It Seems Like Forever

It’s just been a week and a day since I last vlogged, but so much happened that it feels like it’s been months.

Actually not that much happened except my job.

Even if I don’t really want to wake up early tomorrow, I love my job. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about it and yet I’m just SO happy. I’m happy mainly because I know that I actually can teach. I don’t feel nervous before I talk to the whole group (well, a little, but that’d be wrong if I wasn’t nervous at all) and even if everything seems to go bad, I still manage to get things to work. Of course I make mistakes. A lot. I’m more grateful for the mistakes than for the good things – I’m just learning so much!

I’m glad there’s 3 camps for all the summer. Some kids are registered to all 3 camps, but some aren’t, so I basically have to start over each time without doing the same things. And since I’m learning from my mistakes, I know a little bit more what I’ll be doing for the other camps.

It takes me a lot of energy though. I only work from 9 to 12, but when I’m at home, I think a lot about what I’m going to do the next day and stuff like that. It’s better now than it was in the first few days though – I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much. I’ve relaxed a bit now and it feels wonderful. For once in my life, I have more of a certainty of what I want to do with my life, and that I’m capable of doing it. I can’t pretend to be the best teacher in the world (I’m far, far from that), but I’m not completely petrified as I was afraid I could be.

I was also afraid that this job would get me a lot of stress and that the one that I got from the end of last semester would never go away, but I was wrong. I feel it’s slowly leaving my body as I get more confident.

Life is good.

(And no I’m not forgetting those LeakyCon articles! I’m just too lazy when I get back home… This weekend, maybe? I should do them now because after that, my report cards might take a lot of my free time…)

140 Characters Aren’t Enough

I was updating my Twitter about how I was suddenly excited to start my job (it’s on Thursday, by the way!), and I kept adding another comment to that statement and then erasing it to choose a better one because they didn’t all fit into 140 characters. “Why don’t you just write a blog, then?” I told myself. So here I am. Sorry again – it’s not the long-overdue LeakyCon Day 3 (part 2) post.

I sent an e-mail to my co-worker today when I finished making my schedule, and asked her if everything was all right and stuff. I also got an e-mail from one of the bosses with the student list for the first camp. So now I’m all ready to go.

I can’t wait to see them. I was kind of scared, even yesterday, because I had no idea of who they were. Right now I know nothing more about them except their name and their grade (and date of birth – I checked if it’d be someone’s birthday during the camp… we’ll sing happy birthday or something… I might bring some cookies, that’d be cool! haha I’m so excited about that, poor little girl, she doesn’t even know who I am yet…). But yeah, just the fact that they have names and seeing that they actually exist makes me excited. That’s a good sign. I’m still nervous and a bit scared, but it’s in a positive way. It’d be bad if I didn’t care, wouldn’t it?

Also I found out that I was kind of bored today. I can’t remember the last time that it happened. Did I mention that I finished my summer course on Monday at around 8:15pm? This means that it was my first day off, my first day without anything school-related to bother me. When I finished writing that e-mail with my schedule, I didn’t have anything left to do to prepare for my job, either, so I wasn’t procrastinating anything. That was a strange feeling, actually. So I can’t wait to start my job so I’m not bored again! Yeah, well, I’m sure I’d find something to do of that time if I didn’t work this summer, lol.

Speaking of the summer, I have this awesome project with Marie-Eve, and I was afraid that we couldn’t do it because of me working all the time, but I think it’ll work out. In theory, I only work until 12pm every day (I’ll probably leave a bit later than that because of corrections and preparation for the next day, but still), so that leaves plenty of time on the rest of the day. It’s perfect. I just wish it paid a bit more but I’m not complaining – it’s more than what most of my friends make per hour.

And it’ll be fun. I can’t wait to start teaching – I’m going to learn so much from that experience! In November, I’m having my first teaching experience in a school (part of my bachelor’s degree), so I’m really happy to have the opportunity to teach before it “counts”. Not that those children don’t count – it’s just that it’s not going to affect my whole career if I’m bad. They’ll fire me and that’s it. I don’t think that’ll happen, lol, but I’m less nervous for that than I’d be if it were for school.

I’ll leave it here. That was way more than 140 characters, eh?

Why I Don’t Post That Much

Metal Gear Solid.

