SARATS Entry #14

Steve A, and then two more others, quickly responded to my desire to have more SARATS entries than an odious 13. I'll be posting the other entries shortly.

Steve resides in Texas, which makes a foliage competition a little more daunting than it would be for, say, someone like me in London Ontario, or most people even a little further north.

I find it quite gratifying that Steve had trees on the brain over the last couple of months, evidence of which can be found in this post on his blog, DFW Point-to-Point.

In the end, Steve went with this indoor specimen found in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah:

From Steve's email: Make sure you tell the voters that the Mormons will send missionaries to convert them if they don't vote for my entry! 

You have been duly notified. How do you feel about people who come around to your house or stop you on the street to talk religion? I like 'em. I admire their conviction and thoroughly enjoy talking with them. I'm afraid they often find me rather stubborn in my "many many answers" or "whatever floats your ark" religious approaches, but every chat I've had has been polite and kind and generally nice. I haven't been converted from my kind of half-assed brand of Catholicism yet... but who knows, maybe the next missionary I meet will blow my mind wide open! I don't think it very likely, but never say never, man.

For now I think I'll stick to worshipping at the Church of the Mighty (Extra Light Canada No. 1) Maple, and I would be most pleased if you would join me.

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

Please Pardon My Absence: I Was Busy Preparing to Fail

I have been very stressed out and busy preparing for an Exam that I wrote yesterday. I bombed. Like really bombed. I will be extraordinarily lucky if I get the 60% required to pass. The crummy part is, I studied harder than I ever have for just about anything. I prepared  a wide variety of answers for the essay questions that may come. None of the questions I prepared for were on the test. NONE. I am totally sad and upset now, because I have never failed at something I actually put reasonable effort into. There are options for failures like me to re-do the exam, thank God, but man, will that ever suck.

Hey, what if the marker of my exam happens to be a Rantwick reader?  I mean, at least a couple dozen people in my great province read this blog... Hey, remote Exam marker person: You rock. Like, really. Please mark my exam like somebody really nice and/or stupid would rather than how I would or how you normally would. Thanks! 

Ah, well. What's done is done and all I can do is await my fate. I was provided with a study package that may have well as been one page that read "study everything"... but at least it had its lighter moments in the final point of the "exam tip ands tricks" section:

That's all for now, because I really am kinda whipped from 3 days of rather intensive, perfectly useless study on top of work. You should know, though, that I currently have 3 more SARATS entries to tell you about! Leaves! Trees! Salt Lake City, Utah! San Juan Capistrano, California! Unknown location! Aren't you just busting with anticipation? I'm not, because I've seen them. But they're coming to this space soon, I promise. I'm thinking Monday, but maybe sooner... I dunno.

Yer Pal, R A N T W I C K