Once a Month...

That's apparently all I'm capable of posting these days. Apologies to my loyal readers (but I'm still doing better than the bro. :P

The big news would be that the strike is over. As our main issue was that of pay equity and the Library Board refused to admit that there even is a pay equity issue at VPL, Library Workers had the hardest battle to fight and ended up having to content ourselves with the smallest victory. I'm admittedly a bit bitter about the whole thing. And, sadly, the knitting seems to have aggravated the RSI from last year. However, our final tally was about $4000 raised with over 200 other items going to the less fortunate.

I'm off to Los Angeles next weekend for Serenity LA and am looking forward to spoiling my inner geek-girl for four whole days. There was some stress about how to get some time off in order to be able to take in all the events but that resolved itself beautifully.

Weekend after that is the "in lieu of Christmas" visit to San Fran to see the aforementioned bro and Mum.

Then on Dec 21st, the House Elf and I are off to the Big Smoke and two weeks of proper British hospitality! Tickets for the Ewan McGregor & Chiwetel Ejiofor production of Othello went on sale last Monday, 0900hrs GMT, which meant, of course, that I was up until 0200hrs PST Monday morning repeatedly dialling the Donmar Warehouse box office phone number until getting a ring-ring, being put on hold for 20 minutes and then placing my reservation with the "you live in such a beautiful city" lass on the other end. (Online tickets were not available.) End result: we have excellent seats on exactly the evening we were hoping to get. The late night was worth it too since the entire run was sold out by the time I got to school. Woot!

In between the upcoming globe-trotting (and, to be fair, I've been very much the homebody for the last year or so), I'm still waiting to hear if my teaching contract gets extended past the Christmas holidays. My classes have been filling up. Last year, I don't think I had more than one of the seven classes with more than 5 students. This year, I've only got one left with less than 5. Mostly nice kids, though. Mind you, as I've said before, nothing fazes me after my experiences in England. Which makes it a little strange that I'm so eager to go back, I guess.

In less interesting news, I've apparently developed a penchant for picking fights with pregnant acquaintances. Or they have with me. First, there was the mass Facebook sending of this YouTube video:


which seems pretty counter-intuitive since the sender, someone I knew in my teenage years, actually spends her entire commentary saying that the message is from the "loonie left" (I've since corrected her on the spelling of looney) I responded that the video may be a bit idealistic but the tenets seemed sound and not all that radical and pointed out that at the end of the video he asks everyone to forward the video on, which is exactly what she did. Her response was extensive and it seems that her spelling gets even worse when she's agitated.

In the second case of fight-picking, I was sent a mass forwarded email from one of my classmates from Chilliwack wherein it (the email) proclaims that the upcoming release of the film The Golden Compass is one of the most anti-Catholic, dangerous and evil things to ever come about. I'll point out first for the uninformed, the story in The Golden Compass takes places in an alternate universe. The Catholic contingent is focussed on the fact that the clergy who serve The Authority in this alternate universe are corrupt. I responded to this email by letting her know that I enjoyed the books and that I am looking forward to the movie. I might've even recommended that she read them as they are a fitting homage to John Milton's Paradise Lost. Her response was as you'd expect (long) but she did promise not to send anymore propaganda my way at the end of her diatribe on how the popular media targets the Catholic Church. I replied "Thanks" and left it at that.

In both cases, I find myself frustrated that I've wasted as much time thinking (and fuming) on these incidents as I have. I know that people's feelings about politics and religion are impossible to debate logically with. I know that I'm not even that logical a debater. And in both cases, I politely informed the ladies-in-waiting that I was not interested in trying to convince them to change their views and that I wouldn't be appreciative of their attempts to sway me from mine. Well, maybe not in so many words but I was polite. Except about the spelling.