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.
You don’t pick your parents. You don’t pick your country of birth. My grandfather was born in the Ukraine. I could have been too. My other grandfather escaped Poland before the second invasion in WWII. Much of his family that didn’t escape perished. I could have never come into existence.
There are children being born today that will have little or no chance of ever going to school beyond high school. Others who will start work before their 10th birthday. Still others that will know hunger in ways we never will.
We take for granted the opportunities we are given. We complain about things that others would consider a luxury… I wish my car had heated seats. I wish I had the latest phone. I asked for onion rings but they gave me fries.
Sometimes it’s worth pausing for a moment to appreciate that through sheer luck of birth, we have been given opportunities others will never get. We won a lottery that others dream of winning. Be grateful. Be thankful. Be generous. Be kind in thoughts, words, and deeds… Especially to those that have not been as lucky.
It is seldom that I hear a world leader who understands that we can not live in the past. There are so many places in the world where a challenging history of strife and unrest cause an unstable future. Disputed borders create unstable societies and civil unrest. Countless people suffer and die unnecessarily.
War and force are not the answer.
“We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new ways of domination and oppression.”
This message by Martin Kimani needs to be shared with all world leaders. It is timeless and will apply to our world for years, even decades to come.
This past weekend was a 3-day weekend, and it was wonderful to get the extra day off. I feel like I had a holiday. It’s amazing the difference between a two-day and a three-day weekend. If I were ever to start a company, I think I’d institute a 4-day work week.
I’m looking forward to work today. I feel well rested. I have thought about some goals I really want to get to. I finished an audio book that I had about 10 hours to listen to at the start of the weekend.
How different would life be if the work week was just 4 days long? Would people be more productive either at work or at home? Would happiness be greater or would people fall into a similar pattern of happiness that we have now? What would a world with 4 day weeks do to the overall creativity expressed by people?
I’d love to see an entire country try this out. I think the first thing you’d notice is positive immigration… I know I’d like to live there!
My personal best archery score in a Vegas 300 is 289. I’ve done this a few times, first in May of 2021 and most recently again in December. But I’ve been in a slump for most of 2022. In fact, I’ve had a couple scores lower than I’ve seen since before I got my personal best last May.
Today I seemed to have turned a corner and I scored a 288.
In fact, had I not had one bad shot at the top of the tenth end, I would have tied or even beaten my record.
Slumps are never fun, and this was one where I just didn’t know what I was doing wrong? I ended up moving closer and shooting again and again at closer range until I felt successful enough to move further away. This seemed to work.
I believe the slump is finally over and I’m anticipating a new record soon. It’s time to get the monkey off my back and finally score in the 299’s.
Most of us can’t imagine working on something for an hour or two then ripping it up or clicking ‘Select All’ and then hitting delete. But for students who are bitten by the perfectionist bug, it’s just something they do when what they’ve done doesn’t meet the high standard they place on themselves. They will miss a deadline because what they have written will only get them a low ‘A’, rather than a much higher one that they have their heart set on. They will have done 2 hours work on something they think will get them a 90%, then another hour and a half making it a 95%.
This is achievable for a perfectionist working on one project, but will absolutely bury them when they are trying to do this on 3 or 4 assignments simultaneously. The thing is, trying to tell a perfectionist something is ‘good enough’ is like telling a Golden Lab to save some food for later. It’s just not in their nature.
The message we try to give at our school, which has its fair share of perfectionists, is to choose your perfectionism. Don’t disregard it, but use it in some places and not in others. We do agile/scrum projects where part of the project is ‘defining done’ so that students can achieve tasks and move on, rather than spending too long on too many parts. We set challenging timelines where the focus is on completion rather than perfection.
It’s not about taking perfectionism away from a perfectionist, this is a skill many others need to learn. Instead, it’s about helping them learn to harness this skill without it consuming them. It’s about channeling perfectionism where it matters, on projects that matter, and not overwhelmingly on everything. It’s not a habit to break, it’s a skill to use when doing things where perfectionism makes a difference, rather than being something that consumes a kid with unrealistic stress and hours of wasted time.
Facebook reminded me that I just recently passed 14 years since moving from teaching to administration. My FB memory led me to reread this post, Ripples and Tidal Waves, which I wrote 2 weeks after my promotion. I had so many things that came together at that time, which led to me being a presenter at Alan November’s conference a couple years running. I was even toying with the idea to go and work for Alan. How different my life would be now if that was a wave I chose to ride!
Looking back to that point, I had no idea what was in store for me. Living in China for 2 years? Not even a consideration back then, but I did just that a year and a half later. Co-founding a public, inquiry based school? Not on the radar. The only thing I can say that was expected is that I’d still be blogging all these years later.
We never know how circumstances and decisions will end up rippling and leading us to different opportunities and challenges, but we are fortunate when we can look back to a point in our careers 14 years ago and think, “This has been a great journey I’ve been on!” From here, I have less than 1/2 this time until I retire, and so I’m left wondering what ripples lie before me? Retirement for me will not mean gardening or golfing, and I can’t sit still for too long, so in the next few years I need to look for the ripples that come my way… or I need to make them.
