It hasn’t been a big summer for pictures, for me, but here’s a dragonfly I got a couple weeks ago on an outing with Barb:
photo by Kristy Boyce
“The Color of Paradox”
The Color of Paradox
“The Cage”
The Cage
Category Archives: Photography
Rewarded for my virtue yet again…
Got me a decent shot of an American Goldfinch, finally, on my way to Italian class Thursday:
Where the homebodies are buried…
Not long ago, I decided to do something about my desk… or, rather, the walls around my desk.
When we moved into this apartment in 2001, the walls in the larger bedroom were somewhat trashed. The previous owners had raised two sons in there and they had–among other things–driven a blue ballpoint pen into the drywall, dozens and dozens of times, leaving a couple honeycombs of blue punctures. There were lots of holes from hung objects, too, and a few chunks of adhesive that would, if removed, surely rip out even more.
Easily fixed stuff, but painting that particular room wasn’t a priority, so I just continued the trend, putting up my bulletin board in the corner where my desk lives and proceeding to stickpin or sticky note whatever I wanted to see on or around it. And then, when one photo or note got old and I had something more current, I’d put up a new one overtop.
Over time, the sedimentary layers built up. And I have this picture that my great-grandmother Phil did, that I’ve been wanting to put up… my grandma Joan gave it to me on one of our visits to Onoway, and I had it framed and have been sitting on it for ages. (We’ve been wanting to redo our pictures for awhile now, and just haven’t managed to do it, so tackling this constituted a symbolic Start of sorts.)
So I did a good winnow, tossed the bottom few layers of images, sorted the rest, hung Phil’s picture and created some free space for new stuff. It’s still essentially a jumble of images with a computer at its heart, but it was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon, and I’m pleased with the result.
As I write this, it occurs that this is the second lunge I’ve had at the office lately; I also recently rearranged the closets. I have fantasies about disassembling the shelves and desks that dominate this room one day, taking every single thing out and making a huge pile o’ stuff in the living room while we patch (and patch, and patch some more) and paint the walls, and then, possibly, doing a radical rearrange of the space… but this will do nicely for now.
Students who teach, teachers who stude…
In a post called Shaping Dreams not long ago, I talked about pickiness, about trying to encourage new writers to write prose that isn’t merely good enough… about reaching, in other words, for excellence.
A thing about adult education (all education, really) is that it boils down to the old cliche about leading that horse to water. You can lay out ideas before a person–you can sparkle and cajole and really sell, but whether or not they pick ’em up is entirely out of your hands. There’s a bit of an emotional dance you have to do: you offer the knowledge up, and say “This is cool and really important and worthwhile,” but you can’t get in a big knot if a given group or individual kinda looks at it and replies with a shrug. You have to care–you shouldn’t teach if you don’t care–but it’s wrong to take it personally.
So one of the most interesting things that’s happened to me this year was seeing this shoe on the proverbial other foot as I Pac-Missed my way through Italian I again. (Tonight, I embark on a second round of Italian II.)
Adults take classes–writing classes, language classes, silversmithing classes, whatever–because they sincerely want to learn the subject material, but the degree of want can vary. And we all have so many commitments. Even as Teacher Me boggles at students who slide their assignments under my virtual door at literally the last permissible minute, Student Me has been known to finish up her assigned Italian exercises in the osteria half an hour before class begins. And even to think Who are you kidding? when this past term’s instructor snarked at us–we were a sad little trio of language students, who could not hide from her displeasure when we slacked–for neglecting to memorize pages and pages of vocabulary and grammar each and every week in our copious spare time.
The thing is: you’re taking the class for personal enrichment and fun. There’s often no grade, so there’s no fail. The instructor probably has limited options for forcing you to your homework, or making you learn, or–in the case of workshop classes, alas–even obliging you to give feedback as good as you’re getting. This is true whether the course is face to face or online.
Seeing my instructor take our moments of student laze personally was good for Student Me. Knowing how she felt underlined the whole concept of You don’t accomplish stuff unless you make an effort. This in turn has motivated me to actually do a little studying beyond the homework minimum. And I do mean a little. At the end of the day, I’m still more apt to watch an episode of Leverage on Netflix. Still–more than zero.
I also had a couple interesting conversations with my instructor, about these two perspectives, and I discovered she’s a student, too. She’s taking an ESL program, full-time. It has a direct effect on her well-being, as success will directly impact how employable she’ll be in the near future. She’s been working hard for six months and her English is astounding.
And even she has “Oh, I am such a bad student!” stories.
It makes me wonder what classes her English teacher might be taking on the side, and so on, and so on…
Adventures and spiderlings
Saturday’s word count came to all of 89 words before it turned out the relatives coming into town late Saturday night had meant to arrive in the morning, and had rebooked their flights accordingly. Using Twitter, of all things, we mixmastered our entire weekend schedule on the fly. Kelly shot off to the airport; I kept a twice-rescheduled date with my mother. Three hours later, we converged for a run to Granville Island (where, as I predicted, it was like LORD OF THE FLIES, but with tourists fighting tooth and nail for parking and places vendors’ attention) and then dinner in the West End.
For a final blast of excitement we ended up chasing the Modo car to the city impound after dinner. This was an experience that turned out better than I’d have expected, as Impound is more or less directly on the route to our house. (It could have been at the end of the Skytrain tracks or something!)
Anyway, as much of today as possible has been allocated to some much-needed chilling out. It looks sunny and gorgeous, an entirely promising day. I am frankly hoping the house gets stupidly warm.
Here’s a snippet from one of the works-in-progress:
Isle of Gold is one of five nations formerly known as the Piracy. A barren rock unfit for agriculture and without much of a fishery, its difficult-to-navigate coastal waters and dense military fortifications led to its becoming the treasury of the alliance of thieves, smugglers and raiders during the decades of warfare that plagued the seas…
Finally, for those of you who saw my tweets about the baby spiders, here’s a picture.