My brother got a PS3 for Christmas (it was a bit of a gift for everyone else too since it reads blu-ray discs), so I’d bought him a game to go along with it. That game was Metal Gear Solid 4, which was supposedly one of (if not THE) best game for PS3 yet. If you don’t know what it is (I didn’t before I bought it), it’s a “sneaking” game… You have to get past the enemies unnoticed rather than shooting all of them. But if they take notice, well, you’re still ready to shoot them. That’s usually not the kind of game that I like, because shooting people is violent and the sound of guns irritates me. I didn’t know if my brother would like it either, because he had never played any of the Metal Gear games (we had neither of the PlayStation consoles before), but I thought that since it was the best game for the PS3, it must be good. He was happy – he’d heard of that game a lot but never could play it, not having the console, but he said that since it was the 4th of a series, he’d like to play the other games before because it was a story and maybe there were some things he wouldn’t understand if he didn’t play the others. Alright. So he bought a bundle of the first 3 MGS games: the first was on the PSOne and the other 2 on the PS2. We thought that PSOne and PS2 games were both compatible with the PS3, but it turns out that the more recent PS3s couldn’t play PS2 games (but they can PSOne). Our cousin has a 1st generation PS3 and it can play both. Anyways, so my brother didn’t really know what to do, because he had two PS2 games and no console to play them. I said he could always start off by playing MGS1 and ask our cousin for his PS2, since he could use his PS3 instead. So he played MGS1 this winter…

At first I didn’t watch him play, because I thought it was just about sneaking in and shooting people. But then I watched a bit and realised there was a story behind the missions, and that it was getting intriguing. I didn’t watch everything, but I watched enough to understand the story and to want to know more. So when my brother actually bought a PS2 a few weeks ago, I watched him play MGS2 the whole way through, and it was just amazing. The story got even more interesting. I’m watching this like an action movie, except it lasts way longer. I don’t even usually like action movies all that much. More like a suspense. After MGS2, he started MGS3 right away. He finished it on Tuesday, and I asked him not to start MGS4 until I had finished my presentation for my summer course, which was yesterday, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten it done. That’s right – I’m hooked.

So he started MGS4 today. I haven’t done anything except watch him play, and now I’m just too lazy to do anything else other than look at Twitter and Facebook. My subscription box on YouTube is getting so huge… I’m still at day 3 of my LeakyCon tale and I haven’t even finished the “Day 1″ video to go on the DKH channel.

And I just realised that I’m procrastinating nerd things because of a video game. Can this become even more nerdy?

Oh and I watched “Commentary! The Musical” on the Dr. Horrible DVD yesterday before bed, as a reward for doing my presentation. I just love Dr. Horrible.

LeakyCon – Day 3

If you remember how the last article ended, you know that we got to bed late because of Hotel Failure. Well, we got a taste of some more Hotel Failure on Saturday morning. The fire alarm went off at around 8:30. That’s right. At first I thought it was our alarm clock, and I tried many times to turn it off before I heard a lovely voice coming from the walls saying that it was the fire alarm. We evacuated. Some people didn’t, but I don’t understand why… maybe they were ready to die, but I wasn’t. Lol, I don’t think “dying” even crossed my mind while we were going down 8 floors by foot. Many fire trainings in high school tend to remove all the panic that should come with an event like this, it seems. Anyways, we got out of the hotel in our pyjamas only to hear that lovely voice again that said we could go back in. I thought I had video of it, but apparently I thought it was recording when it really wasn’t. It happened a few times during the weekend. Oh well. We then had to hurry to take our showers because the presentations wouldn’t take into account that we got distracted by a fire alarm. We went to see the “Fair Fortune Musical” that Lena made, and it was absolutely fantastic. I’d listened to the song on MySpace a few times and also watched a video of it, but it was so great to see it live. I almost cried at the end. It’s my favourite Tale, except maybe the Peverell brothers one (for obvious reasons), and to see it acted and sung right before my eyes was truly magical.

Then it was the live PotterCast with Ministry of Magic, who did 3 songs. MoM is so good. I was so excited to see them live, because I never did before. I was a bit disappointed at first because it would be an accoustic set, but in the end it was still really good. I was just sad that we couldn’t really get up and dance to “The Bravest Man I Ever Knew”, because it was accoustic and, well, we had chairs and all, because it was also PotterCast. Speaking of PotterCast, I can’t really remember what they talked about. They said that Tom Felton had tweeted that he wished he was there (that got him an official invitation for 2011!), and after that they took some questions. I know that they’re always into HP, probably more than the average person, but I always feel uncomfortable when people ask questions about the books like this, especially now that they’re all out. I mean, do they know better than everyone else? They don’t pretend that they know best, but those should be discussions rather than questions from the audience. Anyways. They revived the house elves debate. A girl from the audience had a yellow shirt that said “Helga did not enslave the house elves” in black letters, and John Noe had a green shirt that said “Yes she did.” in green letters. Melissa and Frak even left the room at some point because they didn’t want to be involved, lol. After the questions they did what they called “Are you smarter than John Noe?”, and that was funny. I think John got only one right, and it was about Dawlish.

