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In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase "squared away".
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If I say that something is squared away in English, it means that it's properly organized; it means everything is in its place.
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If I had something squared away, it would mean that I'm ready for something.
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I spent the last few days getting squared away for the new school year.
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I have everything squared away for the school year, which starts two weeks from today actually.
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So I'm really happy because I have everything squared away.
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Notice you can use this two ways.
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I can say, "I'm squared away," or I can say, "I have everything squared away," or, "Things are all squared away for the start of the new school year."
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I'm pretty happy about that.
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I'm glad that I could take this little break to get ready because being ready for the new school year just makes me a little more relaxed.
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The second phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase "ready to roll".
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Now, I couldn't remember if I've already taught you this phrase, but I am ready to roll.
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In English, we use this phrase, somewhat informally, to just say we're ready for something.
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When it comes to the new school year, I'm ready to roll.
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If my boss said to me, "Bob, are you ready for the first day of school?"
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I would say, "I'm ready to roll."
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Um, it's kind of a funny phrase; I think it's related to⏤we use the word roll when we're talking about driving, like when I'm driving down the road, you could say I'm rolling down the road.
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Uh, I don't actually say that; younger people might.
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But, uh, when you say that you are ready to roll, it means that you are prepared; it means that you are all ready to do something.
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So let's review.
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If you have everything squared away or if you say, "I'm squared away," it means that everything is in its proper place.
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You are organized and ready for something.
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I have everything squared away and I'm ready for the new school year.
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And when you say that you are ready to roll, it means that you are just completely and totally ready to do something.
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But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video.
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This comment is from Maritza and the comment is this:
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"Hi, Bob. Lisianthus are really beautiful flowers, but I wonder if you have any fruit trees on your farm? So far, I haven't seen any. By the way, I'm a cheap person too. I love to drive a hard bargain. Have a good day."
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And my response was this: "We do not have any fruit trees. There used to be a pear tree at the bottom of the hill behind my house, but it died years ago. We've thought about getting an apple tree someday."
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So one of the things that's unique about fruit⏤and not everybody knows this⏤is that you need a certain kind of soil to grow certain kinds of fruit trees.
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Where I live here in Ontario, Canada, we have very hard clay soil, and so the only two types of fruit trees we can grow...
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Uh, we can grow apples and we can grow pears in this soil.
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I'm not sure if you can see it, but way down the hill, there is a dead tree and that is the tree that, uh, used to have pears on it.
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When I was a kid, we would go down the hill and we would pick pears off the ground.
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And we would feed them to some of our animals, but we would also keep all the good ones.
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And we would put them in the fruit cellar in the basement and then we would eat them during the winter.
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They were quite yummy actually.
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We've thought about getting an apple tree; we've just never quite committed to getting one, but that would be really fun to have⏤an apple tree⏤here on the farm as well.
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But, hey, I wanted to talk about being ready for the school year and I wanted to thank you for being patient while I took a bit of a break on this channel and my other one.
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I was able to go into work.
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I was able to look over my class lists.
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I was able to start to think about how I want to organize my classroom.
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I put all my desks in the spots I wanted them.
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Um, I got to see how big my classes were⏤I have about 20 to 25 students in each class, so not big, but not small either.
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So, anyways, thanks for being patient during the break.
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I'll be back in a couple of days with another short English lesson.
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Bye.
