Date

Last day of school today, for students anyways. We got a lot of cleaning done and desks moved outside so work can be done to clean the floors.

Other than that, and feeling like I caught another sinus infection..., my workout was relatively tame today. My legs are extremely sore from Friday, so I just ended up doing upper body work outs.

But onto the more exciting (for me at least) part of my bpost today. I recently started a new jdorama. It's called Date, which is essentially a romantic comedy between a shut-in and a highly educated, yet awkward woman. In a sense, she reminds me of Sheldon, in terms of awkwardness.

Either way, I normally don't like rom-coms or romance dramas in general due to cliches, but I read online that Date won a whole bunch of awards.

I think I can see why

I like how the incorporate recent trends like the "duck face" in this drama. It actually made me laugh out loud.

Yonex Canada Open

No karate today, which meant I was able to make plans to attend the 2015 Yonex Canada Open. The badminton tournament, I believe if I did my research correctly, is the grandest tournament (in terms of skilled players) in Canada. Not only that, but this year had Lee Chong Wei of Malaysia.

Out of the five matches today, there were two upsets (in terms of how they were seeded in the tournament). The first match was the women's doubles between a team from the Netherlands and a team from India. It ended up with the lower seeded Indian team winning, though it was a pretty eventful match in my opinion.

The second match was the men's doubles, which hosted two teams from China. Out of the five, I would have to say that this was the dullest match for the day. Rallies were short and I was falling asleep. It was certainly not my cup of tea... It was the only match that went to three games, yet I didn't find any of the three games really exciting.

The third match was the mixed doubles, between Hong Kong and Indonesia. It seemed a little bit lopsided to me with the Hong Kong side having an edge over the Indonesians. There were some really great rallies during the match from both sides though!

The fourth match, and arguably the best match of the day was the women's singles. It featured Canada's own Michelle Li and Japan's Imabeppu Kaori (Last, First). It was quite an exciting match with amazing plays from both sides. Imabeppu's defense was quite stellar in my opinion, with her making some amazing return shots from Li. The second match had to go up to 25!

And finally, the featured title match: Men's singles. I can see why Lee was number 1 for an extremely long time. He played with such an efficiency and look of effortlessness, that it seemed like he was just warming up.

And that was my day at the Canada Open tournament! My first, but most likely not my last tournament!

It's blurry, but Lee Chong Wei is the one in the orange. 

Last Friday of the School Year!

Exactly one year ago, the grade 8s and 5s went to the movies.

This year, it was the grade 8s and 6s (last year's 5s) that went. What a coincidence. I didn't plan to have the movies on the same calendar date.

We watched Jurassic World, which was overally a decent movie. I liked the scenes that were homages to the original Jurassic Park movie. The ending fight scene was pretty epic as well!

We broke down into other activities afterwards, but that pretty much marked my last Friday!

Sunset Drive

Normal Thursday... like always. I was exhausted today, so I stayed till 4 before heading home. After going out to eat with a couple of pals from university, I took the long way home. It was a nice sunset drive, where Barlow was relatively quiet and it was cool enough to have the windows down (instead of the A/C cranked up).

Just 3 more days of work to go before break starts!

Warm Wednesday

It's night time, yet it feels so hot still.

It might help if I took off my sweater and wore shorts...


Once again, a typical Wednesday. I found out my teaching assignment for next year and which room I'll be moving into. After work today, I went to window shop again.

So many choices with so many factors to consider. =/

Besides all that, this week seems to be going by slowly, in comparison to the last couple of weeks. I hope this continues for the summer though!

Mamamoo

As always, a normal day at work.

Besides work, I rediscovered a relatively new girl's group: Mamamoo.

I liked their debut song, Mr. Ambiguous, though one of their first songs (featuring Bumkey) is amazing in my books.

So what's new?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Followed the same routine for every other Monday that I have experienced thus far this year.

Just grinding through the last full week...

This is a first

I was feeling quite tired from, as you may have guessed, an extensive LoL session Saturday night/Sunday morning. After karate and lunch, I took a nap.

I ended up sleeping for 3 hours! A lot longer than I wanted to, but I feel somewhat refreshed!

And now, onto the final full week of my second year of teaching! Hopefully I'll be able to finish a lot of tasks (including cleaning) so the last two days of work will be a lot easier. I recall from last year how I was rushing to get everything done on the last day of work...

I'll make sure that it will not happen again this year!

It's been a while since I last updated my status on Chopin's Ballade. The first 6 pages are coming a long quite nicely. I believe I'm at around 60% tempo with some musicality. I tried playing Clair de Lune as well. Didn't go as smoothly as a couple weeks back... so onto working on that piece again! 

Quiet Saturday

Started off my morning by teaching piano, followed by picking up food for an early Father's Day gift. After lunch, it was off to window shop, since I can't really afford anything at the moment. =(

However, I do have an idea of what I would like for the near future, so it wasn't a wasteful afternoon at all! After going out, I helped my father and my dad change the brake fluid on my mom's car. We were too exhausted a couple weeks back to do all 3, thus the reason why we did it today.

