Must Be Soggy Camping Today

It's Sunday, Labour Day long weekend. We've been helping David, Richard's brother move to a new place. This will be his first time away from home and he's very positive about the change. He will have quite a bit of work to do unpacking and getting all his stuff sorted out. On Tuesday he is starting at a different McDonald's closer to where he's now going to be living. Stella, his caregiver, is going to do travel training with him tomorrow so he'll know how to get to work and back.

David moving is just another of the changes this fall brings. Richard will be working all next week. He will be the guy who has to get up and make a lunch and head off. It will be interesting because all weeks won't necessarily be like that, although he was pretty booked up last year.

I had another anxiety dream last night but it wasn't about teaching! I take this to be a very good sign. It was something about singing in the opera chorus which I don't think I'll be doing any time soon.

The weather today is grey, rainy and cool. It's a rather gentle rain so maybe it will soak into the lawn. I think it's supposed to be a bit warmer tomorrow. I don't have any complaints though. We're in the house, warm and dry and not in a tent. It's amazing how many times I say to myself that I'm glad I'm not in a tent. I think all that wilderness camping we did has made me much more appreciative of our nice cozy house. Not that we minded the camping; it was fun. It's just that I always have that experience in the back of my mind and I often think of how comfortable my existence is compared to what it could be, even if the discomfort when we were camping was voluntary.

The adventure continues.

Same Drummer, Different Rhythm

I spent the day doing some serious wood working. Although I still work at a snail's pace I'm actually getting faster. Instead of taking 5 days to make one board flat square and smooth on six sides using hand tools, I managed 4 boards in a day today. Actually that's not quite fair because I used a couple of pieces of maple that had been pretty much cut square and had been run through the band saw so I didn't have to start from rough stock there. I'm going to make the ends of the box from pieces cut from the walnut of the foot board of Mum's bed. It was up in her attic for years and got water damage so the auction places didn't want it. Because I cut the walnut pieces out with a hand saw the edges needed some straightening up. Since the pieces were already finished on two sides it was just a matter of taking off the finish with a hand plane and not introducing any bumps and hollows in the process.

One of the problems of working with walnut is that it stains your skin. I'm used to having chalk everywhere but that's easier to get off. At least if it doesn't come off that easily it won't come off on clothes and papers and such.

This is the Friday night of the Labour Day long weekend. It's very nice to feel rested on a Friday night, another new sensation. There have been so many Labour Day Fridays that we've been travelling somewhere to cycle or canoe. This weekend we're content to stay home and out of the campgrounds.

I remember one Labour Day weekend when we went up to canoe from Jasper to Hinton. I think we got back at about one o'clock Tuesday morning and Richard and I both had to go teach after a few hours sleep. We managed better most long weekends when we went out to ride the Silver Triangle in central B.C. I noted one time on the way out that we had spent as much time driving as we had working that day. On the way home we tried to leave in the early afternoon so we would get home before midnight.

Part of the routine was to pick up a couple of submarine sandwiches before we left Calgary and eat them in the car as we drove. I think we had just about every vehicle we ever owned out on the Silver Triangle. We went with the Tercel with a roof rack on top for the bikes. We took the Volkswagen van out and on one trip it only had one headlight that worked. It was pretty exciting driving windy roads without binocular vision so to speak. We took our Toyota van to carry the tandem and we took the big brown camper van. I wonder how many times we actually did that trip. The last time we did the trip was the year Princess Diana died. We were in the windy campground in Kaslo when we heard the news. We intended to do the ride other years since then but one year I broke my foot and another I broke my collar bone. It never seemed to work out.

Now I think we'll try to travel at times other than long weekends unless, of course, there's some trip we want to do that is only offered on a long weekend. Different rhythms indeed.

In some ways the Silver Triangle was my favourite weekend ride with the Elbow Valley Cycle club. Usually we were in good shape having ridden quite a bit over the summer. We got a chance to see the Kokanee salmon spawning and it was very interesting staying at Lemon Creek which was the site of a former Japanese internment camp during the second world war. Some years the weather was quite hot and others it was cold and rainy. It always felt like the last big fling of the summer before work closed in again. Perhaps that's why the trip stands out. The year will take on entirely different rhythms now. It will be interesting to see how they develop.

Makes Life Relatively Easy

Who'd a thunk I'd spend my first couple of days of retirement running about getting teeth done and having a booboo on the car looked at. Mind you, the reason I haven't had the booboo on the car fixed before now is that it really hasn't been urgent. The car works fine. It was one of those nasty light pole things. I had gone to get Vietnamese subs for supper on my way home from school last spring and I parked beside a light pole. When I came to pull out I didn't realize that there was a base on the stupid thing that was much below my eye level. Scrrrrrrrape, you know the ominous sound, all down the side and the front bumper.

