Katitude

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Mastodon Weekend approacheth. I am one of those who cannot attend - damn that responsible adult syndrome (RAS)! Always popping up when it’s least wanted!

But just because I can’t go, doesn’t mean I can’t hand out with some other bloggers likewise afflicted by RAS.

I’ve set up a donkament rebuy for Friday night and I’m looking to sit back, quaff some wobbly pops and mash the All In button with wild drunken abandon.

Hope to see you!

Feel free to gank and pimp!

I stepped into my first classroom ten years ago yesterday. This is officially the longest I have had a job ever. And definitely the longest I have had a job that I have (mostly) liked.

I feel pretty fortunate that I fell into something that is valuable,  meaningful and challenging. I do wish it paid me a bit more, but doing something that even after a decade still motivates me to get out of bed on a regular basis is worth more than money. Much more.

I have grown as a person, as a human, while working here. Sometimes the lessons have been painful and the growth hard, but the rewards have been many.  I get to talk and play and learn right along with the students.

Even on a day when I feel pretty low, being here picks me up.

I keep sitting down to write a decent blog post, get about halfway through then think, what’s the point? I’ll stare at the screen for a while, then save the draft with the thought that I’ll come back to it later.

I’ve just deleted twenty-odd drafts.

That pretty much sums up 2010 so far. With the exception of cello or anything school-related, I start something only to put them aside “for later”.

I’m bored and restless. I’m having a hard time getting through a heavy fog of February meh to look at anything with enthusiasm. The meh is not helped by the fact that circumstances have wiped away all possibilities that I would be attending Mastodon Weekend or March at the Poker Dome with Gracie and SSP. And it looks like Okie-Vegas plans may be shelved as well, unless things pick up around here soon.

Today was a rare February day, sunny and warm (5c IS warm for us). Keith and I decided to grab a camera and head to Mount Pleasant Cemetary for a walk to exercise away some of the blahs. The place was deserted except for a few joggers and cyclists. The only other person was an older man in a fedora and blue overcoat, standing by a grave marker with head bowed and hands clasped behind his back.

We spent a few hours walking the paths, looking at the acres and acres of marble and granite headstones and memorials. We often left the path to look closely at a name, a date, a piece of sculpture, a bedraggled stuffed animal left beside a marker that had only 9 days between the date of birth and the date of death.

It was good to be in the sunshine, to walk and hold hands with Keith while we talked.

“If you put me in a place like this, I’m coming back to haunt your ass forever.”
“How about if I put on the gravestone, It was the salmon mousse!?”
“Well, that would be ok then”

(salmon mousse at 5:20)

What’s the point? There really isn’t one. Nor does there have to be.

I have inherited a lot of things from my mother. Thick, dark eyebrows. My laugh. The colour of my eyes. The places where extra weight collects. And a love of a long soak in a bubble bath.

It was her private spa, her quiet place, her refuge. She had a collection of bubble baths and soaps that we weren’t allowed to use; they were her indulgence, not ours. She’d disappear into the bubbles for an hour or more, equipped with a book and a beer. We all knew better than to bother her while she was in the bath. It was never spoken, but we knew that we had either better be bleeding from the ears or the house was on fire in order to interrupt her without consequences.

And like her, I love my bath. There are many twitters or IM statuses mentioning bubble baths, beer and books. It’s a nice warm-up on a winter night, it relaxes me after one of those days, and/or it helps me sleep.

Tonight I needed it for all of those reasons. It was the annual school ski day where we head up to Horseshoe Resort for a day of skiing, snowboarding or cross-country skiing and tubing. It’s always a blast, but I always come home chilled, tired and headachey.

The bath was prepared with the good (and expensive) bubbles. The beer was the Organic Lager from Mill Street Brewery. Five books were piled on the bathmat:

• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I’m struggling to get through it as it seems a bit hit-or-miss IMHO, but thought tonight might be a good night to reinforce some happy.
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, an old 1955 edition with an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham. I rescued it from the Goodwill for a whole fifty cents. I love the biting and intelligent content, I love the illustrations and I love the smell it gives off when I open it, that musty-paper smell of acid-treated pages that are slowly powdering away.
• Anathem by Neil Stephenson, a nice thick piece of sci-fi that has been sitting on the to-read pile for a little too long.
• Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. I just got it yesterday, and have been itching to crack it open.  It’s not just geeky; it’s teacher-geeky!
• Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton. This is the 15th installment in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, a tale of a very kick-ass woman with vampires, shape-shifters and humans as boyfriends. It is well-written, sexy, and very definitely for adults. No insipid heroines, sparkly weenie vampires or chastity here. And yes, I own the full set.

Keith saw the pile.

“Jesus…just how long are you planning on being in the bath?”

“As long as it takes.”

Although, I only cracked the spine on one. That one was just what I needed.

I watched the Opening ceremonies tonight from Vancouver. And yes, there were missteps, but everything that I saw made me happy that I am Canadian. The representation of the First Nations, the projected images of whales and wheat fields and mountains, the spoken word quotes by Donald Sutherland, the performances by K. D. Lang and Shane Koyczan…all has moved me and reminded me of a pride that is always there, deeply felt. It’s not something I always wear on my sleeve, because that is not what we do here.