And that's pretty much it! Summer is so close! It's the solstice today if I'm not mistaken!

Taught some of my students Big 2 Today

In my options class today, I only had 8 students.

What's better than teaching them a game of Big 2? The group I was playing with picked it up quickly and one of them even managed to win a game!

Hopefully they won't be like me in high school where I would "sneak out" to the library during class time to play Big 2...

Good Ol' English IB. =P

Typical Thursday

Nothing out of the ordinary today. Went to work, had a meeting after school, and went to the gym afterwards. It was exhausting, even though it's my second straight day.

And that's that. A typical day with nothing to write. Perhaps tomorrow will pan out to be more interesting.

Movie Wednesday

It was a rather quiet Wednesday today. As a bit of a treat, though it has some math involved, my math classes watched A Beautiful Mind. As expected, most of them were bored by the beginning, but the movie started to catch their attention when they realized that he was hallucinating.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to finish the movie tomorrow, but we should be by Friday! And then off to their final project!

I might have to start counting down the hours/minutes before school is over!

Bittersweet Graduation

Last final exam today! The students, as well as most of the teachers (including myself) are done with the school year as well. =/

Just 9 more days of school left!

Besides finals, one of my students had his final karate exam after school today. We scheduled it today since it was his last day. Out of the 16 years+ years of assisting/teaching karate, I have to say he's one of my best students. He's eager to learn and has an innate talent for karate. As expected, his exam went flawlessly. As a white belt, he had a mastery with his nunchaku that a lot of brown belts would have trouble with in my opinion. He was also able to perform most of the nunchaku kata for memory.

As I gave him a near perfect mark, and his green belt, he thanked me and shook my hand. It'll probably be the last time that I'll see him. During the few seconds that we grasped hands, I felt a bit of sadness. Not only was he one of my best students in karate, he was also one of my favorite students last year when I taught him math and science. Like in karate, he was always eager to learn and tried his best in everything.

But like any other teacher, or a person in general, to every beginning, there is an end. As a teacher, I was really proud and honored to have taught such a student.  I hope that I was able to play a part in his life and influenced him slightly. As he, and all my other former students move on from junior high, I wish them the best (even though they probably never have/will have read my blog).

Life is short, but full of challenges. You will succeed, but you will fall as well. Learn from your mistakes and thrive for tomorrow.

And now off to sleep. =P

One more to go!

Today marked the exam I dreaded the most: Math. No matter how much practice we seem to do, (trying to look at key words, break down problems, going through a list of skills), my students seem to have difficulty in math. 

Fortunately, thanks to the speediness that a scantron machine brings to marking, I was able to find out the marks right away. 66% class average in one class and 59% in the other. A lot better than I expected. 

Marks were somewhat what I expected for each of my students. There were some pleasant surprises, with a few disappointments. It is to be expected with any exam I guess!

And did I mention that our scantron automatically calculates average and median, and gives a detailed breakdown of which question students are having troubles with? Also, it can somehow read student's names without filling in a bubble section!

Hi-tech indeed!

One more exam to go!

Exams!

T'was the week of exams...

I was never proficient at writing poetry so I'll stop it right there.

Karate exams today! Once again, I was able to gleam what students were understanding during class, and what concepts need more clarification. It'll be something to mentally jot down so that I remember for the new semester in September.

Other than karate, I had volunteering at the hospital. It was somewhat quiet, where nothing out of the ordinary took place today. It always seems though, that we become the busiest just before closing time. A couple weeks back, we had a potential customer that came 5 minutes after closing time and accused us for being extremely rude for closing. =/ Good thing our manager took care of the situation! Due to that experience, I knew how to deal with a situation today, in which a customer came after closing time in need for an item. Fortunately, I was able to guide him to another location to obtain his item. Whether he was successful or not, I do not know.

And that pretty much sums my day! I'm continuing my quest to finish High rank in MH4U. I believe I started caravan 9 quests.

Another one of those days...

... where you don't feel like doing anything. 

This was one of those days.

I actually ended up doing some work: practicing the Ballade, working on an assignment that I need to hand in before the end of the school year, and planning for July!

I also had one of those instances, in which I was trying to take a nap during the afternoon, where I was consciously aware that I was falling asleep. Normally, I don't recall the exact moment that I doze off, but today was an exceptional day.

I didn't end up napping for long though since the sun was starting to shine after the brief grey/thunderstorms that Calgary was going through. 

Apparently I'm a criminal...

For not giving my students a pizza party:

Or maybe they meant my evil twin, Mr. Maryuama. I don't recall having just one tooth. 

(Good thing my last name is difficult to spell!)

Read a book since...

I don't recall the last time I sat down to read a book!

I finally got cracking on a book on scientific inquiry while the 8s were writing their final exam.

But yes, that was pretty much my day. Nothing else out of the ordinary.

Not yet anyways. ;)

One exam done, one more to go!

The grade 7s wrote their Science final exam today. Thanks to our new scantron machine, it took me literally 30 seconds to mark them all, instead of 30 minutes.