After the podcast was lunchtime. We went to Au bon pain and ate soup again, I think. Oh yeah, the broccoli and cheese one. That was good. Anyways, so that didn’t take very long and the show was at 2pm (inside the hotel this time, not at the castle), so we had again a lot of time to kill. We went back to the room and decided that we wouldn’t bring that much stuff downstairs for the afternoon wizard rock show. I didn’t bring my camera, because I wanted to be able to dance and I knew that if something huge happened, there would be at least 50 videos of it on YouTube afterwards. Our roommate had text updates from Twitter on her phone and happened to be in the room, too, when Matt-Whompy tweeted that the show was going to start at 3 instead. We still went down at 2 just to make sure. Some people were at the door already. People mostly female that averaged 14 years old, I’d think. Oh right. The headliners were The Remus Lupins, after all. That was to be expected. Because we had nothing else to do, we sat on a couch on the mezzanine and tried to entertain ourselves. We sang every DKH song at least 3 times while on that couch. I don’t really remember what else we did, except that a guy from Montreal stopped in front of us, because he’d heard us speak in French. We talked a bit… we learned that he was on the PotterCast staff, and then he gave us his e-mail Then we were still bored, so we changed place on the mezzanine, only to find some chairs and sit in them again, singing DKH songs. Eventually we got up and went in line, because it was starting to be long and we didn’t want to have waited all this time only to be in the back. We waited some more. FINALLY it started moving and inside, I was happy to see that not many people were in front of the stage, so I went to have a good spot. Then I realised that the only ones that were already there were the same 14 years old girls that we had seen like 2 hours before. Sitting at a table didn’t sound that bad after all.

First it was RiddleTM. I was excited to see them because I’d heard a lot of good things from them, and they won a lot of WRPCA. And they wrote “For Jo”. I have to admit that I was very disappointed. It wasn’t their fault, they were good, it’s just that the sound was crap (for the whole show, not just for them) and I was personally still under the high of the show of the night before and they don’t have songs where people can dance. Their harmonies were awesome, but I couldn’t hear a word of what they said. After them went the Mudbloods. I hadn’t heard a lot from them either, but I was impressed just like I’d been with Gred and Forge. It’s also a shame that the sound wasn’t good… Then the Moaning Myrtles. They did a sort of musical of their own story, how they formed their band and everything, so that was cool. I’d never seen the full band live and seriously, it’s so much better with Nina, lol. No offense to Lauren, but the MM really are a duo. I like Lauren solo too, but the MM songs have to have Nina in them.

And the Remus Lupins. I would have said that it wasn’t that special of a set if Alex hadn’t finished it by setting his guitar on fire and smashing it on the stage. You read me right. Though those in the fandom probably knew it already and seen it 150 times on YouTube. Or maybe not. Anyways. The girl in front of me decided she wasn’t dancing, so I didn’t dance a lot during this set because I felt awkward doing so. It kind of killed the mood. If everyone around is dancing, then you just have to dance too, right? But yeah. Then Alex set his guitar on fire and I didn’t care anymore. Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba…

Note to self: there’s always something huge happening at wrock shows. Never, ever omit to bring a camera again.

Oh and I almost forgot. In the middle of the set, the sound stopped working completely. More Hotel Fail. So Alex did an accoustic song from his new album with no mic. The song was “At Hogwarts” and I think it talk about his experience in the fandom. Anyways, the chorus made us all sing “at Hoooogwaaarts” together and that was so cool. Looking back, this was probably the most magical set of them all, even if it wasn’t the one that rocked the most.

After the show, we went to eat at California Pizza Kitchen. Annie had the mushroom ravioli. I just thought I’d point that out for all the Twilight fans out there. The food was good, and we had fun. Then it was the ball. OMG. I don’t even know what to say about it. I might even save it for another post, because this one is getting long and if I start saying one thing about the ball then I won’t be able to stop.

So next time, I’ll really talk about the ball and how it was one of the most amazing nights of my life.

More Personal Article

My last tweet: “I’m ignoring him, he’s ignoring me. This is ridiculous.”

It’s been more than 5 years since I last spoke to this guy. I tried to contact him by e-mail and Facebook a few times since, but he never responds. I always tell myself that the next time I run into him unexpectedly, I’m going to go talk to him directly and he won’t have a choice. But I never do. I don’t really know what I’m afraid of, exactly. It’s not like he could reject me more than what he’s doing at the moment.

And it’s not like I have something to tell him, either. I just want to stop playing the “I don’t know you” game. It’s ridiculous. It’s been 5 years - I can’t believe that it would still hurt for him to talk to me. If it does, then we should have a talk and uncover whatever issue there is and fix it for good.

I don’t know why everytime I see him I can’t stop thinking about it. Why can’t I just let it go and forget the he exists, like he wants me to do? That would be so much easier.

