Random Confessions

Update on Project Angel Squirtle: I took Beatrice's advice and added a headpiece, it's supposed to be a faux halo but I'm not sure whether it looks that way. And I tried glitter on the wings, I got freaked out of the pinkish hue it gave off so I was extremely cautious, and as a result they don't sparkle unless you shine a light on them. But still, now this winged squirtle feels somewhat closer to the feel of Eunsoo's SP, a huge thank you to Beatrice and her creative talent :luv17:
https://m.imgur.com/pgsW7Gk
https://m.imgur.com/isZTuM4

Also featuring: Roxie "Heart" Hart Squirtle, the one that gave me the most headaches. Did you know it's ridiculously difficult to apply lipstick on a squirtle?
https://m.imgur.com/8Ljudpr

Not really a confession, but I finally had my last interview to start university this autumn, and when I was there I met this girl who looked so like a slightly younger Gabriella Papadakis, just with more brunette hair. It was quite uncanny. She was very nice but I didn't mention it - I think the minute I start mentioning figure skating I appear way too intense which is never a good impression

tabsy said:

Not really a confession, but I finally had my last interview to start university this autumn, and when I was there I met this girl who looked so like a slightly younger Gabriella Papadakis, just with more brunette hair. It was quite uncanny. She was very nice but I didn't mention it - I think the minute I start mentioning figure skating I appear way too intense which is never a good impression

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Haha, something a bit similar happened to me with an Eteri lookalike with a possibly Georgian accent. I wanted soooo badly to mention it, but I didn't in case she's heard it a million times before and part of the appeal of coming to America was that people would finally stop saying it. I'm still not entirely sure that she wasn't related to Eteri, though...

There's someone at my college named Angela Wang!

Merry Christmas to anyone celebrating today!

alinaharry said:

Hey Spirals for Miles, if you read this, I can't message you until you clear your inbox.

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Should be good...I didn't see this until now

For Korean Nats I shoved all the stuff I do on weekends within the weekdays' schedule, today was the first crazy busy day and I'm dead tired already. I hope I survive the remainder of the week and get myself to the rink

Ichatdelune said:

For Korean Nats I shoved all the stuff I do on weekends within the weekdays' schedule, today was the first crazy busy day and I'm dead tired already. I hope I survive the remainder of the week and get myself to the rink

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It'll be worth it! Good luck!

The other day, I saw a car with a Squirtle plushie in the back window and thought of you immediately. Maybe it was a sign!

I'm working as a part-time English teacher at a learning center now, and the protocol is that the kids (they're aged 6-12) read an English book assigned for them and do a reading exercise, then they have a 10-minute one-on-one session with a teacher who looks over their worksheet and makes them summarize the book (in English, unless they aren't at that level yet). It's kinda like being a preschool teacher, just in small doses.

I know I'm not supposed to play favorites, but I can't help having a few who are a bit more endearing to me. I don't show it outright, at least I try (I'm absolutely terrible at hiding my emotions, a working project of 10+ years), but those kids do end up being adressed as 'darling' or 'cherie'. And then today this happened. (The kid in question lived in Australia for a year, she's the most fluent speaker among the kids, her words are verbatim)

Me: So, you've read Amelia Bedelia today! Did you like it?
DK(Darling Kid): No, not really.
Me: Aww, why not?
DK: Because Amelia is silly. Like you.
Me: Oh, um, okay, I can be silly. (moves on)
Me: (session is nearly over) Good job here. Oh, before you go, tell me why I'm silly like Amelia Bedelia?
DK: Because, I'm learning English and I'm Julia, my mom calls me Julia, the other teachers call me Julia, but you don't.
Me: I don't?
DK: Yes. You call me darling.

I apologised to little Miss Julia (she's 6) and promised not to do that anymore, and today I learned I say darling too much in real life too.

Also, am I the only one who loved Amelia Bedelia? So far not a single kid has liked the books

^ We have something in common! I am a (retired) ESOL/ESL (English to Speakers of Other Languages/English as a Second Language) teacher. For the record, I :luv17: the Ameila Bedelia books, & my students have enjoyed them for the most part. One of my students loved them so much that she asked to borrow every one I had from my personal library.

iluvtodd said:

^ We have something in common! I am a (retired) ESOL/ESL (English to Speakers of Other Languages/English as a Second Language) teacher. For the record, I :luv17: the Ameila Bedelia books, & my students have enjoyed them for the most part. One of my students loved them so much that she asked to borrow every one I had from my personal library.