Class average was 70%! Hurrah! A lot better than last year's class average of... 58%?

Just the math exam to go... though I'm not looking forward to that one...

Exhaustion

Long day, but it felt like I couldn't get much done! After a tutorial session after school, I worked on an answer key for an hour (took a lot longer than I thought it would to fill in a scantron sheet), proceeded to make a practice final exam and counted the money we earned for our small cafeteria today. All in all, that sapped a lot of energy from me somehow. I guess the sniffles don't really help at all as well. =/

Back to the grind tomorrow! Sleep up!

Pretty Eventful Day

Morning started out rough, but it smoothed out as the day progressed. I left school right as buses left since I had a doctor's appointment at 3:30.

Normally, the office is pretty quiet, but today it was literally filled to the brim with patients. They quickly zoomed in and out, so I was able to see my doctor in about 10 minutes time. I needed a booster/2nd shot of Hep A and topical cream for a fungal infection (Tinea Versicolor if I spelt it correctly. And for those of you who are in contact with me, no it's not contagious!)

I left the clinic and headed straight to Costco to pick up my cream and to get my vaccination. I always enjoy getting shots (and no I do not engage in illicit activities) from Costco since the pharmacist normally makes pleasant small talk. After the shot, I waited outside for 15 minutes, just in case for any flare ups from the Hep A shot.

During this time, a middle-aged/elderly Asian lady was waiting near me. We were both waiting before I received my vaccination in a smaller room; she realized that I came back out and sat down. After stating that, we broke out into small talk too.

Now small talking isn't my forte. I normally like to get to the point, if it's a business like matter, or just simply acknowledge the person's presence and move on with life. This conversation was interesting since I was able to gleam into her life and experiences. Somehow, it actually made my day just to listen to a stranger speak in an informal manner.

I left after around 20 minutes or so since it's Monday, which meant that it was a workout day. Losing weight does make lifting a lot rougher. I had troubles deadlifting 2 plates today. Flat benching 185 wasn't as bad as I expected, though I could only do about 5 sets of 3 reps. My core is getting stronger as well, since I was able to do around 25 continuous sit ups with a 25 pounder.

Gains are coming! Still around 19-20 pounds to my target weight of 160!

I didn't expect it to take that long...

Around 37 unit tests to mark. Out of 17, with about 11 questions on each test; took me almost 2 hours to mark...

I'm not sure why, but the tessellation chapter took a lot longer to mark compared to other unit tests. And they only had to draw one tessellation!

Other than that, it was a typical Sunday. Nothing out of the ordinary, save the final count down to the last couple of days of school! Just some things to wrap up!

Hot Saturday

Boy was it hot today. Tomorrow's suppose to hit the 30s...

Summer is definitely, definitely here.

Spent most of the day helping my dad change the brake pads on the Accord (well mostly watching and handing tools) to changing to the brake fluid (ol' pumping brakes method). There was some troubles, so it took us nearly 5 hours to work on two cars.

Other than that, I finished Tokyo Ghoul Root A, which had an interesting ending. I'm not sure what the plan is afterwards, if they choose to continue on. Interesting story line.

I have to admit...

It was awfully tough to get work done this week. I'm not looking forward to all the marking I have to do over the weekend.

Other than work, it's Thursday, thus workout day. Squats, bench, back, triceps and core.

Tired, but fulfilled. My own weight has been dropping. 30 pounds down, 20 more to go.

77mm filters

I went to pick up a package yesterday from the post office. It turned out to be the 3 piece filter set that I ordered late April. It came with a UV, a polarizer and a ND filter. The brand is K&F Concept (or was it Koncept). I was pretty impressed with the package it came with, making it worth (appearance alone) the $18 I spent on it. 

Let's see how well it'll do! 

Besides aftermarket filters, I bought some aftermarket batteries last week and they came in today!

Hopefully they turn out to be decent in quality. 

Finished one thing!

Finished filling in one section of my student's portfoilios! I forgot to see if all of them are complete, but it's a good thing I have a double prep tomorrow.

Other than that, it was another day of work. There's mostly just exam prep at the moment! A week and a bit to go!

Once again, I promise that my blog posts will be more interesting in the summer!

Your Lie in April OVA

I watched the special yesterday night. I thought I was over Shigatsu fever, but it turned out I wasn't.

The OVA was nothing special to be honest, just a bit of background information on how Arima's rivals came to be and how Kaori got her most prized photo. However, it did it's role of bringing back my initial feelings for the anime series. It also made me realize how the main emphasis of this anime was about the music, and what music can create; rather than a romantic series.

I only wish that they will release an OVA to talk about what happened after the end of the anime series. I feel like they can flush it out a bit. Yes, perhaps it ended well, but it would be nice, in my opinion, to see Arima's maturation as a pianist.

Other than that, today was an ordinary day. I somehow planned to have all my final unit tests today, so it was a relatively "relaxing". Just a week and a bit before final exams start! =/

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I find it more harrowing to see students write final exams, than for my own self to write a final exam. It's like I can't really control their performance/ how well they'll do on their exam.