One Little, Two Little, Three Little Asians...:

Actually, there are four of them.  For those of you who hasn't heard my story yet, my dad's high school alumni association (Queen Elizabeth School Old Students' Association) got together many years ago and founded another high school, which they creatively called Queen Elizabeth School Old Students' Association Secondary School, or Q.E.S.O.S.A.S.S.  I don't know about you, but it makes me appreciate my high school's abbreviation a lot more.  Anyway, every year the alumni association sponsors some of the top students to spend some time in North America.  Usually it's been Vancouver, but for some reason they decided to send them to Toronto this year.  My dad, being the president of the Ontario chapter of Q.E.S.O.S.A., organized their trip.  So, for the next two weeks, my family, along with several other families, will be housing these three girls and one boy and taking them to see the sights.  Since we live the closest to the airport, we picked them up today and will be housing them for tonight and tomorrow (I think), and then they'll split into two groups and spend their time in other homes across the GTA until the last night, when they'll be back here and we'll take them back to the airport the next day.

They're all fourteen, except for Emily who just turned fifteen.  Of course, she's the tiniest one in the bunch.  The boy (Bobby) seems to be the most talkative, despite what he wrote in his letter (but each one of them wrote that they were quiet and shy).  He's also the smartest of the group.  I think the prinicpal of the school wrote to my dad that Bobby has an IQ of 150 (I just tested my own IQ, and apparently I'm 146, or "genius"...how did that happen?).  Helen was the only one who got a little sick on the plane.  She was pretty pale but a couple of hours and a shower later she looked okay.  The last one, Edy, reminds me of someone.  I can't think of who...

I Fought the Law, and the Law Won:

Well, more like the law kicked my butt a little.  I went to a two-day seminar this weekend to prepare for the Professional Practice Exam to become a professional engineer.  My exam isn't until the 14th of August, but I figured I needed a little help on how to study, since they didn't really provide any guidelines.  The ethics section was okay, even though it's the less cut-and-dry of the two.  But as long as you write everything down and explain your logic, then it's all good.  And I'm pretty okay in the BS department.  Law, on the other hand, has an okay part and a not-so-okay part.  The okay part is that the instructor gave us templates for the different types of questions (tort law, contract law, fundamental breach of contract, etc.) and so when we encounter those questions, we would just plug the facts into the template and the answer would write itself.  The not-so-okay part is that we have to memorize these templates and all the legal definitions, whereas the code of ethics and the definition of professional misconduct will be provided during the exam.  There was one case that confused pretty much everyone in the room, including the instructor, which is never a good sign.  It had to do with calculating the amount of damages the owner could get from the contractor in a fundamental breach of contract case.  There were two trains of thought, so everyone was arguing about one or the other, when in fact both methods ended up producing the same result.  But the next day the instructor came back to clarify the answer and confused me again.  I don't know, I'll just BS through that too I guess...

"Into the river below, I'm running from the inferno"