Just a little paint I thought. Wrong. Apparently they will need to replace part of the frame on the one side and that ain't a gonna be cheap. Also I needed to fill out a police report and get a damage sticker. Had I been teaching, all this would have been a major pain in the butt since I wouldn't have been available to sit on hold on the phone and wouldn't have been able to take calls from the various people involved. Being retired it's more of a 'ho hum this is a bit more complicated than I thought but oh well.' I'm hoping to be able to go from initial estimate to getting a date booked to take the car in to be fixed within two or three days. That, is getting everything organized, not actually getting the car in in that length of time.

I don't have a photo to go along with the blog today. I'm trying to make it a little less text heavy but I like to write. Thanks to Robin for pointing out in the last blog entry that the picture of Richard's lathe-tool holder complete with tools is right next to the text about getting my teeth cleaned. I howled when she pointed that out. So, just to set the record straight, the picture is of wood-turning tools, not teeth-cleaning ones. I'll try to move the picture to a more appropriate spot but I may need some coaching on HTML coding to do that. In the meantime, enjoy the amusing justaposition.

Let me see, what shall I do next......

My Gums Like It

What an exciting way to spend the first real day of retirement, getting my teeth cleaned. As the hygienist worked she kept saying that I had great tissue response. I wondered if that meant that my tissues were obediently bouncing their little knees up in reflex when she hit them with her rather pointy dental tool. Apparently the pockets are not nearly as deep as they were the last time she did my teeth. Unlike when referring to money, deep pockets are not good things. "Retirement looks good on you," she said. I'm so glad my teeth and gums are happy about it.

I now have a picture of the tool rest I made for Richard's lathe. I went back to try to put it in the appropriate entry but couldn't figure out how to do it so I'll post it here.

I'd be a liar if I said there wasn't anything I didn't miss about the first day back at school. I missed seeing my colleagues and finding out what happened with their lives during the summer. That's about it.

Tonight we helped to fold newsletters for the cycling club and then sat around and talked. I found myself looking at the clock fairly frequently. I wondered what was up with that and decided that before, when I have folded newsletters, it has usually been on a school night and there has always been the weighing of what I needed to do for the next day with the enjoyment of the conversation. Old habits die hard. Once I figured that out I quit looking at the clock. I'm not missing typing names and ID numbers into class lists or trying to plan my courses for the semester.

Tomorrow promises to be another day of new experiences. I'll have to really be diligent about school zones starting next week. I'm used to just blowing through them because I'm hardly ever driving when they're in force.

The adventure continues.

Lonely Lunch Bag

There it is sitting on the top shelf of the linen cupboard with the blue carabiner for my school keys. I'm not taking it out tonight and I don't know when or if I'll take it out again. It's been a good lunch bag, custom made for Richard with with an ice cream cone and bananas embroidered on it. Richard decided that it just didn't give the right impression when he was working with system administrators and by the time he was back working with teachers I'd adopted the lunch bag as my own. It took one colleague two years to notice that it had Richard's name on it.

Sometimes it carried sandwiches with homemade bread. Sometimes it lunch was leftover Chinese food or soup or stew. Often lunch was a salad either vegetable or fruit. I went through phases. When I was at Scarlett we bought the first bread maker and I ate mostly sandwiches. While I taught at Pearson I ate spinach salads regularly. Crackers cheese and veggies were other standbys. The one consistent thing was that I very rarely bought lunch in the school cafeteria.

It was partly that I didn't want to spend the money on lunches but more that I didn't want to get into the habit. I knew that if I went to the cafeteria and decided I liked it, it would be harder and harder to make that lunch. At the beginning of the week I was very disciplined and made my lunch the night before and put it in the fridge all ready to go. As the week wore on I seemed to leave the lunch-making later and later until on Friday I would often get up and throw in an can of tuna salad or a bagel and peanut butter. If I could convince someone to go out for Vietnamese subs that was even better.

When you eat lunch at school you have to develop certain strategies. We had a microwave in the office. It was best for me to bring foods that needed to be microwaved on days when I had a preparation period right before lunch. That way I could get lunch in and out of the microwave before classes finished. It was easier for me and others as well. If I waited then I would have to take my turn on the runway and some days it seemed as if all ten people in the department needed to microwave something. Sometimes I ate my pasta cold rather than wait for the microwave. On days when I had to supervise over lunch I tried to bring sandwiches or something that was quick to eat. I should probably say 'quicker' to eat since most of us ended up eating lunch in about fifteen minutes anyway.

