You say "raring," I say "rearing"

In any case, I'm rearing/raring to go....

Made it out to the airport an hour and a half before my flight was scheduled to leave. Had a deja-vu moment when the agent at the WestJet counter told me my flight was cancelled. (This happened in December too, as I was trying to make it out to Edmonton before going to the Dominican Republic.) They blamed it on ice-fog in Edmonton; however, I noted that my flight was the only one cancelled to/from Edmonton this morning. Just my luck.... What is it about the universe not wanting me to be in Edmonton? I hope this doesn't apply to my grad school application as well....

The past few days went by in the blink of an eye. I needed to get a current criminal record check done in order to be in the classroom, but the Vancouver Police Department told me that the check would take two to three weeks to complete. I most definitely do not have two to three weeks. I am supposed to start teaching on Monday. Although the attempt to get the criminal record check ended in utter failure, I had an educational morning walking around Vancouver's infamous downtown eastside, as the police station was there. One man pulled out two packages of chicken from a garbage bag, placed them on the sidewalk, and proceeded to try to sell them for four dollars to passersby. A woman had old clothes and shoes laid out on the ground, and several people examined the items with interest, with hands in their pockets and slightly embarrassed expressions on their faces. A man who walked beside me dropped a bottle cap, and three people in front turned around in a frenzied state, eyes darting to the ground, searching. This is my city, my home. This is the city that is welcoming the world in 2010 for the Winter Olympics. I was ashamed to have to walk down its streets with such discomfort, with my eyes cast downward, hand clutching my cell phone in my pocket, just in case.

I was supposed to be landing in Edmonton right around this time; instead, I'm sitting here, hoping that the flight they've put me on will indeed take off six hours from now.

Some days, there's nothing much to say except "oh well."

* What do you say -- "rearing" or "raring" to go? I just searched an online forum on word usage, and it seems as though I'm the only one to whom "rearing" sounds correct. Yet, the online Oxford dictionary lists "raring" as a dialect variant of "rearing." Hmmm....