Crickets

I said I'd tell you about the crickets, and today shall be the day to tell that tale.

One day I was doing something in the apartment when I thought I heard the sound of crickets. No....not crickets, a SINGLE cricket. Odd....you usually hear them all together, not individually. And not usually so loud. Then dawned on me. It's coming from INSIDE the house!

My husband and I went on the lookout, trying to hunt down the cricket. We eventually got it cornered, but unfortunately, we couldn't reach it...with anything...at all. We'd have to wait until it came out in the open.

So we waited....

And waited....

..........waited.

It was late and we wanted to go to bed, so we thought 'screw it...we'll take care of it in the morning'. So we turned off all the lights, got into our pajamas and crawled into bed.

Funny thing about crickets....they're most active at night.

We had quite a bit of trouble getting to sleep. Every few seconds there was that individual cricket sound that sounds  a wee bit like a whistle...or train whistle even. It was loud, obnoxious and persistent. I finally got some sleep, but was again awoken by the sound of the cricket. This time it was louder.

I got up to go to the bathroom, and there was the cricket. Making it's chirping sound in the most echo-y part of the apartment, making the most noise it can possibly make. An epic battle ensued in which I finally won, captured the little cricket (I couldn't kill it) and threw it outside.


....


The cricket came back the next day. Sadly, the cricket lost that battle too and this time I was far less merciful.

Ravel thinks I'm cool

I am a volunteer on campus for a peer counseling group and today we had our monthly training session. The organization is structured into teams. All the volunteers are broken down into several small teams which meet weekly and then the leaders of each team form their own team that also meets weekly and then once a month we all meet together for trainings. Therefore, volunteers who aren't in your team are only ever seen once a month and at those monthly meetings, very little interaction is involved.

As additional background info, I'm fairly social-phobic and find it quite difficult to go up and talk to people. At one of the breaks in the training, I went to go get a coffee and was standing there fixing my coffee while a fellow volunteer did the same. The employees at the Tim Horton's had a radio player which happened to be playing the classical song 'Bolero'. I decided that could be my excuse to start a conversation, so I said 'It's been a while since I heard this song *pause*....Bolero.' The volunteer looked at me a little shocked, politely smiling and tried to listen. She didn't know the song. I'd assumed it was one of those classical songs that everyone comes across in elementary music class but apparently not so.

I tried to recover and explain that I'm not like a classical music aficionado or anything. So I said that I'd seen it played in concert at the NAC. I was in music class. It's a good piece. Very famous. You can't dance to it but it's pretty good.

The more I said, the worse things got until I noticed that she had already started walking away from me and started talking to other people, occasionally turning back if I said something she felt obligated to respond to.

At one time I would have been reduced to tears and sent into a downward spiral of self-hatred and depression. And the spiral did begin. However, during the next break, I decided to turn it into an amusing anecdote to tell to a completely different volunteer. Somehow discussing a time when you behaved very awkwardly leaves people gutting themselves laughing where the actual incident will leave people confused and uneasy.

Funny how that works.

New TV

Yesterday was a day that my husband and I actually got to spend together. It's a rare occurrence, and thus when it happens, magical things also happen.

I suddenly became very inspired to create a home office for myself despite this being my last semester of school before moving across the province. This home office will only be in use for a maximum of 4 months. Yet, I was fiercely inspired so I went to the usual district and looked through Value Village and the Thrift Store looking for a desk/table/flat surface to begin my remodel. Alas I found nothing. So I asked a clerk to please check in the back room for a desk just in case they got one within the past few minutes. She did and upon returning empty handed, referred me to the BRAND NEW Goodwill down the street.

There had been a Goodwill in my area for several months now without me knowing. I rushed back home to tell my husband that we needed to go there instantly. We did and despite it being a relatively large Goodwill, with lots of other interesting things, there was nothing I could use for my home office.

There were, however, TVs. Now, our current tv technically works, but it is from about the mid 1980s and extremely frustrating when words pop up and you can't read them because the TV is so blurry. We saw one TV that was a good size and an ok price. I was hesitant because we couldn't really tell if it would be an improvement until we got it home and hooked it up, and by then it's non-returnable.

"You guys thinking about buying that TV?" A stranger had approached us. No doubt a student, mid to late 20s, likely high.
"Yeah," we said uncertainly.
"Do you want a free TV? I live just across the street and I'm moving so I need to get rid of it."

We pondered the offer and concluded that a free TV is far less of a gamble than a $10 TV, so we decided to take him up on his offer.

Turns out he did live across the street. He lived in a house, the driveway of which was situated in the middle of a T-intersection of the two busiest roads in all of Guelph. It was quite the adventure simply driving there. So we get the TV, and it's smaller than we would have liked, but free so we didn't complain. A roommate was there with the strange student and seemed to be considerably more inebriated, and both were giggling.

When we got back home, we disinfected every surface of the TV because we're a little worried about germs, especially considering the source, and we turned it on in the hopes that if Bed Bugs had crawled up in the nooks and crannies, they'd die of the heat. Once it was all hooked up and programmed, the difference was amazing. We could read words on it! The picture was clear! Red things didn't bleed into the rest of the picture and white things didn't glow. It was a glorious victory, and yet...it was considerably smaller than our old TV, and also than the TV we were looking at in Goodwill.

We decided that we'd go back to Goodwill and get the other TV too. The small one could be put in our bedroom for easy snuggling during movies. Except, when we got there, the TV had sold! Dissappointed, we went back home.

Then a thought crossed our minds. What if those guys weren't moving, but in fact were dumping their old TV on us so they could get the new, big TV?

Hmmmm.