Monday, June 11, 2012

Mildly Bad Day

Monday June 11, 10:16 p.m.

Had one more lesson with that morning class that I'd been teaching all last week. Didn't quite come off as well as expected, part of the reason being that I had a student suddenly show up in the last week of the session. As the regular teacher put it when I met her during lunch break today, the school is also a business. Students shouldn't be allowed to audit during the final week, but if they insist, the administration's hands are tied. But as it was, there was enough goodwill from last week so that I was able to get out of it with my skin intact. As far as I know, I'm done for the rest of the week.

It was 3H weather in the GTA today: hot, hazy and humid. Plus, there was a smog alert to scare the asthmatics and allergy-prone commuters. Still, I decided to walk down over to the St. Lawrence Market to see if I could pick up some Montreal bagels for the parents. But I found out the hard way that the place is closed on Sundays and Mondays. Well, there's always Wednesday. On the walk back to Union Station, I went through the basement of Brookfield (formerly BCE) Place; saw a lot of folks in the upscale food court there watching multiple monitors of the France-England game in Euro 2012. Yup, Toronto may be a full continent away from the soccer pitches of Europe, but there's plenty of passion for football.

Got a couple of calls from old friends today. First I spoke with The Wild Guy; it's been a few weeks since I met him and The Egg for lunch. I'd thought that I would have one chance to have lunch with him this week but he turned me down since he has to take care of a lot of business before he and his family take off for Osaka for a short vacation. Then, The Egg himself called up tonight. Not surprisingly, he's been having a really busy time of it since he manages the 2nd-largest theatre complex in the country. Great money for him, but oh, the hours. In any case, I'm gonna see him and his wife for dinner in the Yonge-Eglinton area on Wednesday night.

The big news in Japan has been that psycho killer in Osaka who had gone on a killing spree a few days ago. He killed two with a knife and stabbed several others....sounds ominously like the Eaton Centre attacks. And the motive behind his massacre is not new, but it is pathetic. He couldn't come to kill himself so he decided to kill others so that he could get capital punishment and have someone else do it for him. And I know he's probably a nutjob just for the fact that he stared right at the camera lens as he was being driven into police headquarters; most people have some sense of shame and remorse and hide their faces. Not this guy....looked like a deer in headlights.