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I still have memories of rolling in laughter after reading Amelia Bedelia stuffing the Christmas stockings with chicken stuffing or weeding the grass by watering the weeds, glad to know that I'm not alone. Wonder why my little ones can't see the humour :sad4: It's sad to be the overenthusiastic one, the books the kids read are 98% the ones I grew up reading and loving and almost always they answer among the lines of "It was okay" when I ask them if they liked the book... One bright girl of 10 had read a Junie B. Jones book (one of my childhood defining books along with Harry Potter and LotR), when I asked her if she liked it she said she loved it, and guess who's (psst) my favorite

I spent at least five minutes scrolling through these comments to see if anyone else thought this dude looks like Daisuke Takahashi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkwfNNiDQKM

I was not disappointed.

Going to NYC in February for my birthday and just bought tickets to see Dear Evan Hansen. Very excited!

^ That's wonderful! Definitely one of the shows we want to see eventually! We were in NYC towards the end of Thanksgiving Weekend, and got to see "Come From Away" - just fabulous & uplifting!

Tessa Virtue's abs are amazing. I am going to print this picture and stare at it for motivation when doing planks.

Ichatdelune said:

Presents for my two Messrs. Cha 90% done, the remaining 10% is finishing touches to be done just before the actual event. My hands are not gifted and it could've been done better, but I'm content with how Prince CHArming and Traditional garb Bandabi turned out. http://imgur.com/lXKy2XR
http://imgur.com/ipAK3RG

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Prince CHArming was delivered yesterday, he had it with him at the KnC (dies)

hanyuufan5 said:

It'll be worth it! Good luck!

The other day, I saw a car with a Squirtle plushie in the back window and thought of you immediately. Maybe it was a sign!

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It was SO worth it, me calling Junhwan being recorded was the most embarrassing thing ever (still kinda dying from that) but like https://twitter.com/soratobee3/status/1084104367307862018?s=19 (dies again)

Ichatdelune said:

Prince CHArming was delivered yesterday, he had it with him at the KnC (dies)



It was SO worth it, me calling Junhwan being recorded was the most embarrassing thing ever (still kinda dying from that) but like https://twitter.com/soratobee3/status/1084104367307862018?s=19 (dies again)

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I saw it in various outlets on Twitter - well done!!!

Seems like we had both an emotional weekend - I managed to deliver all 4 bouquets, I was really touched by coaches' reaction to be honest, Patrice was like 'oh, that's so nice!' when he saw an imperial bouquet for Wang/Liu and next he just smiled seeing me descending stairs again to give card & bouquet to Madison&Evan. Greens were also happy along with Elena. I hope they will all enjoy these little gifts and they will remind them of time they've spent in Poland.

I have been having major computer problems, which is why I haven’t been on Golden Skate since last week.

On Thursday, the desktop computer froze when I was in the middle of catching up on a stage of the Tour de Ski. Admittedly, I was actually watching Eurosport’s coverage that I had recorded from the TV, and using the World Feed coverage on the computer to fill in the gaps whenever the TV coverage wasn’t on air, but it still caused some inconvenience.

Anyway, over the next few days, any time I switched on the desktop computer, it would work fine for about 10 minutes, and would then freeze. And the only way to get it going again was to do a forced shutdown, and start again.

As 10 minutes isn’t long enough to get anything done, something had to be found. So, I went around to my Uncle’s to start looking for new computers on the internet. But, it was taking very long to do the research, because I found that most desktops nowadays don’t have half the things that our current desktop has. (The same problem I found when looking at laptops a few years ago).

Traipsing round to my Uncle’s every day to use the internet wasn’t going to be practical. So, I decided to try to get online on my laptop.

As I explained before, I had given up on using my laptop a good few years ago. The problem back then was that it was overheating, and the fans were going like mad to try to cool it down. And everything would eventually get too much for the poor laptop, and it would just cut out. So, I took it down to the local computer repair shop, looking for them to fix it and upgrade it while it was there. And although they were able to put in a bigger hard drive and more RAM, and take it back to the factory settings, they weren’t able to do anything else. I put a few programmes back on (Firefox, BBC iPlayer, Google Earth), but it still had the overheating problems. So, I gave up on it and just used the desktop full time.

