confused with an estate garden, a 'house' garden, or a rockery garden), and Mum has given me her email address so I can ask if I can ask her some questions. I also have a cousin Andrew who is a groundskeeper for an estate in Scotland, but have decided not to ask him questions as, while he knows a lot about gardening and is excellent at his job, he is not very good at explaining and gets embarrassed easily while talking, and does not write very well either and gets embarrassed about that. Very nice person, though, from what I've seen. (I haven't spoken with him very often. I was fifteen the last time I was in Scotland.)
Anyhoo... it's going to be a fun paper. Just from speaking with Mum I've got all sorts of theories about class structure, inter-nobility competition (neener neener, I've got more kinds of roses than you! Oh yeah? Well, I created a _new_ species of rose! Beat that!... as Mum put it, it's not so much keeping up with the Joneses as it is keeping up with the Smythe-Joneses.), Imperialism and Colonialism (it is very fashionable for the wealthier merchant class and nobility to have peacocks from India, golden pheasants from China, and all sorts of exotic fruit trees in the greenhouses), and patience. Fascinating.
Plus it takes one's mind off of the pain in one's gut.
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speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-10 07:56 pm (UTC)- MD
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-10 08:09 pm (UTC)Actually, I think you need to live in Canada for three years, be able to answer some questions (about geography, political systems, and such), and make a pledge. That's how to be a Canadian citizen.
On the other hand, you could be a Landed Immigrant, who gets everythign a citizen does except the vote.
In order to immigrate to Canada, you must either have family here who will sponsor you, be educated in a profession which we need (ex: my parents got in because Dad's an engineer and had a job waiting), or be able to claim refugee status. There's a few other ways, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. It is Much Easier to move to Canada than it is to move to the US.
I'm pretty sure there're still mounds of paperwork, though.
Besides, it's not cold everywhere in Canada. Bits of it get up to thirty six degrees in summer, and the West Coast in particular has a pretty stable year-round temperature.
(Which bit of the States are you from? I can't remember. If you're from Texas or Arizona or Utah or wherever, you might find it a bit cold in winter. On the other hand, Southern Ontario is on the same line of latitude as Northern California.)
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-10 09:09 pm (UTC)Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-11 07:33 pm (UTC)If nothing else, I suppose I could accept your marriage proposal from a few months ago :)
- MD
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-11 07:36 pm (UTC)- MD
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-11 08:43 pm (UTC)Question one: yes, they will. My parents and I did not become Canadian citizens until I was three and a half (I only had to repeat the pledge, fortunately. I don't think I'd have done very well with the history and politics knowledge :p), and then we celebrated by eating Italian ice cream :p.
Teachers are always needed, and the governments (education is legislated by the provinces, not federally) are always on the lookout for good teachers. On the other hand, teachers here don't get paid nearly enough for the hard work they do - but then, is there a place which has ever not underpaid teachers? Teachers are especially in demand in isolated communities, but those tend to be in chillier bits of the country. Again, each province has its own conditions for being able to teach - my mother has a B.Ed. from Bath College in England, but was not eligible to teach in Quebec until she'd passed a class about the history of education in Quebec. (hint - Marguerite Bourgeoys is a name that will come up. She was the nun who started the first school in Canada, in Ville-Marie, which is now Montreal).
My mother and I would not be eligible to sponsor you, I think. The sponsorship thing tends to be for families from poorer countries who send someone over to work for three years, and once they are a citizen, they can sponsor the rest of their family to immigrate. For example, one of my sister's best friends comes from a fairly wealthy family, and they had a Filipina nanny/housekeeper who was working to bring her children to Canada.
The being born in England thing might be an asset, considering we're a Commonwealth country. Do you have dual citizenship? I seem to remember the States not allowing dual citizenship, which is why we moved to Canada. I'm pretty sure that I'd have been allowed to remain a citizen of the UK since I was born there, but I don't think my little sister would have.
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-11 08:57 pm (UTC)- MD
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-13 02:49 pm (UTC)I like Leeds United and Chelsea, but mainly because those are the teams my folks support. I don't have any particular regional affiliation, you see.
In terms of international games, I like the Canadian women - I grew up playing ringette with Amy and Cindy Walsh's little sister :)
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-13 09:16 pm (UTC)So I haven't been keeping up with the NHL (see my own posts about baseball)... are we gonna have hockey this year or what?
- MD
Re: speaking of bad days (non sequitur)
Date: 2004-10-13 09:52 pm (UTC)Looks like a sad no on NHL hockey this year. :( I'm hoping that the networks realise what a goldmine there is in the minor leagues and in women's hockey.