We rode in the same bus tonight. It’s weird, because not many people are taking the bus at that hour (around 9pm). He was standing right before me. I was reading a book, so I had a good reason not to look at him and to pretend I hadn’t seen him. When we arrived at the station, he almost ran to the door that was the farthest from me. I took the other, but still had to walk in the same direction as him. But I couldn’t see him outside. I admit that I was looking for him. I was curious to see if he had his own car parked there (I didn’t remember if he had a car or not) or if he’d be waiting for someone to drive him home, or even if he’d be taking another bus (which would mean that he would’ve moved from his parents’ house because those buses don’t go where he lives). Anyways. I couldn’t see him. I walked to the waiting spot, because my brother was giving me a ride and he hadn’t arrived yet. I just turned a bit to take a last look, and he was there, right in front of me. I think he stopped abruptly. So did I, and I turned again to walk in the right direction, like I hadn’t seen him. He waited a few seconds and then entered the waiting thing as well, but stood as far away from me as possible. I was afraid that my brother would recognise him and wave at him, not knowing what had happened between us. But his ride arrived 10 seconds before mine.

I’m sorry if this is confusing. Some people might know who I’m talking about but there’s very few of them. Telling the full backstory would take too long…

I just want my friend back.

LeakyCon – Day 2

In the morning we went to a presentation on how to book shows and promote a wizard rock band. Paul DeGeorge made most of the talking, but there was also Brian “Malfoy”, JustinFF, Matt-Whompy, Steph-Tonks and Alex-Lupin. I feel like I’m forgetting someone… Anyways. We learned some useful things there. Then we went for lunch. Marie-Eve asked for a Friendly’s, but the lady at the front desk looked at us weird and said that “those” were usually outside the city. Great. She gave us directions to a food court. We found it, but we weren’t too appealed by the type of food there, so we went to find another diner. Never found it, so we came back to the food court and ate chinese food. It was actually really good. We vlogged there so I won’t tell more about what happened when we were walking to find food  Back at the hotel, we had some time on our hands until the next thing started (for me it was the Nerdfighter event and the others wanted to see a HPA presentation) so Marie-Eve suggested we went for a walk in the park we’d seen while searching for food, so we started to move when we ran into Lena (the Butterbeer Experience) who thought going to the park was a very good idea. We sat in the grass under a tree and just talked until we had to get back. At the Nerdfighter event, they served some things to eat, like oatmeal and raisin cookies and what looked like carrot cake. I don’t know if there was anything else but I took one of each without knowing what it actually was, just because it was free food I wasn’t expecting. Yay! Since that took some time (the line at the food table was huge), the places at the front were all taken, so I sat somewhere in the back where there was still a lot of space. I was alone, I didn’t want to steal the place to anyone, and it would have felt weird to sit beside someone I didn’t know. While I was eating the supposedly carrot cake which was actually a chocolate brownie, the place what starting to fill up. I’d just finished eating when I see Paul DeGeorge and his girlfriend coming near me, looking for a place to sit. He asks: “Are those seats taken?” They weren’t, obviously, so he sat right beside me and started talking. “What’s your name?
- Jacinthe. Hm, you better read it, it’s French,” I said, showing my nametag (those things have proven to be quite useful for that). He then proceeded to say it and got it right pretty quickly. He then asked where I was from, and I said Montreal, to which he responded that they’d played a show there a couple of years ago, and I said that I’d found out about that show on the day after, so I missed it. I totally should have asked him to come back but that didn’t cross my mind, haha. He, too, was eating some cookies while talking, and at some point, he said something like: “This brownie is huge. Do you want it?” And I said I’d already had one, so I didn’t get to eat it, lol. So that was the story of how Harry Potter and I almost shared a brownie, XD.

The Nerdfighter thing was alright. It didn’t blow my mind, but I can’t say I was disappointed. I’m happy I went because now I can say that I’ve been to one, but I don’t know, maybe I was expecting more out of it, but I don’t know exactly what since there can’t be much more than nerds talking at a nerd talk event, lol. Or maybe I was just too far in the back of the room to feel the awesomeness, or too annoyed at the girls sitting close to me, or too fangirly about Paul-Potter sitting beside me.

After that, in the same room, was a showing of the We Are Wizards documentary, which we’d already seen a year ago at the Boston Independant Film Festival, but before that was the premiere of the trailer for Finding Hogwarts, another documentary about the fandom made by John Noe of PotterCast, Bre Bishop (ifancythetrio on YouTube) and some others, I think, featuring Melissa Anelli, Andrew Slack, Paul DeGeorge, Frak, and I’m again surely forgetting some. The trailer is also available online since then, and you should go see it. It looks good! We didn’t stay for We Are Wizards because, as I said, we’d already seen it. We went to the Wizrocklopedia panel about the wizard rock community, but we arrived late so we were in the back and I couldn’t see anything. Marie-Eve decided to go take a nap before dinner, because she knew she’d need some energy for the wrock show that night Annie and I stayed to see the announcements of the Wizrocklopedia People’s Choice Awards. Then I don’t really remember what happened. I know at some point Annie went back to the room as well but I didn’t, and I sat on a couch on the mezzanine and met a girl, Maggie, from… was it Tennessee? Anyways, she was really nice. We chatted for a bit, and then she had to get to a CD swap thing and I had to get back to the room because it was the time that Marie-Eve had asked to be woken up at. I think we only ate a soup for dinner or something. Marie-Eve and Annie went to get some ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s (I didn’t because only the smell of the sugar gave me shivers – that brownie really was sweet, too) and they ate it on a couch on the mezzanine as we were waiting for the wrock show which, according to our schedule, was supposed to be in the Imperial Ballroom right next to us, but it was actually in the castle. Because of that, we were almost late for the show again. Except we weren’t. We had time to shop for merch. While we were doing so, a guy comes up to Marie-Eve and asks her if he can borrow her “I ♥ Ron” wristband. Turns out it was Jarrod-Forge, who was performing that night, and he wanted to wear it on stage. Cool.