I only forgot my lunch a few times in the twenty-nine years I taught. The first time was in my first or second year teaching. I was still living at home with my parents and my mother, having been a teacher herself, took pity on me and made my lunch so I wouldn't have to stay up even later to make it myself. Having parents for teachers can suck when you're a kid but they really understand the job in a way that no one else can. Anyway, I realized as soon as I got to school that I didn't have my lunch. I shrugged it off and figured I'd go and get a sandwich.

About half way through the morning I got a call from the office to say that my lunch was waiting for me at the office. My mother had put the lunch in the car and driven out to the school with it. I think, in truth, it was an excuse to show a visiting aunt where I worked. That would have been okay except that one of my kids was in the office for something shortly afterwards and the secretary asked her to take the lunch to me. She entered the room and, holding the lunch bag high, announced to the class, "Ms. H your mother just delivered your lunch." I was thoroughly embarrassed and while it was a very kind gesture, Mum and I had a conversation that night. The gist of it was that I was a responsible adult and if I forgot my lunch I could solve the problem . I failed to point out that I was responsible enough to make my lunch in the first place and she was too gracious to point that out.

Another challenge was learning to eat on someone else's schedule. There simply wasn't time for snacks and I often felt I could eat the leg off a table when lunch time arrived. By the time school was over in the afternoon I was hungry again. I did get smart enough to take a snack of fruit and yogurt with me but I was often to busy or distracted to eat it. Some days it was a chore just to get from the classroom to the car because I was tired and hungry.

One of the true joys of watching all the teachers go back to school tomorrow morning will be the knowledge that I will not have to pack a lunch every day, that I can eat when I'm hungry and the lunch can be as simple as opening the fridge and taking out an apple and a piece of cheese because I can always eat again when I get hungry. I may use the lunch bag when I go hiking but it will not have to be on deck day after day any more and neither will I.

The Unexpected

As I suspected, one of the major advantages of being retired is a new way to look at time. In the past time has pretty much been the enemy, gotta get this finished before the next class comes in; gotta get to the store before it closes; gotta do this quicker so I can get home so I can go back out and do something else.

Today we had a business appointment in the morning. We enjoyed meeting the guy and sprinkled among the talk needed for the business transaction were a number of entertaining stories. We took longer than we might have done without the stories but the stories made the encounter more enjoyable. Richard had a dental appointment and we decided to go find some lunch and stay downtown.

We found a little sandwich place we didn't know existed, met someone from the church who came in for lunch and then Richard headed off for his appointment and I headed off to an art store. I certainly don't need art supplies for school anymore but maybe it's time to return to an interest I had in high school and one that's kind of been poking away at the edges of my consciousness off and on for years. I lost myself among the books, how to draw all manner of cartoon characters, how to mix colour, how to draw and how to see.

My love of books hasn't changed; only the subject matter has. When I picked up the one on how to see I thought of Freeman Patterson and his photography books. It intrigued me so I bought it. Since I still had time I went poking around some other stores and found a little tea place. I didn't know that Calgary had places that just served tea and I didn't know there were so many varieties of tea. The guy let me smell some green pear tea. Since it smelled good, I decided to try it.

They served it in a pot like a Bodum coffee maker. The tea leaves go in; you let it steep for a few minutes and then push the press down and the tea leaves are trapped on the bottom of the pot. I would never have thought of using a pot like that for tea but it makes perfect sense. The green pear tea was very nice and I want to go back to try some other varieties.

I finished my tea and went back to pick Richard up only to learn that he was going to be another 40 minutes or so. I had business at the bank so I did that and then went back to get him. He was just coming out into the waiting room as I walked in. Perfect timing.

The point of all this is that normally I would have been irritated by the change in schedule because I would have had a lot of other stuff planned and would have felt the constant weight of things that needed to be done. Today I could enjoy the surprises, lunch downtown, a new place to get tea, a new kind of tea, getting business and banking done and, when I got home I was still able to finish the lathe-tool holder I started to make for Richard yesterday.

All in all it's been a very satisfying day, going with the flow and enjoying what turns up.

Random Thoughts 1

I drove past AE Cross school yesterday and looked at the start-up information on the sign board out front. That led me back to the days when I student taught in that school. That, in turn, caused the familiar knot in my stomach. I read somewhere that the body can't tell the difference between something that is really happening and something that you're imagining clearly.

It's strange that the number one fear of people is supposedly public speaking. I'm much less nervous about public speaking and public singing than I am about teaching a class. Perhaps that's because I feel a heavy responsibility in teaching that isn't there in a one shot performance. I get very nervous just before I stand up to speak or in the measures before I have to sing but once I start I'm fine. It's all familiar and the nervousness evaporates. In teaching it never quite goes away. Perhaps that's because I'm aware that the responsibility never goes away and the responsibility of a teacher is very broad. There are moments that are fun certainly, but I don't think that I've ever fully relaxed in front of a class to the point where I reached a flow state. I wonder what it would have been like if I could have.

