Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I still haven’t spoken to my father yet, but I’ve got my kids here and dinner is being picked up as I write this. Sushi. All my favourites.
I spent the morning shooting a round of arrows followed by a quick workout. While I didn’t shoot my best, it was my first round where I scored all gold.
A success even if it wasn’t a personal best. I had a few line breakers that squeaked in, but as my buddy always reminds me, a 9 is a 9 and a 10 is a 10… take them when you get them.
My afternoon was busy. I installed my water fed solar panels on my garage roof. This took longer than expected and everyone was pitching in, but the hard part is done!
And food has arrived. To all the dads out there, happy Father’s Day! It’s time to have dinner with my family.
I had the opportunity to stop and sniff the roses today. They were beautiful, and their smell… well their smell reminded me of bathroom spray.
Growing up, my mom always bought rose scented bathroom air deodorizer for all of our bathrooms… especially the main floor bathroom that had a very noisy fan and poor air circulation. If you ever used that bathroom for a ‘number 2’, you were sure to mask the odour with the rose scented spray. Now, decades later I can’t smell a rose without flashing back to the memory of bathroom spray and hints of fart.
If my wife is trying a new perfume out, a common complaint I’d have if I didn’t like it would be ‘too flowery’.
It’s weird how smell can incite such powerful memories. And weirder still how those memories can impact us so many years later. I don’t have a great sense of smell, but I will sometimes smell something and instantly I’m thinking about a memory, or thinking ‘this smell reminds me of something’, but not remembering what?
If you have have reason to buy me flowers, roses may not be the best choice. 😜
I will admit that I’ve been critical of the vaccine rollout in Canada. I really thought that it took much too long to get things started. However, I now have to say that I’m very impressed with how things are going. Have a look at this chart as of yesterday:
It seems that Canada’s strategy of getting the first shot to as many people as possible is paying off. I get my second shot next week, and I just read that the new Canadian goal is to have every person from the age of 12 and up to be able to get their second shot by September… every person that wants it.
That’s the new challenge we face, how many people in our population will not choose to get vaccinated? With the Delta variant hitting the unvaccinated population extremely hard, Covid-19 is proving to be hearty and resilient. The Delta variant spreads very easily, and on average causes much harsher symptoms, putting more people in hospital than other variants.
Reducing the threat of this variant, and subsequent variants is best done with a comprehensive vaccine rollout. Reduce the likelihood of spread, and you also reduce the likelihood of mutation and new variants. The spread of measles provides a good lesson for us. Measles is preventable by vaccine and numbers have gone down for years heading into 2010. But the last decade has seen spikes due to anti-vaccine sentiment, and a larger population of unvaccinated kids in different populations.
Canada is lucky. For such a large country, we don’t have a massive population, and the population we do have predominantly lives in a narrow band near the US border. So, not many people, but mostly living in a concentrated area. This makes vaccine distribution easier on two fronts. The third and final frontier is the willingness of the population to do their part.
Our younger generation seems to be more willing to do their part than in other countries. As soon as the 18+ population were given the opportunity to get a vaccine in Canada, uptake has been good. Since younger age groups seems hard hit by the Delta variant in England, it is comforting to know that the Canadian population that had to wait the longest for their turn at getting the first shot have been so willing.
It’s good news all around in Canada, and so now as the vast majority of the population lines up for their 2nd shot, it’s my hope that we also see more people take advantage of their first shot. This is the challenge ahead of us. Not the rollout of the second shot, that is going very well. Rather it’s the rollout of the first shot to the population who seems hesitant to do their part. The closer we get to full immunity, the more likely we are to be protected from dangerous variants spreading through our communities… and our loved ones.
At Inquiry Hub students learn the difference between a working portfolio and a presentation portfolio. They don’t get electives in the same way a student in a large high school gets theirs. Instead of a Grade 9 looking at a large catalogue of courses to choose from, students get a couple ‘mandatory electives’… yet they end up with more choice and variety than students in big schools with many elective choices. This is possible because one of the mandatory courses is Foundations of Inquiry, where students get to choose their own topics.