I can’t even describe how awesome that show was. Tonks and the Aurors, Gred and Forge, The Whomping Willows and Harry and the Potters. I knew TatA because she played at Wrock Montreal and she was great. She did a few song from her new album which were really good. Now I wonder why I didn’t buy it. Gred and Forge came as a big surprise. I had a few songs from free downloads and compilations but I don’t think I ever went to listen on MySpace or anything. It rocked! In the beginning, though, we were wondering what he’d done with the wristband, because we couldn’t see it under the jacket he was wearing. His last song, though, was “Brotherly Love”, and he removed his jacket for it, showing off the wristband in all its glory. We understood why he wanted it by listening to the song. So funny.

The Whomping Willows was amazing as always. I was looking forward to see what his new album would sound like live, and it sounded awesome. It was still new so not many people knew the lyrics – it wasn’t as successful for dancing as, say, House of Awesome or Wizard Rock Heart Throb, but it still was quite enjoyable He finished his set with Draco and Harry, I think, and people went mad with jumping and everything, hehe.

Harry and the Potters… I think it’s the best show I’ve seen from them yet. I’ve been debating that since I got back, because Prophecy and We Are Wizards and the Yule Ball were pretty epic shows as well. I’d never seen them do “Bacon” live (it’s one of their song, btw, they didn’t “do the bacon”, lol) and it’s honestly far from being my favourite song from them, but it was definitely a highlight of the show. They seriously distributed bacon to the crowd. Real bacon. In all its greasyness. Not only did they give us bacon, it was some special characters that gave it to us. I got mine from the Giant Squid (aka Jarrod) and also saw Santa (aka JFF) who was close. I heard there was Wandicorn and a few others, but I didn’t see them (and I don’t know who was under the costumes ) Hilarious. Later on they played Dumbledore, which is always emotional. I took a video of that song and Paul’s voice seems to break from the emotion, but that might just be me. There was an epic circle of love made, just as it had at the Boston Yule Ball, only waaaay more huge. I was filming everything, and then it got to the fun part where everyone jumps in the middle of the circle and starts rocking, but my camera decided she wanted to die just for that part. (It had “drop detection on” and apparently it thought I had dropped it and turned itself off). I’m SO angry and sad that I didn’t get that. Not only I didn’t get it, but I also missed that part IRL because I was busy trying to turn it back on ASAP. Anyways, after that they did the Weapon and their own version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, which wrapped up the night as it should have been: with awesome.

Back at the hotel, we tried to enter our room, but our keys didn’t work. Our roommate had caught up with us at that point, and neither of our 4 keys worked. We went back down to the lobby, and the guy basically said that it was impossible that all 4 keys would stop working at the same time, tried them in his computer and said they should work just fine. Well, they don’t! He reinitialized them, or remagnetized them anyway. We went back up, and it still didn’t work. Called security. The security guy tried it and it didn’t work either, and then they told him our room had been double-locked and we had to go to the front desk again to see why. Down there they said that no one gave them a “method of payment” on check-in. The problem is that they never asked for it at check-in. The reservation had been made on the web and they already had a credit card number from that, so everything should have been fine. We went back up to the room, but it was still locked. We figured that a security guy had to come to unlock it, so we waited, and waited, until he finally came. All of this took AT LEAST 45 minutes, and at an hour when all we wanted was to get some sleep (or get a time-turner to be at the show again, but unfortunately that’s not possible).

Next time, I’ll write about how I finally (after 21 years) spent an entire night dancing, with the help of just one drink (legal!), and how that day was basically the most epic day ever.

LeakyCon – Day 1

There it is. I was going to write about my second training session at my future job, but there isn’t much to say that I haven’t already said on Twitter. And it did fit in 140 characters, after all.

So I’m going to stop procrastinating and blog about LeakyCon. Yay! I’ll write chronogically because it’s just more simple and I started making the video recaps for the DKH channel chronogically too, so I’m into day 1 already.

