News Flash: Canada is cold.

Well, my second day and my second post.
In case all zero of you who are reading were wondering, I live in Canada. And Canada is cold. I even live in a major city, Toronto, (the majorist city, as far as I am concerned) and it is freezing. I thought these sorts of temperatures were supposed to only exist in the burbs and little farm towns where everybody gets frozen in in the winter and then somebody gets sick and the doctor has to make a heroic rescue effort to the persons house to save their little Jimmy from dying of sudden onset Pneumonia. So the whole point of this is to excuse myself from going to class. I had a 12 o'clock class today and I definitely did not go to it. I have a 2 o'clock class and it is looking more and more likely that I will not be going to it either. That is unless the temperature suddenly goes up 10 degrees. I should probably go to my second class, Italian Neorealist Cinema, and I have to go to my third class at 6pm, as a) it is a half course, b) my parents will be home by then and will be able to drive me to class and c) I should go to school, because KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! I should probably go to my Cinema Class as we're supposed to get our midterm marks back, but MY GOD it is cold.
I've been outside twice today. The first time I went at about 10:30 am, to take my dog out for a walk. When I got out the door she ran off on our super handy extendo leash and I contemplated just leaving her out there to freeze as I was so cold in the first few minutes that my finger tips ached. Unfortunately, I had some feeling of responsibility, as well as the fact that she had reached the end of the leash and was forcibly dragging me out into the street. As I was following after her, trying to gather up the slack on the leash, a man started walking down the sidewalk. Now, my dog is very friendly. She's only 5 and a half months old and feels that absolutely EVERYONE should be her friend and a member of the pack, whether it be a crabby old man walking down the street, a woman and her stroller or, in this case, a cranky drunkard. So Goose goes chasing after him and gets to his heels where she makes a little leap, not all the way up, just to his ankles. I immediately chastised her and apologized and the guy had the audacity to yell out "What the fuck, lady?" and then keep walking. I apologized again as a) I was in the wrong and should have kept better control over her and b) I am Canadian and it is a knee jerk reaction to apologize for everything. So he grumbles off and I take Goosey across the street to do her duty. As I'm walking away I just hear him say "Stupid Cunt".

I'm sorry, (See?) but who the hell kicked your mother in the stomach and made you such an asshole? My dog is clearly a puppy and so hasn't been entirely trained about jumping up yet. As well, I apologized about it; there's little else I could do. What was expected of me? Should I have run over and apologized profusely for the actions of my puppy? Anyway, I just ignored it and let him go off to his lonely life where nobody wants him, and enjoyed the adoration of my puppy in private.

I have a midterm on Dante's Purgatorio on Thursday and I am as prepared for this as a Grad Student is for the real world. I should be studying right now, but my blog is very much more interesting. To me, that is. As well, I seem to have misplaced my book and notes somewhere in the chaos that is my room. I have a hard time with the prof as well; he isn't very good. Well, he's not even a prof really, he's a doctoral student who teaches it. Last term we had the course coordinator as our prof and she was phenomenal. She was so excited to teach us about Dante and did it with enthusiasm and passion. She made all of us WANT to learn and so it was no surprise that I ended the class with an A- average. It doesn't help that the entire class is lectured in Italian, so understanding our heavily Roman accented teacher makes it difficult to take notes. He'll go on about something, then try to make some weak joke in Italian that we get, but don't really care about. So this awkward silence fills the class for a little while before he goes on telling us about some uninteresting part of Purgatorio that we learned by reading the annotated version of the book. The class feels like one reallly (two hour) long awkward conversation with the Italian guy you hooked up with one night and then had to talk to again in the morning and realized you had nothing in common with him and couldn't understand a word that was coming out of his gorgeous mouth.

Anyway, the point of this is that I plan to do something a little productive if I am not going to go to class: I will clean my room. Exciting, no? And then when I, hopefully, find my notes I'll study. See how good I am at procrastinating? I make it seem like I'm actually doing something, but I'm really not.

As this is supposed to be a Gardening blog, I should probably mention something about my planned garden. I worked last night at figuring out when I would have to plant things indoors, when I would have to transfer them outdoors and which plants I wanted to get. I plan to have a little vegetable garden as well as flowers for cutting. So far my planned flowers consist of: Lupines, Bleeding Hearts (Gold Heart), Grape Hyacinth, Foxgloves, Flanders' Poppy, English Lavender, Cinderella Snapdragons, Sweet Cluster Tomatoes, Beam's Yellow Pear Tomatoes, Beef Steak Tomatoes, Romaine Lettuce, Little Finger Carrots and Early Wonder Beets. Yeah, it's a lot. I'll probably only plant 1/3 of what I planned, but it'll be a start. The Bleeding Heart will be joining French Lilacs my mother and I are planning to plant in the front yard, as we have a huge tree that doesn't allow much sunlight. It seems most of my indoor planting will happen March 7th, and then I'll have a big planting day on May 16th. May 9th is the official day for last frost, but Canada sucks about weather, so I'm going to try and play it safe. As well, if I plant them too early then I'll have to spend May trying to support little seedlings in our terribly destructive climate. What this indoor planting date means, however, is that I need to get started pretty damn soon. Like, next week. Which means I need to buy indoor planters, seeds and other supplies, as well as get started working with my dad to build the large planters for outside on the roof.

Well, I seem to have managed to successfully evade work, yet again. So I'm off to stop procrastinating and actually do something other than lie in bed and read gossip blogs and talk on msn.

Yours,