I followed Twitter while I watched, which probably was a mistake. Along with the twitters from my countrymen, I read some snide comments from Americans, smug with the knowledge that they live in the best country in the world.

Well, I do apologise, but I must respectfully and oh so politely disagree. I happen to think I live in the best country in the world.

I am Canadian. And I’m damn proud of it.

Good gravy, I am tired. Yet invigorated at the same time. I was going to take a pass on this writing class since things are a bit tight financially but I am glad I didn’t. I get to hang out with some interesting people and meet the interesting characters they are making up. It’s making me kinda wanna write some fiction.

One of the things we were asked to do for tonight’s writing class was to come up with a description of our project. Everyone else took it fairly serious, but I was feeling kind of smartass-y so this is what I ended up with.

This will be a tale of one relationship, two people, five motorcycles, twelve years and thousands of kilometres. It will involve meeting all manner of interesting people, drinking gallons of coffee and eating pie whenever possible. There will be nights spent camping and nights spent in cheap motels while the camping gear stays packed on the bikes. Visits will be made to tacky roadside attractions and breathtaking natural wonders. The weather will be incredibly wet (with anything from a drizzle to a deluge), numbingly cold, unbearably hot, humid, dry, foggy and then back to wet again. It will occasionally feature thunder, lightning, hail and/or snow. Once, maybe twice, it will be utterly, heartbreakingly perfect. There will be wardrobe failures, gear failures and communication failures. There will be breakdowns inside my helmet, breakdowns at the side of the road and a near breakup. But all will be stronger in the end.

I am not pissed off at you because I was tired, stressed or PMS-ing. I am pissed of at you because you acted/are acting like a bonehead.

I am even more pissed off by the fact that it doesn’t appear that you are even aware that I am pissed off at you.

Jesus, what do I have to do, hire a marching band and sky writers?

Men. Sigh.

Some impulse had me glance at my blog stats tonight. And looking at tonight’s usage, I have to wonder if a student has found this space. Expect it to go dark if that’s the case.

~ I haven’t posted much lately.
~ How come?
~ I just don’t feel that I have anything interesting to say.
~ Like that’s stopping anyone else.
~ Good point.

**********

So here I am, laying in bed trying to get comfortable. My back didn’t like something about how I turned the shower on this morning, and took that moment to tell me that the time to lose weight and develop muscles to support my frame has passed. Long passed. And that I had better get on it as I am not getting any younger.

Thank you, dear body for the reminder. I’ll get right on that as soon as I can get out of bed.

it’s not quite how I was planning to spend the day. I am missing two pretty interesting classes, my cello lesson with the grade 5’s and 6’s, and a food drive for the local food bank that I helped organize. The plan for the food drive was to have everyone bring in a minimum of 2 canned food items and during All-School, each group was to use the cans to create either a sculpture or a mosaic picture. Prizes were to be awarded for the most creative, then all the cans get shipped off to the food bank. Win/win…the kids have some fun, the food bank gets a few hundred items.

I hope someone took pictures.

**********

Speaking of school, I’ve been re-thinking what I do there, and what I want to do. There have been conversations with the principals who are offering a lot of support for my ideas on how to use technology to educate, to learn. So I’ve stepped off that ledge called my comfort zone, and will be both attending and putting in proposals to speak at conferences, and volunteering to help out at next year’s ECOO. I’m giving a presentation to the staff next week about some of the ways they themselves can use technology and then incorporate it into their lessons. Here’s hoping that they can come into it with an open mind, and the ones that can’t will at least wait until my back is turned before they roll their eyes.

As a sidenote, I’m pretty surprised at what I can get done when I take all that energy I was using rail against where my life was and use it to move my life forward.

Yeah, colour me late to the party.

**********

I’ve started another writing class this week. This one is geared towards finishing a big project rather than the little weekly things I was doing before. My “big project” has morphed from being a tale about the tip to Alaska to something that includes some of the other road stories that want to be told. I have no idea what the framework is/will be and I feel like I’m stepping off another ledge with another mix of nervousness, excitement, anticipation and hopefulness (as in, I hope I don’t suck).

Chris, who is the most lovely, supportive ass-kicker ever , had us do some exercises. I always like the first one she does as I’m always surprised at where it takes me. She has a few hundred rectangles of white paper sitting in the middle of the table and on each is a word. The exercise is to pick the words that we are drawn to then make a poem. Mine came out as:

Breathe.

Then crash
your warm shell
into ten million words.

Use the old charm
of this abstract want.

I don’t know/care if it makes any sense to anyone else, but it made me smile and think “oh”.

Another exercise she had us do (us being the other four in my group, all are working on fiction) was to pretend we were at a party and that we had to describe what we are writing about. Mine came out as

I ride a motorcycle which has led to have some adventures, to have some stories to tell. Some of the stories are funny, like the one about Baby Boo and the worst motel in America. Some are stories perseverance and rewards, like riding through a foggy and dismal Newfoundland morning to find sunshine and haute cuisine and Vikings at the literal end of the road. And some are stories of growth and transformation, of finding out what one is made of on a northern mountain pass, above the tree line, above the snow line.

So that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t mean that it won’t morph into something else, or even that I’ll finish. I’m not imposing any deadlines on myself; I know myself well enough to know that that is the first kiss of an incomplete death. If it wants to happen, it will happen.

As with any good ride, it’s about the journey, not the destination.