Greetings from transcript (and lazy winter flower) Hell

Posted On January 30, 2021

So, the good news is the university has gotten my transcript from the audio recording school I attended. Of course, said school doesn’t really do official transcripts so they sent a PDF of my grades records, which the university has received but put as a separate item on my “checklist” as an unofficial transcript… which makes it look like I still have to get them an official one.

Oops.

And they have now received my PDF transcript from Emily Carr for my continuing studies stuff.

No sign of the Langara one, though Langara told me they emailed it a week ago.

No sign of the BCIT one, though I think they actually are mailing physical transcripts still, so hopefully that didn’t get sent to Timbuktu en route to the local university.

I got sidetracked and didn’t order the UBC one until today, but they will email a PDF and mail a real one, so hopefully that shows up as checked off within a week.

The nightmare one will be my high school transcripts, which is kinda dumb because as I mentioned here the university thinks my name is Phoenix which is surely tied in with my high school transcripts that they received about 25 years ago… plus it would be impossible for them to get my other transcripts, especially from UBC and BCIT, without me having graduated from high school, and in the case of UBC, without me having gotten good enough grades in high school to get in there.

Anyway, whole thing is convoluted but also incredibly lax. I had to set up a BCeID (which curiously enough doesn’t involve giving them any scans of my actual real ID to prove who I am), and then jumping from there to the Student Transcript Services, logging in with my brand new BCeID (again with no proof of who I am), telling them my name from high school, birthday, and personal education number (getting this number from the school district I graduated from at least did require me to pass an interrogation involving my original name, date of birth, and listing by grade every school I ever attended there, which at least entailed some requirement that I be who I say I am), and then sending my high school transcripts to the local university on that basis… but with no way to enter a note for them as to what application reference number to attach those to…

FML…

Here’s the funny thing: at first I put in my legal name from high school and it gave me an error message that this matched no known records.

Then I replaced my legal first name with Phoenix, and sure enough… lol… the world sure was a different place in the 90s that I could get my school (i.e. government) records altered in favor of my dumb self-appointed nickname without having any legal change of name. Good times…

So I think I’m good… again, pending Canada Post’s good grace to not send my transcripts to some foreign land en route, since the Ministry of Education will take 6 business days to process and send out my shit, then Canada Post will take up to 8 business days to deliver it, and then probably a week to get processed upon receipt and we’re cutting things close to the deadline.

Yes, I know, whose fault is that for ordering that shit with only one month left before the deadline?

What else has been going on? Not much. We were threatened with snow but it never came. The hellebores in my yard are still thumbing their noses at me, i.e., not opening up yet.

I mean, I do have open hellebore blooms, but note these are still in their pots:

That’s because I just bought them on Tuesday and I think the nursery slapped them in a greenhouse for the first couple weeks of January to get them to bloom earlier.

Same with these violas and primulas I just bought on Thursday at Gardenworks in Saanich.

The little shrub with the bell flowers is a certified hit with the hummingbirds, in fact, one followed me into the store when I went in to pay so he could sample the flowers.

Let my local hummers never say I don’t do anything for them. Also, they were supposed to have not one but two camellias in bloom for them as of Christmas but neither of those lazy SOBs bloomed at all this time. One was planted in August of 2019 and had its first flower open on Christmas Day 2019 but not a single flower bud this year, the other was bought last January as it was falling out of bloom so it ought to have had Christmas blooms as well, but again, not a single flower bud.

Perhaps they needed more fertilizer, but I do hear sometimes shrubs like that won’t flower their second year as all their energy is going into roots and leafy growth. We’ll see what happens this winter.

The snowdrops are starting to show themselves, however, and much as I generally give less than a shit about snowdrops, they are at least plentiful in my yard thanks to prior owners and they are the second to bloom after the winter jasmine.

Speaking of which, I bought 4 more this week and have them potted up and placed by the north fence and the south wall’s screen, so hopefully they’ll grow a lot this year and reward me next January.

I even have the first daffodil shoots…

… and my biggest late May alliums (“Ambassador”) have started to work their way up.

My roses all have the beginnings of new leaf/shoot buds, and even my lazy witch hazel is ever so slowly starting to open a little bit more.

I have some major cleanup to do in the garden this spring since I didn’t keep on top of things in the summer after the fall down the stairs. As it is, it seems every time I go out there, there’s a new blackberry shoot coming out where there never were any before (I blame the birds shitting out their seeds everywhere) and I’ve pulled at least a dozen this month along with other seedling weeds, but that’s not even touching the issue of grass rhizomes trying to reclaim all the flowerbeds. At least those are easy to yank out as it seems most haven’t really rooted, but I’ll have to set aside an hour a day this coming week just to be out there yanking grass rhizomes.

The blackberry shoots may well get a dose of RoundUp painted on them if they keep coming back or are too big to just yank… but that will wait for a dry spell of a week or two, probably later in February.

And it’s time to cut last year’s perennials and annuals down. They were left for texture and to feed the birds in the fall, but the seeds are all gone now and it’s time to cut them off at the ground and compost what’s left (except the seedheads will be put in the municipal yard waste in case there still are seeds there). I also need to hack back my Mexican Feather grass and a couple other ornamental grasses right to the ground and let them return fresh.

Apart from the application and the garden, I’ve pretty much been writing a bit of poetry every night (and have posted a couple examples on the last couple Mondays) and outlining a couple more episodes of the sitcom. Not much else that I’m ready to report yet… well, hypothetically speaking, I may have ordered a few new additions to my collection of old tour programs and even more hypothetically speaking a couple of them may well have been old U2 tour programs because reasons, but never mind that.

Lastly: Revenge of the Cis blasting bands they grew up with:

I can relate to Mersh talking about suddenly realizing the artists you grew up with are shitheads. And I agree with them about all 3 here: Dylan, Springsteen, Billy Joel.