Thursday, May 21st.

I woke up relatively early, because I had stuff to do before I left. I hadn’t completely finished packing, I still hadn’t got any US dollars (except like $30 that I had from last time) and my bus for Montreal was at 11:52. Everything went fine, despite having to face the wind on the way to get my US money, me who hadn’t ridden a bicycle in forever. The bus driver sort of looked at me funny with all my luggage. Ha. I met my cousin in the bus, and I didn’t stop talking because I was so excited, lol. So I met Annie and Marie-Eve in Montreal and we went down to Saint-Jean together to get the car (Marie-Eve’s parents’). The ride to Boston was cool. We’re starting to recognise some spots (it’s the 3rd time we go there) and I find that funny. Halfway there I’m tired of being in a car, but when we actually get there, I find myself thinking it didn’t take that long. We ate in the car so that we wouldn’t have to stop for anything else than gas and toilets… but ended up never stopping (a full tank is enough and nobody needed to pee, whoo!). The ride itself was sort of uneventful, except some Mmmbop dancing that led to “vehicle flirting” (that will be included in the video, so I won’t talk more about it here). We had a hard time finding the parking garage, but we managed (or Marie-Eve did, anyways), and then in the hotel we couldn’t find the place to register. The schedule said that registration would close at 6 and it was around 8, so we had a number to call so that someone would give us our stuff. Our biggest worry, I think, was that nobody would be there and that we couldn’t enter the wrock show because we didn’t register, but actually there was like 3-4 people at registration. They didn’t quite seem to know what they were doing, because they never asked for an ID when they gave us the bracelets that meant we were over 21 and could drink alcohol, and I even ended up having two sets of “over 21″ bracelets. Anyways, we finally managed to get to the show. I wish we hadn’t been in a hurry, because everyone said afterwards that walking into the castle for the first time was a wonderful feeling, but for us it was just worrying about what we had missed and running to the stage. The castle was beautiful though. You’ll see it in the videos so I won’t describe it, but it definitely looked perfect for a HP con.

The show was “Evil Night”. We arrived halfway through Swish and Flick, which was the first band to perform. I actually don’t remember a lot from it… maybe because I was recovering from the ride and all that. After their set, during the break, Annie and I were sitting on the floor and I can’t remember where Marie-Eve was, but Justin (Finch-Fletchley and the Sugar Quills… JFF) walked by, so I greeted him and he gave us two a giant hug (at the same time, lol). I asked him if he’d played yet because we’d just arrived, and he said he was going now, and indeed, he jumped on the stage right after he talked to us. His sets are always so awesome. He did a few song from his new album and wow, it rocked. For me it’s always hard to feel ‘in it’ when I don’t know the songs, but with him I just don’t care, because his stage presence is just amazing. After JFF it was the Parselmouths. I do like them, but it doesn’t rock as much and since Marie-Eve doesn’t really like them (I don’t know about Annie), we went to sit a little further away. Most of the time I was just being a fangirl because I watch both Kristina’s and Alex Day’s channels on YouTube and to have them both on the stage at the same time was a huge YouTube fangirl moment.

Oh my, I almost forgot. Between the Parselmouths and Draco and the Malfoys (or was it between JFF and the Parselmouths?), we were standing there on the edge of the crowd. Some shoes were randomly there but a lot of people had removed their shoes, so it wasn’t that odd. Then next thing we know, Sue Upton arrives, takes her shoes and starts chatting with us! She’s so sweet! Everyone knows she’s a Hufflepuff, but I’d never seen until then just how much she actually is. I honestly hardly remember what we talked about… I remember something about Draco and the Malfoys… most of the time I just couldn’t hear because we were right beside the speakers and I didn’t want her to repeat everything she said, so I guess Marie-Eve could tell more on that.

And then it was Draco and the Malfoys. They played a folk set. What was that, seriously? I mean I might listen to iton a CD and enjoy it, but I was ready to rock and it didn’t let me. I love DatM live. They always did the same thing everytime I saw them, which became sort of annoying, but I have to admit that it was still entertaining. I was so disappointed, especially since I was reserving some energy for their set. We left the show before it ended. No idea if they rocked after that (I doubt it), but anyways I wasn’t in the mood anymore.

Back at the room (or was that before the show?), we found out that the couch was actually a pull-out, but there wasn’t enough space for it to be opened, which was totally stupid. We somehow found a way to move it in another direction and let it open. That was definitely better than the rollaway bed that the hotel gave us.