Fast forward 7 years or so to Saturday, and since it had been out of use for so long, I decided to take the laptop back to the factory settings again. Admittedly, it took me a couple of days to work out how to do it (I was using the wrong CD!), but I got it done. And when I put it on, I got reminded of how much I love Windows XP compared to Windows 7. But, that soon turned sour.

Firstly, no matter what I did, Internet Explorer couldn’t connect to the internet. Which in turn meant I couldn’t download the installers for the browsers I normally use (Chrome for videos, and Firefox for everything else). Fortunately, downloading them was something that could be achieved within the 10 minute window on the desktop. But, when I tried to install them on the laptop, they wouldn’t do it because they were incompatible with XP.

I did manage to get around this by using some old installers from 2011 that I had saved on my external hard drive. And after installing the browsers, they were able to update to the most recent version that was compatible with XP. But, these newer versions were still not recent enough for some sites to work on them. For example, Eurosport Player.

The same problem arose with the next thing I tried to install – the antivirus software (I didn’t feel comfortable using the internet without anything). Again, I had an old installer which got it on, but the programme wouldn’t update to a newer version (a thing I always hated about that particular software). But, I decided to do a virus scan anyway using the 7 year old definitions. And the old problem of the laptop overheating and cutting out happened in the middle of the scan. So, that was that idea out of the window.

Next thing I tried to install was Office 2003, so that I could do the stuff for the forum that I was planning on doing this week (continuing to work on the Fan Fest I was in the middle of writing an update for; making out predictions for Canadian, American and European Championships; and making out the Scoresheet for the ISU Predictions Game). But, sometime over the past 9 years (since I last used it when the desktop was first bought), a fault has developed on the CD. And it wouldn’t install.

By this stage (Monday), I was getting to the hair-pulling out stage. But then yesterday, I put on the desktop to check something, and found it didn’t freeze after 10 minutes. And, touch wood, it has been working fine every time I have put it on since. I have no idea what happened, but I’m not going to argue with it!

This situation has really made me realise just how important it is to have a backup computer that can be used if something goes wrong with the desktop. Although the overheating on the laptop was not enough in itself to rule it out as a viable alternative, the fact that it operates under Windows XP was.

So, now I have a dilemma:

• Do I continue to look for a new desktop now?
• Or, do I step up my efforts to find somebody to build a new laptop out of my old one?
• Or, do I bite the bullet and get a new laptop, even though it won’t do what I want it to do?

Answers on a postcard please to…

CaroLiza_fan

That was a very pleasant surprise.

I am currently doing my predictions for the Canadian Championships, and because there are so many skaters that we don't get to see too often, I was looking them up on Rink Results. (I wouldn't recommend doing this for Canadian skaters, because Rink Results does not have results for any domestic competitions in Canada - not even Nationals! But, I thought I would at least try to see if it helped in any way).

And it was only when I went to sort them that I discovered that one of the Bios I had opened was not actually the Senior level skater I was looking for, but was actually a girl with the same name who is currently competing at Beginner level. More significantly, though, this girl was from my local club!

Madison Moore

I really should have noticed the flag in the search results, though... :

CaroLiza_fan

The learning center/academy place that I work at is currently doing a Harry Potter thing, I have no idea on the specifics (not privy to that due to part-timer status) but a whole lot of kids have been given Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (or as the kids have it, Sorcerer's) Stone for their learning material. As a person whose childhood is 50% HP (I'm a Potterhead still, I get frustrated when I don't get 100% on HP trivia quizes on the internet) I've been kinda enjoying it, according to my books no child should not know Hogwarts and a surprising number of kids had never read any of the books or watched the movies before (still not over the shock of that). Although me humming the audiobook intro music and gushing over Jim Dale's amazing performance do make the kids stare, so far the kids had acknowledged that the book is good and were willing to talk about the bits they had read for the day.

