Ms. PetraFied: Numero Uno

Hi,

I'll just start slow, and use self restraint.

That's what Jack said to Jill when they went up that stupidly dangerous hill; but I've got more support than Jack had, so if/when I fall down a hill (I'm pretty good on hills though, I have coordination) I'll have lots of people catching me on the way.

Enough metaphors. This post won't bring you, the reader, up to speed with me. I don't do things television style though, so you'll have a nice solid ending with all sorts of great morals and life lessons, and possibly fireworks.

On the 18th of December we put on our boots pretty early for a Saturday and trucked off to the Centres des Arts to help out with a food drive. I got paired with two guys who had the goofiest toques on the planet and kept hitting each other. Their names were Alladar and Jacques. They stuffed me into the backseat of their car with four boxes of food and offered me cigarettes and told me in broken English that I would be the one to carry the Christmas present because I was much cuter than they were. Then we took off from the icy parking lot at lightning speed and almost hit a helpless, dumb squirrel. I told them small pieces of info about myself, in French, and the one driving almost took out a garbage can when he looked back at me. "YOU TALKING FRENCH?"
Hah, my God, they were so funny, they acted more like teenagers than I do. But when we arrived at our destination of a top floor apartment, they turned into mindful, calm people who spoke slowly and wished the woman of the house Joyeux Noel while gently kissing her on both cheeks. When they dropped me off at the Centre des Arts they gave me bear hugs and gave me double kisses also. I suggested in what might be described as a kind, holiday tone, that they have a Joyeux Noel and they laughed and said "Why don't you have a Joyeux Noel!!" That has been the craziest 15 minutes of my life in little Nicolet, thus far. (Besides Sam's speeding fiend of a boyfriend..)

Before or after that, one of the two, the day doesn't really matter, we went out of town a ways and walked along a beautiful snowy boardwalk to a viewpoint of the St. Laurence. It wasn't a very clear day but we did take some group shots, just for the sake of it. The area is a protected bird sanctuary; the forests are all untouched and the road doesn't go right out to the river. There was no noise.

Martin and Eric bought their hideous, wonderful one piece ski suits at the Thrift store while they were house managers together, a $3 investment for each of them. It was an interesting week when they were in charge, every meal had the addition of food colouring in some portion. Blue mashed potatoes anyone?

My last day of work was the 22nd, but I didn't go because I chose instead to have a ridiculous head cold matched with a throbbing head ache and as a result slept for 17 hours straight on my top bunk. Then I got up, did some laundry and then slept for another 12 hours. After waking from my state of semi-coma I thought it would be a great time to partially lose my voice and become a coughing, grumpy mess.

During my hibernation, the rest of the group thought it would be a great time (or rather, it was on our schedule) to have Winter Olympics, Katima-style. They ventured into our snowy outdoors and made snowmen and threw spherical chunks of snow at one another and had a jolly, Pre-25th time.

We didn't do much that evening, and the next day being the 24th was a suuuper looong sleep in day. I was cured of 95% of all illnesses when I got up and in pretty fine form for the rest of the day. Antoine put half a turkey in our piece-of-crap oven at 8am and by 7pm that evening it was a cooked to a tasty perfection. Just took 11 hours. Many thanks to his parents for the turkey, our budget wouldn't have allowed for a turkey that week because of our New Year's Eve plans (in future post). We all made some part of Christmas dinner and had to dress pretty because Valerie, our program leader, loves pretty people and despises sweatpants and sports bras.

Just whipping up a cake, no big.

At 11pm seven of us went out to midnight mass at the church and as it was mostly anglophones, save Martin and Valerie, we had to wait for obvious sit-down, stand-up, get-on-your-knees-and-pray cues from the other churchgoers in order to look like regular people. Being a Quebecois church it was Roman Catholic and extravagant. The building is shaped for optimal audio quality and each pew has a speaker. This was a pretty monumental event for me as I've really only been inside churches to take pictures and see people get married or attend Girl Guides during earlier years of life. Needless to say, I didn't understand one word of the sermon and could only sing along with Silent Night, but it was a fabulous experience anyways, and a way of doing Christmas I've never tried.

Joyeux Noel! On the morning of the 25th we opened presents and ate delicious food and had a dance party in our kitchen. At 12pm we got into that famous white Katimavik van and drove out to our french teacher's family's farm. The house had an indoor pool and hottub and a huge living area where everyone ate food, played dominoes (mexican trains!) and spoke loudly. It was the perfect afternoon. Marie Douval, our french teacher, was born in Romania and her parents took her and her siblings travelling as kids. I'm not entirely sure what her first language is or how many she knows, but she's pretty excellent at teaching us French!

The 26th was our boy Scott's birthday. For a nineteen year old to be completely happy on his birthday, we discovered, he needs - a cake composed of three doughnuts, hot dogs and fries for dinner, and winning a game of football. We figured the physical activity would counter the sugar induced hyperactive state we knew Scotty would adopt. Antoine had Scott for secret santa the night before and bought him a football, because the only thing Scott loves more than watching football is playing football. So we went down to our riverside field (previously and since used for events such as Trois-Rivieres vs Nicolet snowball fight, chuck the penguin, and homemade toboggan race katimaa-cluster style.. stay tuned) and kicked around the old pigskin for a while. Can anyone tell me if I can use pigskin in this sentence? Scott's team brought home gold so he was a happy, legal-in-all-provinces, boy.

Young Creechan, opening his football.

The next three days consisted of badminton at the Police Academy gym, a hilarious movie filmed in Montreal called Filiere 13 (highly recommended!) and French games, which are apparently helping our knowledge of this confusing language, but seem to just bring out our competitive energy more than anything. We had a visitor on our games night, a previous katimavictim from down the road. He had a nice set of locks and a full beard and this matched with some excellent handstand skills made poor Martin quite envious. The most enjoyable part of the evening was watching them turn beet red, upside-down and smiling.

We also painted the daycare Eric and Julian work at during the week, Gripette. The man who showed up to give us directions was much more interested in going snowmobiling that afternoon than putting his 110% into painting, so we had a full 6 hours on painting under our belts by the end of the day. It's hard to say if it looks better than it did before, but painting sure felt satisfying!