Yesterday morning our cat was covered in sawdust from our renovation, his eyes were streaming and he smelled like chemicals. We were extremely concerned that he poisoned himself, and gave him a bath to get the chemicals off. It wasn’t fun! At one point I had a claw stuck in me and no matter what I tried our struggling cat just stuck the claw in deeper. This is from a cat that never scratches us.
It was only after the bath was done and the vet was called for an appointment did we go outside and smell the same smell outside. Turns out that in his early morning wanderings our cat was sprayed by a skunk. Our retired neighbour was kind enough to take our cat to the vet while we went to work.
When we got home last night we gave him another bath, this time with tomato juice, and some baking soda. He’s going to need another one of these baths tonight. Now that he is curled up under my chin as I write this, I can unmistakably smell skunk. However, when it happened yesterday it was very much a chemical smell that didn’t make me think of this very familiar smell.
The good news, he isn’t poisoned. The bad news, we have a smelly cat.
I bet everyone has a story about how they almost lost an eye. A projectile of some sort just missed their eye; the corner of a car door; something in their hand that just missed their eye when they fell. There’s always a harrowing close call where someone could have lost an eye but didn’t. It’s amazing that there aren’t more people walking around our planet with an eye patch or glass eye.
There are however, a lot of people that wear glasses to improve the sight they do have. I’m just getting to that point now. When my eyes are tired I struggle to read on my phone and I depend on some 1.25 magnifiers to help me keep things in focus. It’s amazing how we’ve been able to improve the vision of people who would otherwise live in a blurry world.
A little luck, and a little science keeps us seeing the world clearly, with perspective, out of two eyes. And our world is filled with wonderful things to see. Beautiful people, food, sunsets, and all sorts of amazing things from the smallest of creatures to the vastness of distant stars in the night sky.
Sight is a gift, and it’s amazing to think of how lucky we are to see the world in all of its splendour. I don’t think we spend enough time appreciating how lucky we are to see. .
Maybe it’s from growing up in Barbados. Maybe it’s just human nature. When I wake up and know I’m going to see clear skies and a sunny day, my whole day ahead brightens.
No matter how much I want to be internally motivated, the outside world affects my mood. And so, while I can’t control the weather, I can control the people I choose to surround myself with… and I choose people who have a sunny disposition and/or people who bring the sunny disposition out of me.
There’s a reason why I call my kids ‘My Sunshines’. There’s a reason I call delightful students in my school Sunshine. It’s my nickname for people who brighten my day.
I hope you surround yourself with sunshine too… no matter what the weather.
When we moved into our house we did a renovation upstairs, converting from 4 bedrooms to 3. The front bedrooms were 9’x9′, 8’x9′, and 10’x9′. The smallest, middle room had a tiny closet and wasn’t really functional as a bedroom, and so we created 2 larger rooms out of the three. We were also able to add more room to the master bedroom, creating a second closet and an alcove for a large chest of drawers.
In the process, we tore up the ugly carpet in the hallway. We cut the carpet at the top of the stairs, and just had the plywood floor between bedrooms. When the rooms were done, we painted upstairs, and while doing so I painted a message to my wife. Her nickname is Bean, shortened from Ann-E-Bean, and so I wrote ‘Hi Bean’ halfway out of the hall closet, knowing that we were going to carpet over it in a few days.
The only thing is, we didn’t put carpet back in for about 5 years. We had a carpet runner down the hallway, and my little message was there long enough for my oldest daughter, who Ann was pregnant with when we moved in, to be able to read on her own. There was always something we were spending our money on that kept us from spending some on this final part of the upstairs renovation.
When we moved in, we knew we couldn’t afford to renovate the kitchen as well as upstairs, but after moving into a house with purple countertops and pink tiles with a pink motif behind the stove, and pink wallpaper… we realized that the house would never feel like ours if we didn’t change this. Then we updated the back yard, replaced the hot water tank, and replaced the furnace.
Instead of replacing the carpet upstairs, we’d buy new living room furniture, bedroom furniture to replace the Ikea pieces we moved in with, replace all of our windows. There was always something we were working on, and since it’s only our family that lived upstairs, we just tolerated the plywood underfloor and runner down the hallway until finally a close friend of ours essentially told us, “Either you buy carpet for upstairs or I’ll do int for you… it’s ridiculous that you’ve been living ‘under construction’ for your kids’ entire lives.”
She was right and we finally put carpet in.
Now, as we are remodelling our main floor, another 17 years later, and we decided to extend the main floor flooring up the stairs and into the upstairs hallway. Last night we came home from work and the hallway carpet was pulled up. For me it was a complete blast from the past to see my little message to my wife painted on the plywood. It brought back some fond memories. It was something that was part of our lives for years, and it was fun to see it uncovered again. It will probably be covered up today, never to be seen by us again, but I did take a photo and it really was a treat to see it again.
I also added this to our first’s bedroom, but it was covered so we didn’t see it often.