We were rooming with a girl from Indianapolis that we’d found randomly on Leaky. When we first arrived at the room before the show, her stuff was there but we didn’t actually see her, because she was already at the show. When we came back to the room, she wasn’t there yet, probably still at the show. She arrived around midnight (when the show ended), took some things from her luggage and left, saying she was “crashing into someone else’s room”. She left us puzzled as to know if she would come back at all during the night… is she didn’t we would have taken her bed, as we had left her one (Annie and I in a double bed and Marie-Eve on the pull-out couch). At 5 in the morning, we hear her come back, take a shower, and then leave. Wow. We weren’t too sure about her then, but we learned later that she’d fallen asleep in her friends’ room and they didn’t wake her up, so she was planning on coming back and sleep in our room. She ended up being cool (And she shared a cab with freaking John Green! Nerdfighters!) It was just a bad first impression that wasn’t entirely her fault

In the next episode, I’ll explain how Harry Potter and I almost shared a brownie.

This Isn’t About LeakyCon

I’m planning to blog about the whole experience, hopefully writing every detail before I forget them. But it’s 2am and I don’t have that kind of time yet.

I’m blogging about school again. I got an e-mail from one of my teachers today. Well, our whole work-team got it. He e-mailed us personally to tell us that he’d never seen a work like this (my brother would add: “yeah, but he’s very young!”, but I don’t care), and that it could be a good idea to get it published. Hm, WHAT? Published?

I don’t want to get my hopes up, because this is very hypothetical (I mean, we’re only in our first year in the bac (1st year as undergrads, if it’s more comprehensible) and I can already see a few problems in that work), but… SERIOUSLY? He wouldn’t say that if there was absolutely no chance, would he? He said he’d keep our e-mails and keep us posted “if he gets some offers or ideas”. He seemed quite serious about it.

He also asked if he could keep our printed version to show his future students and, though I feel very honoured, that also makes me sad because I was the one who made the presentation, who printed it and put it all together in a binder and thus I feel very strongly attached to the paper version. (Plus, it’s my paper, my ink, and my binder, lol). I wanted to keep it, as a souvenir at least,  because I put so many hours into this. It’s ridiculous. I didn’t count, and didn’t need to, because I enjoyed it a lot (except at the end when it was just correcting some minor mistakes, I got tired of it). Especially working with these people. We once had a four hours meeting, without any breaks, to work on that, and it didn’t even feel like working. I’m so lucky. Everytime I’m angry about myself for choosing this program too late (I’m 2 years behind the “normal” course of things) or choosing this school that’s always on strike and has a lot of problems, I think about those friends and how my life would be totally different without them. If I’d chosen this program in the first place, I wouldn’t have been in the same year as them, and maybe I wouldn’t have made any friends and maybe I would have decided to quit because of that. I’m so, so lucky.

I’m now even more considering the master’s degree. I still have three years until I graduate, but I’d really like to do that.

I love school right now.

Unproductive

I haven’t done anything for school today. It’s kind of bad, cause I still have a lot of things to do.

I woke up at around 11:45 this “morning”, and stressed a bit because I had an appointment at the dentist at 1:00 and my brother had an appointment (at the optometrist across the street from the dentist, lol) too around that time and I knew he hadn’t done anything like take a shower or have breakfast. I think we arrived a few minutes late to our appointments but it wasn’t so bad. Dentist said my teeth were awesome, and I joined my brother, who found out he needed glasses, so I helped him choose, since he hates “shopping” a lot. He would’ve taken the first one he tried on… Anyways. Got back home, answered some e-mail, and my aunt called to ask if we’d like to go eat some pizza with them for dinner. Since there wasn’t a lot of time before we had to leave, I didn’t start anything new for school… it wasn’t worth it, so I played a bit of Guitar Hero. It’d been a long time, and I still got my skills! haha. I beat a song that was SO hard, I’m proud of it. Anyways. So we went for dinner and then I wanted to see something in a store. My aunt and uncle had invited us for coffee after that, so we went there, and now I’m here, not caring to do something for school at this hour.

So it wasn’t really my fault if I didn’t do anything today. I could have, but I think I really needed the break, too. Doing grammar tomorrow and then some research for my oral communication project, it shouldn’t be too bad.

I know I always say this, but I’m sorry to talk about school again. Nothing else is going on with my life… I guess I could just NOT blog about it, since BEDA is over and I don’t have to blog even if I don’t have anything interesting to say…

