So now is the time to tell the world what is happening to the back of my pants/trousers … Really? Really. Well, this expression is a frenchism, it comes from “user ses fonds de culotte sur les bancs d’école.” That will take some time to explain and will be totally abstruse, I’m going to enjoy that.

Because see, when one is at school one mostly sits, right? And in French “culotte” (which means “panties,” not extraordinarily virile but I like to use it to refer to my boxershorts, it never fails to bring interesting facial expressions on my interlocutors’ face) was used to describe whatever pupils would wear, pretty often shorts — well, it used to be shorts from Easter to All Saints’ Day, roughly april to november, and that regardless of the weather conditions, those were the days let me tell you, my father told me — The seats at school would be wooden benches, oftentimes stuck to the tables by means of metal tubes, possibly to prevent one-figure-number years old kids to run home with them. So the expression would translate by “wearing out your shorts on scholl benches” and was meant mostly to bully people who would stay in school too long, were they too stupid to learn properly (although common thinking is that students are not bad, only teachers are, ohhh how I hate people…) or were they not too eager to go and face the real working world and therefore keep on studying important things such as egyptology or doing PhDs in Italian minestrone throughout the ages…

Got it?

Alright, let us move on. Nothing to see here people, move along. What the hell am I doing, wearing down my panties (?!) on the pretty comfortable seats in computers labs at UBC (University of British Columbia) Vancouver? Yeah, the times, they are a-changing. No more wooden benches, this is the century of the computer and the comfy chair. Although it needs to be said that the computer room let one access computer but one has no rights whatsoever to do anything on it, for instance if one wants to edit a text file one has only the possibility of using the dreadful NotePad©, yes, and not, for example, vim which would be the only sensible choice. I cannot even start saying how bad that is. It would be like renting you a car without gaz, you can sit inside it but, well, that’s it. Do not get me started on the OS …

Anyhow …

So I have four courses for this term, giving me twelve credits (one does need eighteen credits in classes and twelve in MSc thesis to complete the whole deal and win the price and possibly get another go at the merry-go-round), they go as follows:

• Forestry in BC (yes again for British Columbia, still not Before Christ)
• Landscape Ecology
• Communication skills (don’t ask)
• Directed studies in Socio-Ecological Assessment Methodology

That’s a sizeable chunk of knowledge and data to crunch, especially given that yours truly knows approximately nothing about what the hell a tree is or can be. My background is on bolts and nuts, mainly fairly small ones at that, not in big brown and green (mostly) pieces of living and sentient beings, taking adaptative decisions, migrating, pioneering and other activities that we puny humans cannot see because we dash through our lives like madmen, a heavy foot on the pedal, yes, to the metal! Soory, I got a bit carried away here. So, yes, trees, I do not know a thing about them which makes attending the abovementioned set of lectures quite amusing, the first weeks I got approximately a word out of three and asked questions such as: what is that “thing”, answer usually being “this or that specie of trees, or bit of trees or whatever” followed by various (other set of) interesting facial expression from sheer puzzlement to disdain and horror. Joy. And one is not allowed to drink whisky in class, I could have done with some sips.

It’s all better now, some weekend ago I went hiking, ended up bush bashing on a more than 45degrees slope for an hour, the slope was very wet and covered with grass which led to some, er, interaction with vegetation and soil. My leg had some argument with the trunk of a tree, which it lost, my leg, the argument. However I was able to identify said-tree as a Western Hemlock. That gave me some confort. The tree was in its good rights, granted.

Another good thing is that in one of the courses (Forestry in BC, not to name it) we get the opportunity to go “in the field,” meaning we have to wake up really early to cram up inside a school bus — yeps, the yellow funny looking ones, such as the one that end up in the lake in Atom Egoyan’s movie The Sweet Hereafters, based on a book by Russel Banks, highly recommended, both, book and movie —  and drive for hours in order to get to some places with nice trees to look at. We went to the inside of the province, to a forest research centre and to Vancouver Island. The three of them had been wonderful trips. I took some pictures but the state of my wallet and time management didn’t allow me yet to have films developed, scanned and processed but one can have a look at some digicrapping of the trips on flickr here. There would be many things to tell about the activities and various mischiefs which didn’t fail to happen during these trips but I read somewhere on the interweb that people have a tendency not to read blogs anymore, especially those which dwell in more that one hundred and forty characters (annoying, figures in word, aren’t they?) so I’ll stop here and go for a walk outside…

Laters folks.