First Class in the Books

I wrote my final exam for my first of 5 French classes on Saturday morning. An odd time for a final exam, I guess they figure if we're taking summer classes we're losers and have nothing to do on Friday night anyway. In my case they were right.

I suspect that I did not do extremely well on the exam for a couple of reasons. First I felt horrible, I don't know if it was some bad crab meat (it smelled fishy) or what but my stomach was not in good shape. We went out for an early breakfast so I would be ready to write the exam and I did eat almost as much as I usually would but I was in a great deal of discomfort. The nervousness of having to write an exam was probably part of it but I still feel a bit off today. I ate some of those disgusting pepto bismal tabs and by the time I got to the school and met a couple of the guys from class my stomach had settled considerably.

As is usually the case I studied a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't on the test at all, the harder stuff, so I'm sure I made a few minor mistakes, which of course will add up. I know I forgot to make the verb etre agree in gender and number when doing the passe compose. I didn't even think about it until I was half a kilometer away from the exam room, a dumb mistake.

There was also a reading comprehension area. Now normally I do well at this part of a test, the reading I find easier than most other areas, I think many people would agree. For some evil reason they picked a topic that would have half gone over my head if it were written in English! It was about why the youth of France have more incentives to purchase homes. They get tax breaks and some other stuff that I didn't understand because it was a) written in French and b) about tax crap. How incredibly irritating, who knows maybe I aced that part. Basically I copied what I thought was relevant from the text as my answers. BTW did you know that 52% of private wealth in France is property?

We have our final softball game tonight, the 3rd place match. We were the victims of a last inning comeback last week. As disappointing as that game was to lose it was possibly the best game of the year. I didn't do anything spectacular but over all the game was close and fun. I hope tonight is the same, maybe with a bit less pressure. We have decided to sign up for next season though so the softball will continue into September! Let the real Fall Classic begin.

We saw a duplex that we like and I think we're going to put an offer in on it. We're up in Thunder Bay Wednesday to Monday of this week so we won't make any decisions until we return but I think we are going to try. They may not like our offer of course but it will be the first time we've made an offer so regardless of us getting this particular place it's a bit exciting for us.

Following in the footsteps of my sister we would move into the smaller of the two apartments and renovate it while we lived in it and rent our the other floor which needs much less work. The upstairs (where we would live) has been half gutted and not put back together. They tried to turn the living and dining rooms into one giant room so they took walls down but they didn't clean up the mess so now there's exposed wood beams and wires hanging around. The roof needs to be redone and since the floor is a bit of an open concept now (or will be after we clean it up) we're thinking about a skylight. So we think we can improve the place significantly, we just have to make sure we can make our money back plus more on it. I'll of course post more on the place when we take further steps towards acquiring it.

Wednesday we fly to Thunder Bay, there's a wedding on Saturday and Kate's family owns a cottage up there so most of the trip will be hanging out at the cottage. I was there once before when we drove to BC we stopped in for a night. It's an interesting place, lots of dead animals on the walls and the second floor was an add on so it's dimensions are a bit off, kinda creepy actually but I like it.

I'm sure I'll have fun meeting Kate's family, to date I have meet very few of them.