In Foundations of Inquiry, students create a working portfolio. Using OneNote, they share their documentation of work and progress with their teacher. They will include photographs, videos, and journaling, as well as reflections, progress reports, and copies of presentations done as part of the process. These notes are not public, beyond teacher access. In a way, these portfolios are the rough draft of what’s being done.
We also encourage students to publicly share their work. This can include on a blog or website, or a presentation beyond the classroom. It can include contacting mentors and experts and sharing what they have done. And it can include creating videos or doing presentations to family and community at school. These are public opportunities to share their portfolio, and this portfolio is polished and ready for sharing out in the open.
A daily journal like this is sort of a mix between the two kinds of portfolios. Writing every day, I don’t get to share polished work. I have no editors, I am generally sharing my first draft, looked over only by myself, once or twice, before scheduling the post to go live at 7:22am on most mornings… a random time I have selected and stick to on weekdays, when I’m up and writing before 5:30am. Weekends I publish later, and immediately after writing, rather than scheduling.
This is by all means a working portfolio. Some of my ideas are half baked. Some are fleeting thoughts expanded into a handful of sentences. Some are ideas like this where I give a long background before getting to the idea at hand. Some are thoughtful reflections that seem far more thought out than they actually are. And some really aren’t that good, and wouldn’t pass an editor, or even myself if I looked at it two days later.
A journal like my Daily-Ink is a constant work in progress, it is a working portfolio of ideas and thoughts. Yet, it is also very public. When I schedule a post, it automatically goes to RRS feeds, it gets put onto a Facebook page, and it is shared through Twitter and LinkedIn posts. It is put on public display on many fronts for anyone interested to see. It’s a glimpse into my mind, and it shows the rough edges. It is at once a draft and a final copy.
I don’t think many people would be comfortable doing this every day. I have to say that it is a huge commitment, but a rewarding one. Sometimes words flow and I feel an incredible sense of satisfaction. Sometimes I stare at a blank page with no idea what to write, questioning why I do this to myself? But, I wrote this one day and now share it as my blog tag line:
Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
As I state in the post, “The act of writing makes me a better writer. The commitment to this act every single day is itself a reward, making me feel like I’ve accomplished something before I even start my work day.”
It’s not perfect, (in fact I found a typo in the quote above that I went back and changed). This is a working portfolio… it just happens to be one that I share publicly.
We had our final PAC meeting of the year last night for Inquiry Hub. At the end of the Principal’s Report I did a quick ‘Thank You’ to parents, students, and teachers. One thing I mentioned when I talked about the students was resilience. I am so impressed with how resilient students were this year.
We’ve had students deal with family hardships that no kid should have to deal with. We’ve had students who have had their own struggles that they need to face. We’ve had students who have struggled previously that have stepped up and found ways to be more successful. These students are especially resilient, and may not even realize it.
We’ve also had many students who have come to school every day and just made the most out of this year. In many respects it has been a challenging year, one where things did nothing go as expected. But students have come together and created community. They have supported each other. They have found ways to thrive.
And they’ve learned so much! I’m absolutely impressed with some of the inquiry projects that were done this year. And when I’ve watched student presentations, I’ve seen slides that are so well put together that you would think they were going to a design school. They aren’t just putting information on a page, they are conveying a coherent story. While this is usually something we consistently see with seniors, this is now something that we are seeing at every grade.
And students are committed to helping each other. They have come together and showed how much they care for one another, and supported each other. The examples I can think of are plentiful, but also a little too specific to share here without asking permission. The point being that during a global pandemic, when I’d expect to see more individual concerns for student well being, I’ve instead seen resilient kids coming together to help each other.
We don’t always give kids the credit they deserve. They are amazingly resilient and at a time when many people are dealing with hardships greater than they normally have to face, our students, our kids, have been dealt a challenging school year and have made it through this year surprisingly well.
I can’t wait to see what these kids do when we are able to provide them a full school experience next year… it’s something I really look forward to. I’m already excited about what September will bring.
I do a lot to take care of myself and for the most part, I feel good about my progress. But today I feel old.
I usually take in the attitude that age is just a number. I’m as young as I believe that I am. Today my age wins.
