I Seem To Have Money On My Mind A Lot Lately

Tonight I managed to sell the spare Nintendo 3DS that we had bought for my younger son to replace the one that he had "lost" which ended up being not lost, so now we had two. (Yes, I am rather fond of run-on sentences, although I am not as good at composing them as Lemony Snicket, who is an expert run-on sentence composer, unlike myself, who am not as good at it as he, Lemony Snicket, is.) ;)

I am proud to say that I resisted temptation and did not make a profit on this sale. We had originally bought the game for $100 and that is how much I sold it for tonight. So we came out even.

Money does not have a good track record as far as staying in my pocket is concerned. As I have posted previously, my first son really DID lose his Nintendo by taking it to school and having it stolen. So that one still has to be replaced, not to console my misbehaving son, but to spare the feelings of his grandparents, who gave him the game and would be very hurt to find out that he had taken such bad care of it.

So this $100 will go towards buying him a Nintendo that I may or may not forbid him to ever touch. :o)

Luckily, I have also managed to sell Daughter's horseback riding pants and boots, so the money for the second Nintendo, which should cost about $120 if the person selling it ever replies to my emails, has been secured.

I must say I will be relieved to have this whole episode behind us. I still remember how panicked I felt when I thought of telling my parents that the boys had lost their birthday gifts. Worse yet, I am still not sure that I dealt with this situation in the right way. I recognize that in essence I am shielding the boys from the consequences of their actions. Am I protecting them in order to spare my parents' feelings, or to hide the fact that I am an inadequate mother whose parenting skills are sorely lacking and whose sons disobeyed her and were not responsible enough with the expensive gifts that they received? Truth be told, it is a little of both. I would be ashamed to tell my parents what really happened. I am going to these great lengths to replace the Nintendo both for my boys' sakes and for mine.

Hopefully this chapter will soon be closed and I can get on with life, with a little less money in my pockets, but also minus some of the guilt.

Take Two

A few weeks ago I shared my excitement of having written an entrance exam at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Today was the University of Ottawa exam. Hopefully one or the other (dare I hope both?) of these schools will accept me into their translation program.

Today's exam was quite different from the previous one. For one thing, we weren't allowed our Petit Larousse and Webster's Collegiate dictionaries. It was also a paper exam, so I had to be really careful not to misspell anything because I had no spell-check to back me up. The types of questions were also pretty different. Both exams were three hours long.

Today's exam started with ten grammar questions. Each question had four sentences in it. We had to find the sentence with the grammar mistake and then correct it. This part was pretty easy, since these are the things I used to harp on when I taught French as a Second Language. 

The second section was vocabulary and I do have to admit there were plenty of words I wasn't familiar with. Most of my French vocabulary is career and government-related, and some of these questions were outside that field. I am only 100% sure of five of my ten answers. *gulp*

After this was a text with 20 mistakes in it that we had to identify and correct. The fact that I knew there were twenty helped a lot. I corrected the text, then went back and counted the mistakes that I had found. I think I did well in this section.

Next, we had to write a 350-word summary in French for a newspaper article we read in English. Pretty standard stuff.

After the summary was the English as a Second Language section, where we read an excerpt from a novel in French, and had to answer questions about it in English. Most of the questions required an answer of at least 20 words, the last one asked for 200 words. I think this part went pretty well, except for one question where we were asked to identify grammar points that were no longer used in modern French. I picked out what struck me as different and went with that, but I'm not sure if I replied correctly.

I am certainly not as confident after this exam as I was after the first one, but I still hope I did well enough to be accepted. Now that I have applied to the universities and written the entrance exams, all that is left to do it wait. It's pretty nerve-racking. I'm not as nervous about UQO as U of O, but U of O is the one I would really like to attend, especially since tuition fees are going up in Quebec. I am trying to be realistic, so I won't count my chickens before they hatch. Still, I hope that today I at least showed U of O that I have potential. We shall see...

In the meantime, life continues. The children were with my brother while I was writing the exam. He took my youngest to gymnastics and played with the other two at the playground outside. In a way, the exam was a bit of a break from the kids for me. Now I am ready to plunge in again and play, play, play! Unfortunately, the kids are pretty tuckered out, so they are vegging out in front of the TV watching a film on VHS. So, now that I have finished this post, I can focus my energies on a big pile of dirty dishes. Oh, joy!