I don’t believe it! I won against the would-be scammer!
Month: June 2011
Well, That was Early!
The alarm rang at 4:55 this morning. Thankfully, I wasn’t in the middle of a REM cycle, so it was easy to bounce out of bed, have breakfast, and get on the road for 5:15.
The first part of the day was flagging, which meant I had to keep the lady I’m working for alive while she laid traffic-counting hoses across a busy highway and nailed them into the pavement. At that hour there wasn’t much traffic, but I felt very powerful standing in there in my safety-yellow cover all and SLOW sign. 😀
I had to wear a cute outfit like this one this morning (image from textileinnovations.com)
After, she treated me to breakfast, then I counted cars for two hours. Tonight, I’ll be doing the reverse, starting at 4PM.
Now, I need to work on a translation contract then go deliver some fliers. After counting, I’ll try to deliver some phone books. I can’t believe how little income I have for how busy I am!
But the phone rang this morning and suddenly things are looking up… It’s way too soon to get excited, but it makes me feel optimistic.
I’m Going to Need a Wake-Up Call Tomorrow
After I finished counting cars the other day, I was asked if I’d be available for more work this summer. Of course, I said yes, but I honestly never expected to hear from this lady again, not with the way my employment situation has been since I got to Lethbridge.
I must learn to have more faith. I’m meeting her at 5:30 tomorrow morning. It’s going to be a short night. 🙂
I’m going to be counting cars again, but the reason we are meeting so early is so I can help lay down some hoses. At least, that’s what I understood. And I might be introduced to flagging (being a traffic control person).
To think I could be working in an office in Gatineau doing the same thing over and over and over and over again day in and day out instead of learning something new every day. Lack of steady income not withstanding, my life is pretty awesome!
Alberta Propane Prices
I went to fill the 30lb propane tank today and once again was shocked by the cost of propane in Alberta.
In the last three years, filling that thing in BC and the US has cost me between $20 and $30, with Campbell River and Blaine being at the high end of the spectrum, the Okanagan in the middle, and Surrey at the bottom. I also once filled it for almost $40 in Dawson.
Propane in Canada is sold in a price per litre and I’ve always considered the low eighties per litre to be an acceptable price.
I’ve filled up twice since I got to Alberta and hope I don’t have to get used to the price they have here (ie. that I have to stay here in definitely) because I’m going to get spoiled. Propane is 74 cents per litre, so my 35lbs costs me just shy of $18!!!!
New Project Starting to Bear Fruit
When I finished my cross-stitch project at the end of April, I posted that I was in need of a new project. I decided to cross another item off my bucket list: learn to read a language that does not use the Roman alphabet. My top three choices were Russian, Arabic, and Japanese. I decided on Japanese because it’s a much easier language to learn than the other two. Moreover, I have some experience with Asian languages, having studied Mandarin in college. Japanese is much easier since it has two phonetic alphabets and no tones. I set myself a goal: to be able to read a sushi menu.
As it turns out, there are three sets of characters in Japanese, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The last one is what people think of when they think of Japanese writing; those are the pictograms that represent words. Hiragana and katakana are symbols that represent sounds and have no inherent meaning. They are just like our letters.
Common pedagogy suggests learning the forty-six hiragana characters first, so I got my hands on the most highly recommended Hiragana workbook, Let’s Learn Hiragana: First Book of Basic Japanese Writing (Kodansha’s Children’s Classics)Â 
Oy. Learning languages past mid-adolescence is quite difficult. Nothing was sticking. The first lesson has you learning ten hiragana characters and it was so overwhelming. I would write them over and over and over again, but all I saw was squiggles.
Until the other night. I couldn’t sleep and was browsing through the sushi app on my iPod Touch when I realised that the squiggles next to the English were hiragana. And I could recognize three of them, those for the sounds a, ka, and i. Breakthrough. The squiggles were no longer meaningless, they were sounds!
I’ve been able to add three more symbols, one of which isn’t in that first lesson: e, o, and ga. Ga was the forth symbol in that first word, which is akagai, a type of clam.
With those six, I have been able to truly READ some words. The first one was aoi. Blue.
I can now read a couple of words on a sushi menu, including ika, squid.
I’m going to start making myself vocabulary flashcards. It’s all well and good to be able to read, but understanding would be good, too. 🙂 The next sound I’m working on is U so that I can read all the vowels.
My favourite Japanese word that I can read is oka. That’s hill. And also French-Canadian for stinky delicious cheese. 😀