Saturday on my 5km walk with my wife, she decided to jog for some of it. I enjoy jogging at my wife’s pace and thought nothing of it. I will run on my treadmill faster than this, and for longer than the two sections we jogged for. Sunday after my archery I did an 8 minute leg workout that I usually do, and added about 4 reps of an assisted pistol squat, because I’m very slowly trying to get myself to the point that I can do these.
But by Sunday night my knee was hurting. I don’t know why, but think it might be running on uneven terrain rather than on the treadmill, or trying the pistol squat after my 8 minute workout, when my legs are fatigued. Then I got a hip cramp that night.
After this my shoulders and back tightened up and for the first time in several months I felt shoulder pain. I only did one exercise with my arms that was slightly different than my usual routine, and I intentionally did it with light weights since it was new. Besides, it was a bicep exercise, not a shoulder one.
This ache caused me to tense up my upper back and the tension between my shoulder blades was so tight, I had to push my back into doorway jams to work the kinks out several times during the day… basically using the corners of the doorway to massage the knots out of my upper back.
Old. That’s the feeling this morning. I feel like the rust has formed on my joints, and the whole machine is seizing up. This morning I’ll ride my stationary bike for 20 leisurely minutes, do some stretching, and that will be my workout. Tomorrow I have a massage booked and it will be a painful one. A lot of deep tissue work on my upper back, and hamstring work because my tight hamstrings tend to be the root of my leg and hip issues.
Maybe after that I can remember why I work so hard to take care of myself, remember to spend more time stretching, and start to feel young again. Maybe I need reminders like this to refocus me. When I don’t exercise, my back pain becomes chronic. But I have to say that it’s not fun to ache in several places at once, and while exercise usually keeps the rust away, right now this machine feels old and rusty.
This morning my age is getting the best of me… but I’m not done feeling young. I’ll work my way back to healthy, and oil these joints back to fully operational again. The alternative to this is being lazy and letting myself fall back into a life of daily pain, and feeling even older than I do today. No, I’d rather keep active and find my way back to feeling young again.
Yesterday at my archery practice my thoughts were my enemy. I got into a negative flow of thinking that I couldn’t break. It seemed as though every thought I had related to reasons why I would not hit the center of the target. My scores weren’t horrible, but they also weren’t anything close to what I’m capable of. It wasn’t so much the score that bothered me, it was my inability to get out of a negative loop of thinking.
I often wonder what goes through other people’s heads when they think. Are their minds as busy as mine? Do they have a constant internal dialogue that doesn’t shut up? For me, there is always a dialogue going on, and it isn’t always helpful. I sometimes wonder if I have some kind of attention deficit issue, with my mind bouncing from idea to idea.
Sometimes I feel like this is a super power, because I can make lateral connections to things others don’t see. Other times it’s more like a disability, with an inability to truly focus. And still other times (though less common) my thoughts can sink me into a zone of singular focus. This can happen when I’m writing, and I can start to put words on paper, intuitively knowing the beginning, middle, and end, before the world can get from my mind to the page. I love these moments, but they don’t come often.
What comes most often is a busy, somewhat clouded mind that is easily distracted. One that requires constant reminding to stay on task. I’ve figured out how to manage this, how to be effective, even when my mind wants to wander and wonder. But sometimes, like yesterday’s archery practice, I become my own worst enemy. I try to convince myself that I can focus and get away from the negative thoughts, but I can’t. Negative thoughts prevail. Negative internal dialogue persists.
I can get this way with meditation too. I can get so that every attempt to focus on my breath lasts only seconds before I’m fighting off distraction. And then the distractions become the only thing I can think of. These sessions don’t prove to be very meditative. They become 10 minutes of thinking that I need to be better at mediating, rather than actual meditation.
Yesterday, a clouded mind took over my archery practice. I didn’t practice archery, I practiced the art of negative thinking. The art of getting in my own way. The art of distraction. I need to learn a strategy to get my head out of these dark clouds when they come. I need to metaphorically clear the skies, and let the sun shine through… or at least pack an umbrella.
This is an observation, not me beating myself up. I’ve been on a good healthy living kick and in the best shape I’ve been in years. However today I looked at my healthy living calendar and I had a target weight written on it… I’m not close to it. I haven’t made any gains that I hoped to.