In fact that’s not true. There are some more interesting things going on in my life… I’m going to a Murder Mystery night on Tuesday! Our oral comm. project is actually about murder mysteries (well, not really about… we’re making our fictional students build one and then play it), and it made us want to do one. It’s going to be fun! We talked about it being a sleep-over, too (actually because we had no other time to meet for our project than Tuesday night/Wednesday morning) but I don’t think it’s gonna happen because the place of the guy to which we’re going is kind of hard to reach by public transport. It’s just ridiculous: it takes 20 minutes to get there by car, but 2 HOURS by bus (because of 3 different buses). I hate my city for that. Anyways. Anything else interesting? Oh, since yesterday, I’m trying to catch up on thisisnottom.com… I’d discovered this some time ago, it’s a riddle website thingy, for those who don’t know, and since the riddles were too hard for me, I just dropped it. But then I learned that John Green’s “new book” is sort of hidden inside those riddles, and I love John Green, so I want to read it. Of course I could just use the spoilers, but I thought I should try it at least. So far I think I used the spoilers for each of them, lol. I always figure out some parts of the riddle but I never get everything and I don’t have any patience, so I go to the clues and everything and then I look at the spoiler and try to figure out how to get there. So it’s not really cheating, cause I still do everything to do to get the right answer… I just get the answer first. Right now I’m on a chemistry riddle and I’ve never taken any chemistry class, so it’s kind of hard, but I found a few interesting things… I just need to know how to translate everything into the answer, hehe. I can’t wait to find it – this one’s supposed to lead to the very first chapter!

OH and HOW could I forget to mention that??! I GOT A JOB! yep! I got news from that Chinatown e-learning place (the one I was telling it looked weird from the outside, lol), and I actually didn’t get the one opening that they had – the lady told me that I did so well on the test that she talked to her superiors to see if they could take me for a few hours a week this summer, just so I could be trained and then be ready if they had something else… But the day after, she called back to say that she had talked to her superiors again and they opened a full-time post just for me! I feel kinda big now, hahaha. It’ll be for the summer camps, from June 25 to August 18. I have no idea if it pays well or not, but I HAVE A JOB. I hope I’ll like it… I’ll probably have to find something else when the summer is over, I don’t know, but for now I’m just happy to know I’ll be able to payback every penny I owe soon, and feel less guilty about buying merch at LeakyCon!!

Gosh that was long. I kept thinking about new things I had to say, lol. Sorry?

To Keep My Sanity

I need to write my progress somewhere, and because I don’t want to bother anyone on MSN just to say where I’m at, and because I don’t want to alert everyone on Facebook or Twitter each time I write a paragraph, I’ll update this post as long as I go. No need to actually read, this is for me. As the title says, I just want to keep my sanity.

• 8:55pm, I’ve finished my introduction and one principal idea out of 3. I have 2¾ pages and have to write between 6 and 8. My outline still isn’t finalized for principal idea #3.
• 9:30pm, finished the first secondary idea of my second principal idea, out of 2. 3 1/3 pages done.
• 10:05pm, 4 pages done, I think I’m finished with my second principal idea but if I lack something at the end, which I doubt, there were still some things I could add. Now I’m done writing everything I had fully planned, so I have to finish my outline before I do anything else. This is actually going better than I though… Oh, and in the process of thinking, I split my lower lip. With my fingers. I was playing randomly with my lip and it split. So stupid. It hurts. I put some lipstick on to rehydrate it and to stop touching it, so I look silly, at 10 pm, looking like crap BUT wearing lipstick. Haha.
• 11:36pm. Exact same point as I was at 10:05. Took a nap until 11:00, then uni friends who were done spoke to me on MSN. Encouragements, but at the same time, discouragement, due to the fact that they are DONE, and I’m not.
• 0:11am. Still nothing more, been reading/responding to a 16-e-mails-long convo. I’m starting to seriously feel sleepy. Can’t go to bed, cause there’s still too much to do before I can hope to finish the resto tomorrow. Due time is 5pm, by the way, but I have to count at LEAST an hour for transport.
• 1:10am. My outline is officially finished. Haven’t started writing my last principal idea yet… should do that now, but I’m so tireeeed. I’m still afraid of not enough time tomorrow, so I’ll have to wake up somehow. Also, if I go to sleep at 2-2:30, I can’t get up much earlier than 9, more like 10-10:30. Which means I’ll have no more than 4 hours tomorrow, with the showering, eating…, you know, survival stuff. Should get going then.
• 2:14am. 5¼ pages in. Only one proof (= ½ of one  secondary idea) left, and the conclusion. Given the hour that’s not so late, I’ll go to bed and I’ll be able to wake up relatively early to finish this. I’d also have some serious re-reading to do, but I usually never bother and it doesn’t show on my marks, so I’ll see.
• 8:23am. I’m up and ready to go. I’m even early on my schedule, cause I’d put my alarm clock at 8:15 and woke up by myself at 7:30 instead. Facebook is done, Twitter is done, and I even looked up the LeakyCon schedule! Oh, and I ate, too. Maybe I’ll be able to take the 10:30 bus to go to uni? I’ll try, but I’m more likely to take the 11:50 one or even the 1:15 one (no, there’s no other bus between those hours). Not too bad!
• 9:24am. I’d be done with writing!! Do I bother to re-read, that is the question. I probably should, because I was so tired…. But I’m also very sick of this paper. I’ll go take a shower and decide then. I’d technically be able to get on the 10:30 bus, but I don’t want to stress myself, so I’ll go with the 11:50 one. I have 2:20 to myself / reread, WOOT!