i'm it

tagged by dor.

five random facts about me:

1) i have been sleeping on the floor in front of the fireplace for the past month. but this morning we finally got our furnace replaced and now we can all thaw out. i can put away the snowsuit.

2) i have this fascination with the armed forces. i used to want to be in the army, among other things, and as recently as fall of 2003, i spent an entire weekend exploring http://www.forces.gc.ca reading everything there was to know about being in the reserve. i was seriously considering basic recruit training for the following summer. obviously that didn't happen.

3) the same lady has cut my hair my entire life. she shaved my head twice when i was a newborn.

4) the one movie that had me crying from beginning to end was "i am sam". i watched it in a florida hotel room; my parents and sister were already asleep, but i stayed up and watched the whole thing, uncontrollable tears streaming down my face in every scene, running to the bathroom every few minutes to get more toilet paper (i don't know why i didn't use kleenex). my dad woke up at one point and just stared at me, not sure what to do.

5) many many years ago i got a valentine with my name severely misspelled as "shrin". shrin spelled backwards is nirhs.

enough about me. now you're it: char jennifer catherine herman dorinda

i may have permanent hearing damage...

http://www.268blog.blogspot.com/

slumber party II

a bunch of us went to visit lyris in rochester this past weekend and all seven of us squished into her bachelor apartment to spend the night. we left early saturday morning, driving the 3 hours or so to rochester, with an unnecessarily lengthy stopover at a niagara falls denny's (a different one from the OOX trip!) due to exceptionally slow service. kelvin was our driver, and karen, who was supposed to be our navigator ended up dozing off, so we named her the napigator. anyway, once we got there we did a gazillion things: lyris showed us the university of rochester, we walked along the erie canal, almost watched a college football game, went bath & body works shopping, had mediterranean food, walked along a different part of the erie canal, saw (heard?) the rochester philharmonic orchestra and toured the eastman school of music, during which time lyris gave us a private concert. she's amazing on piano!! needless to say we were exhausted after day 1, so there was a lot of slumber at this slumber party. the next morning we wolfed down our breakfast of cup noodles and headed to the church that lyris attends. after the service, we went to the beach for a stroll along the boardwalk and took *s* club pictures of all of us jumping in the air. then we had savoury crepes for lunch, drove lyris back to her apartment and headed back to the ferry dock. we took the CAT back to toronto, which didn't save us any time or money and it was slightly nauseating during rough waters, but we got to play rummy and poker!

it hurts

i was bitten on my left arm yesterday, matching the bite i have on my right arm from saturday. no blood or anything, just some tenderness and missing skin. one of the kids i work with is a biter. normally i can get my limbs out of the way in time, but i happened to be carrying him when he decided to bite and i didn't think dropping him would have been the best plan of action. but even with the biting he's a really cute kid. he's 3 and doesn't have any speech in the normal sense, but he does communicate. the other day, he needed help stringing beads so he looked at me and said a forceful "AAH!". after i guided his hands and he got the bead to the end of the string, he then said the exact same "AAH!" each time he needed help thereafter. it was amazing.

another kid i work with has some gas problems. he is constantly burping and farting, and the little room we work in doesn't have much ventilation...and it doesn't help that all he does is eat chips! they're supposed to be his reinforcer, or his reward for doing his therapy programs, but he doesn't seem to care much when i give him a piece. it's probably b/c he gets chips all the time outside of our sessions, so it doesn't mean much to him whether he gets them from me or not. anyway, overall work is going well. the travelling hasn't been too stressful...yet. just costly.