I’ve already realized that I need to reset goals, but now I think I need to just stop making goals beyond my calendar chart. That chart has been something that keeps me ‘on target’, while other goals leave me disappointed when I don’t meet them. There is a lot going on these days, with the school year ending and a visit home planned, and camping holidays booked… and yet I’m exercising 5-6 timed a week; I’m shooting arrows regularly; I’m enjoying writing every day; and I’ve only missed a couple meditations this year. These are mini celebrations that I don’t need to cloud with unmet goals that push me beyond what I’m prepared to do.
I’m getting stronger, I’m looking and feeling good, I’m meeting my targets I’ve places on myself. I don’t need to push, push, push, and add goals that are too much for me… I just needed to say that ‘out loud’ to convince myself.
I’m trying to set up a new pump, sand filter, and solar panels for our above ground pool. Whenever I do something like this, my ineptitude at being a handyman goes on full display.
Wrong items picked up at Home Depot, not having everything I need, and hours of watching other people do what I want to do on YouTube, lead to hours of work and very slow progress. To top it off, the flexible piping that was supposed to arrive yesterday still hasn’t come in.
So now I have a half-done job that can’t be finished, and even when the piping comes in, I’m still not 100% sure how I’m going to strap the solar panels onto my garage roof?
I wish I had more skills in this area. I don’t. The good news is that I got a fair bit done today… by putting a lot of time into the project. However, there is still a fair bit to do, I’ll probably end up at Home Depot 2-3 more times, and I’ll be rewatching a few videos when I’m ready to start the new pump and filter up. Such is the life of an un-handyman trying to do handy things. If I keep doing things like this, hopefully I’ll be able to remove the ‘un’ and just call myself handy.
A couple days ago I wrote this about a heavy 3am rainfall that woke me up:
“The sound took me back to my childhood. In Barbados we would have these short, intense rain showers. They seldom lasted more than 20 minutes and they came and left without warning. We had a galvanized roof and the sound of heavy rain hitting it was thunderous. But it was never scary. As loud and fierce as the rain sounded hitting corrugated metal above us, it was also a sound that was soothing, comforting.”
In a video chat my dad said he read it and said that it brought back memories for him too. My youngest daughter joined me on the phone and he asked if she had read it, she hadn’t. So he went on to ask if she knew the sound of rain on a galvanized roof. She didn’t know what that was. Then, like me, he went on to describe a corrugated metal roof. I said, she probably doesn’t know what that is either… she didn’t.
We have an aluminum roof on our current house, so a metal roof isn’t an unknown thing, but a loud, uninsulated, galvanized, corrugated metal roof is not something common to Canada. It is something a tropical islander would know all too well.
Here is a video sharing the sound of ‘heavy rain’ falling on a galvanized, corrugated metal roof:
https://youtu.be/VDu-YwKJ2uA
While the video description says ‘heavy rain’, this sounds quite gentle. It’s a sound of a constant flow. Often as a kid, when the sound of rain on a roof woke me up during the night, it would be an intense and truly heavy rain attacking the roof that would wake me. It would settle to the sound in the video, but imagine a louder, more violent version of this thundering above as a passing storm went by.
It was interesting to realize that the experience I was describing could connect my dad to a shared experience, but the same description meant nothing to my daughter. It made me realize that I was sharing a contextual experience that not everyone has had. Furthermore, here in Vancouver, while it rains a lot, the rain just isn’t the same as in Barbados.
The Bajan rains come fast and are intense, and leave as quickly as they come. Here in Vancouver it can drizzle for hours. In Barbados when it rains you stay under cover because you know it will stop soon, and a 15 second walk from your car to inside would leave you drenched like you went into the shower with your clothes on. Here in Vancouver, it rains far more often and I never carry an umbrella. For most rainfalls here, I don’t even think about covering my head when I walk in the rain for a minute. Rain here is not rain everywhere.
I’m reminded of the Inuit having several terms for snow, while we just call it snow. And that some cultures can’t distinguish between blue and green, because they don’t have a term for blue, but they also see shades of green that we can’t distinguish or tell apart. Our contexts growing up shape us. And our experiences don’t always create a shared understanding. To me a corrugated, galvanized roof is a musical instrument played by rain, to others it is an unfamiliar sound.