Well, the bright young miss who had loved Junie B. Jones and is my unofficial favorite (shh) student, she started on HP some days ago. She's the youngest one among the HP kids (she's 10, the others are 11 or 12), but I had assumed everything would be fine since she's a smart little thing. Today I checked over her for the first time after she started on HP, and this ensues. (about 80% verbatim)

Me: So, how are you liking the book so far?
Julie (learned her English name today): Huh?
Me: Do you like the book?
J: Not really.
Me: Wha- How come?
J: It's too long.
Me: C'mon, just because a book is long doesn't mean it's not good.
J: It is so.
Me: I can bet my right hand on that it's not. But anyway, tell me what happened during the part you read today. (The kids read the book in parts, annoyingly not 100% in chapters)
J: All of it?
Me: (blinks) Of course.
J: But there's too many.
Me: (secretly ) You don't have to tell me every tiny detail, just the important ones.
J: It's still too many.
Me: Well then... Show me where you began for today, and where you stopped reading.
J: (proceeds to show me that)
Me: Okay, so Hagrid gave Harry tickets for the Hogwarts Express. What happened next?
J: He goes into the wall.
Me: Huh?? Oh, you're talking about Harry getting on to Platform Nine and Three-quarters. I'm talking about the things that happened before.
J: Um... Dudley (mumbled something)
Me: confused: ) Okay, that happened. Then tell me this, how did Harry get to King's Cross, the train station?
J: Mr Dudley. (The kids confuse Dudley and Dursley for some reason, so I'm kinda used to this)
Me: Right, Vernon Dursley drove Harry. And how did Harry get to Platform Nine and Three-quarters?
J: Run into the wall.
Me: Yes darling, he headed for the barrier... Anyway, who told him how to do that?
J: The fat lady.
Me: (starts to feel uneasy) Aaaaall right... Do you remember her name?
J: (shakes head)
Me: Then at least, do you know who she is?
J: The mother.
Me: She's Ron's mother. So you remember Ron?
J: (small nod)
Me: Okay then. What is Ron like? Can you describe him to me?
J: (shakes head)
Me: But you know Ron.
J: (in Korean) I don't know much.
Me: (switches to Korean) Just tell me the important thing. What is his relationship with Harry like?
J: (in English) Friends.
Me: (back to English) Yes, they become friends. (checks time) Okay now, on the train some people visit Harry and Ron. Do you know who they are?
J: Twins.
Me: (tries to remember whether Fred and George came into Harry and Ron's compartment) Anyone else?
J: Uh... A girl.
Me: You don't happen to remember her name, do you?
J: No.
Me: (sighs inside) Hermione Granger. She becomes important later on.
J: (back to Korean) She's that girl?
Me: Huh? Yeah, she's one of the trio. Aside from Hermione?
J: (back to English) Twins.
Me: You've mentioned them already... Three boys. Remember them?
J: No.
Me: Weeeell, do you remember Harry buying robes, and a boy being with him there?
J: Ah, yes!
Me: He's Draco Malfoy. Does the name ring a bell? (checks) Apparently not. Draco comes with his friends, don't you remember?
J: (shakes head)
Me: Hmm, tell me this. Is Draco Malfoy a good person?
J: Yes? (looks at my expression) No.
Me: How can you tell?
J: ... Isn't it in the book?
Me: No book has a line like "This is a bad person", darling. Why did you think he was a good person?
J: (back to Korean) I haven't read all the parts I was supposed to read, see.
Me: (switches) So then, did you read all the parts you were supposed to read today?
J: (looks at the ground)
Me: I'm not scolding you, so please, show me the parts that you actually read and remember the details?
J: (proceeds to do that, she had only read like 20%)
Me: (internal deep sigh) Okay darling, for today I'm going to summarize the part of the book that you were supposed to read today. But really, please do read the parts you didn't get to catch up on, I don't care even if you read the translated version. I just want you to understand what's going on when you keep on reading, it's going to be even harder and more boring if you don't get what's happening. (summarizes) And that's what happened, got it?
J: (very small nod, looks despondent)
Me: Aaargh this looks like as if I've scolded you, I'm not, it's just... See, Harry Potter was my childhood, I love the books so much and I can guarantee you, they are really, really good. I just don't want you to miss out on it and think that this book is hard and boring and you don't get anything.
J: (blank look)
Me: (feels terrible) I'll... let you go now, want some candy?
J: Uh-huh.
Me: Which one? I've got two jars.
J: Mentos.
Me: (gives Mentos while freaking out inside)

And she was my last kid for today. I still feel terrible, she's usually bright and a bit cheeky and not a bit like what happened today. I know it's more like that she's given too much work than what she's capable of doing in 30 minutes (she was reading Amber Brown just last week, now she's reading a book that's as long as six Amber Browns), but... :hpull: