Last Weekend

Haha, so I didnèt wake up early to work on this blog. But hey, I am now working on it in the cafe. No loss, eh? By the way the café looks cooler than ever with the new art that Aurelie created and put on the walls...she is putting an exhibit in the cafe, and selling her art at the same time. Rather talented, even though her art is quite pricey (cheapest one starts at $60)

Anyways details are fading from me, so I am going to try and summarize in order to get the big picture...hopefully this blog is not too long, for your sakes

1) House-managing week with Rebecca - overall a good experience, she always seems to have ideas (current events night, etc...although she didnèt go gung ho with the games this time around compared with the time she was house-managing with Charles, because everyday there would be something happening during dinnertime when they were house managers). We were going to do Zachès superhero night, but that didnèt happen...oh well Zach can do it again when he becomes a housemanager with Mike for the 2nd time (poor, poor boy). I got to talk to Rebecca quite a bit, and she was pleasant to work with...like me, she has the feel-guilty-if-someone-does-my-work syndrome, and she also likes to feed me back the same things I said to her before...quite amusing. Rebecca is also a good cook-in-training, with the same sense of adventure in cuisine that I have, which is fun. It helps both of us enjoy being a house manager, unlike other people in the house. After house-managing with Rebecca and Stephen, I am now officially done with house-managing until the next trimester (coming very soon...end of May).

2) Saturday/Cabane à Sucre - At 9:00 am, the whole house left and headed to Laterriere (a bit off of Chicoutimi, and where Valerie is from) to the sugar shack. I have linked it so you guys can find out what cabane a sucre is without me explaining what it is. After an hour, we arrived at the sugar shack/erables dèor, and only then did I realize we were also doing this with the Jonquiere/Sault Ste. Marie group. This is one of the things that frustrates me about this trimester compared with the last one - I never seem to know what is going on (and I know I am not the only person in the group with this problem). But hey, the more the merrier, eh? So everyone goes to the sugar shack, and the first thing we do is go inside the giant dining hall and have their classic sugar shack breakfast (I donèt know whether I have mentioned this before, but I actually went to this sugar shack before with my billeting family)...pancakes, ham, deep fried pork rinds, sausages, beans...all topped with maple syrup of course. This surprised me because I didnèt think we had enough money to get breakfast for everyone, but hey I am not complaining. After a hour of food chow-down and enjoying the music by the same performer that I saw last time/perhaps the sugar-shack owner/Johnny...many of us went outside to have a good tasting of maple lollipop, which consisted of pouring maple syrup onto blocks of snow, have it harden, and slowly roll it onto a popsicle stick. Personally, I am not a dessert/sweets fan, and I was done after 2 of them. However, everyone else (especially the French kids) had one after another after another, and Maxime claims that one time she ate 15 when she visited a sugar shack. People pretty much spent the whole time socializing by the maple lollipop snowpile, or going back inside the dining hall and dancing/waiting for the clown to do face painting for them, or take walks around the property...I did all 3 things, minus the face painting plus the quick tour of syrup making room, which I didnèt get to go last time (but I got to go dog-sledding!) By the way, no one got face painting at the end because the clown shuts down her business at 12:30 pm, and the last person she worked on was a kid who got there earlier than any of the katima-kids). We stayed there until almost 2 oèclock (we got a scare when rumours started that we were supposed to stay until 4:00 pm, and inactivity started around 11 something), and I think everyone was relieved when we were told that we were leaving. Overall, it was all right for me, because I have done it before and the freshness wasnèt there...but the amount of inactivity was what bored me...in fact upon arriving back to our katima-van we found Stephanie and Maxime in the van, sleeping...which annoyed Valerie but she didnèt really show it (we only found out about it during the next meeting).
Oh yes one funny story - Rebecca and a bunch of us were around the maple lollipop snowpile, chatting...and Rebecca dropped her lollipop to the ground. Just as she bent down to pick it up, she accidentally kicked the lollipop...and the lollipop landed on the pants of a lady that walked by. The funniest part - the lady didnèt know about it and just kept walking...
NO...we didnèt wait for the lady to leave and start laughing our ass off. Everyone was shocked, and we started bawling with laughter, while looking at each other with the same thought "what are we going to do now? Let the lady go, or do something?" In the end, the good Samaritian in Rebecca got out and Rebecca and I ran to the lady and told her what happened, and apologized. Luckily, after some paper towels/cloth/snow, the lady was extremely humored about it and everyone enjoyed themselves. Although I feel a tad bad for Rebecca because after that, the lady told the story to her friends and they were all pointing at her and laughing...

After - We actually went and visited Valerieès parents. Her dad was a bit non-descript for me (just because I didnèt get to talk to him personally) but her mom was very sociable and friendly. She handed chips and drinks all around and asked us questions (well more targeted to the French kids, but whatever). We got to see photos of Valerie when she was younger (not that much different from now but her eyebrows were much bushier back then), and heard some stories (again I couldnèt understand everything, because the conversations were mainly in French). All in all it was all right, I think the French kids enjoyed it more than the English kids...it certainly didnèt help that many of us were getting a sugar crash...Cynthia was nodding off on the couch.

Saturday night - As I had promised Stephanie for her birthday, she and I went to a folk music concert held in Cafe Sofa (Sylvie Jean redemption, haha). It was free for me since I work there, but for Stephanie it costs $10 (well duh I paid, itès her birthday!). By the way Stephanie got a sweeeet laptop for her birthday (to be more precise she bought it but her parents sent it to her at her birthday)...itès the newest ACER with cool speakers, webcam, windows vista...not to mention that her laptop is able to pick up wireless better than Maximeès or Stephenès and can splice it so that all laptops can go online at the same time. But back to the concert...it was pretty good, despite that the genre was more suitable for someone like my mom and most of the audiences were middle-aged adults. Went home around 10:30 pm, and just chilled on the computer (havenèt done that on the house computer for a loooooong time) while Valerie/Stephen/Charles were outside, having a bonfire and playing guitar/tam-tams/spoons

Sunday - relatively uneventful in the morning, the afternoon a lady from an arts association in Sag-Lac area came in and talked about her beadwork. This lady (also an English teacher/photographer/graphics designer) made jewelery using beads and she showed us what she did...Maxime and the majority of girls were "oooohahhhh" over many of her pieces. Best part - we got to make our own! After 2 - 3 hours of labour, most of us (except for Charles and Cynthia, who gave up making jewelery after an hour) made different pieces, and everyoneès jewelery kind of reflected their personality, in my opinion. Rebeccaès simple 2 strand necklace got many appraisals, as did Cherylès bracelet. My choker was a fancier version of what I used to make when I was little - daisy chains (Ady this will be your birthday present ;). Another perk - originally the lady was going to charge us extra with using fancier crystals and giant beads, but I think she just omitted that at the end, which was very nice of her as Swarovski crystals are expensive.

Later in the evening - House meeting: What was supposed to be your average house meeting turned out to be the revealing event of our group tensions. I know I didnèt really talk about the group dynamics in our group during Alma (or even in Blind River I think), but in my opinion this is probably the most interesting and important thing about the whole Katimavik adventure...and I am sorry that I didnèt quite have time to describe whatès going on in terms of relationships between people. To summarize, our group was once a good group of kids that got along relatively well in Blind River, with the loving encouragement of Emilie. There were differences, yes, but it wasnèt as apparent as when we arrived to Alma. Once we got to Alma, and I donèt know why...but the differences became more apparent and soon enough, little tensions started forming. The French kids and the English kids divided themselves and everyone became more cliquey, and less communicative with each other. I can go into this further, but due to time and now that Charles reads this, I have to watch what I say ;P...nah I will write another blog about this another time.
Pretty much everyone in the group knew and saw these problems, but no one really tried solving the problems or even bother acknowledging them...which was really sad because once upon a time the strength of our group lies onto the fact that we were relatively open communicators. But the last meeting kind of changed that...in Maximeès positive and negative comments, she mentioned that there is tension in the group and she was being more reclusive. Cynthia agreed with her, which brought Valerie to create a giant discussion on what is going on in the group and have everyone say what they felt was the problem in our group...I am not going into details but different people have different thoughts on what the problem is (Cynthia and I are the most similar in thoughts in this department), with the Stephen/Rebecca complaining about the language barriers. Valerie chipped in with her thoughts, saying that many of us are still clinging on to Blind River and our memories with it and not giving Alma a chance...and our little tensions are normal because we are in 2nd trimester and this trimester is usually the most difficult to deal with (and I think our group got the worst because a. the English have to deal with the language barriers and b. the French have the temptation of going home), with the most amount of people quitting during the 2nd trimester. Because Maxime was the one who brought it up, she was kind of put on the spotlight on the group dynamics, which was slightly unfair (how ironic, though...I was kind of the person who was pushing it), but she did the best she can, and I could tell it wasnèt easy for her.

My 2 biggest thoughts on this:
- I donèt think everyone in the group was being honest and truthful. Maxime is the perfect example, just because when it was her turn to tell her part, she would say something, then hesitate and not want to talk about it...we had to encourage her to keep going and this went on for a couple of times. Why is it so difficult for her? When Zach just shrugged and said "I donèt know" in this certain tone, I thought that was total bullshit, being the fact that this was Zach and not someone else. As well, Cheryl, who is opinionated, vocal, and acknowledged the fact that there is tension, did not really comment or say anything. That again disappointed me. And because of this...
- Even though it seems like we "acknowledged" the problems, I doubt things will improve because certain people seem to have things to hide (ok that may be a bit strong) and are not really willing to take the first step...perhaps I am being cynical though, and honestly slight improvements are starting to happen...but we will see what the future unfolds.
- Maybe I canèt blame the people for not opening up though...probably some of the tensions come from individuals with other individuals. Again I will not go into details right now.

Welcome To Storming...so this is how it feels like...

I think I am done blogging for the day. My back is starting to hurt.