Teaching was a very good career. I had a lot of autonomy and I could pretty well duck the politics by going into my room and closing the door if I needed to. On a good day when a students finally sees that they are capable of more than they ever thought, it's the best job in the world and I loved working with young writers. Yes, the 'boy drool' got tedious, and after seeing so many incorrect spellings over the years it's a wonder I can even spell my own name. It enabled me to live in a world of ideas and possibilities. There was always something new to read about how the brain worked and there were always opportunities to try new things.

Despite these things teaching was never a comfortable career for me. Perhaps if it had been it would have become even more routine than it eventually did, or perhaps, I might have really been able to fly. I don't regret the time I spent teaching. I like kids and have many good memories of conversations that meant a lot to me and, I think, to the students. It's in my nature to wonder and at this time of transition in my life there is a lot to wonder about. I certainly have no desire to go back! I gave it a good shot and now I can settle into a rhythm that is more natural to me.

At Rona yesterday I met a former colleague who has been retired for two years. I was in search of casters for my scroll saw base. She told me what I've hear from so many others, "You'll love it. I've never been so busy in my life." I said I was looking forward to it. I won't take time to read the paper (we don't get one) or do the crossword (I've never liked them) but I find myself getting up, turning on the computer, reading my email and then looking up whatever interesting thing comes to mind. I suspect that my second cup of tea in the morning will be spent at the keyboard. Who knows. Today I found a new Canadian running site and I'll check out the woodworking blogs.

When tea and searched are done, I'm off to buy MDF for tool bases. I need to build a caster base for the scroll saw and I want to put casters on one of the metal cabinets that I inherited and that have been storage in my classroom for the last two years. One of them is going to become my rolling tool box. I have such a sense of freedom to research a project, plan it out and then make it happen. I suppose in teaching I did that too but the results were often invisible. I love to be able to see and touch the projects that are now a major part of my life.

Sawdust awaits.

Rats, Another One

I had another teaching dream last night. This time I was in the right school but it kept morphing so I didn't know it and a bunch of teachers knew me but I didn't know them. These little signs of going back to school, which I'm not, can stop any time now.

Today I got to practice being retired. I rode my bike downtown for a chiro appointment and had lunch with Katharine. Her meeting time was changed so I had about an hour between the time I finished with Dr. P and when I was to meet her for lunch. I decided to just go for a bit of a ride. I rode down by the zoo and say the osprey's nest with what looked like the two parents sitting up in the nest. I didn't have binoculars so I didn't stop to take a closer look. I went up the Nose Creek Pathway past Memorial Drive but not as far north as 16 ave. I sat on a bench for a while and watched the planes as they headed for the airport. The wind was blowing from the north so they were flying pretty much parallel to the part of the bike path where the bench was.

I managed to snag a table in the food court through some judicious lurking and Katharine went and got lunch for us. By 1:00 the place was pretty well cleared out. It's very easy to get to her office building from the bike path now that I know what street it's on.

The weather has been unsettled most of the day. It rained in the morning but by the time I was ready to leave the rain had stopped. On the way home from lunch the wind had picked up and there was a huge threatening cloud to the north. I looked at the situation and decided to take the nasty shorter hill by the golf course. Just as I got to the tracks a train came along so I got to watch that go by. Some people might find that frustrating but as long as I'm not in a hurry to go anywhere, I like to watch trains and planes. I made it up the hill without either getting off or falling off which was good. I was definitely winded and definitely in my granny gear.

It was a most enjoyable day, a chance to ride in cooler temperatures and at a time when there wasn't a lot of bike traffic on the pathways. There were a few runners and a couple of people walking their Yorkie. The dog was off leash and it seemed more interested in sniffing the grass around my bike than it was in continuing its walk. The woman called it twice and then if finally decided that it had better be off. In terms of other wildlife I saw a mouse or a vole cross the path. I wasn't close enough to tell which. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I'd know the difference even if I was close.

All in all a good day. It's chilly now and raining so I feel quite virtuous having done my ride and now I'm all tucked into a nice warm house, and two days ago I was cranky because the house was too hot. Gotta love that Calgary weather.

Endings and Beginnings

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last few days thinking about Pat Clifford. We had desks beside each other in the English office at Crescent Heights High School in the early '80's. Neither of us was particularly tidy and so my stuff would slop over onto Pat's desk and her stuff would slop over onto my desk. I think at one point John, our department head, put a sign up on our two desks which read "The Cluttered Wallow Award." It was the first joint award we won.

Before either of us would put the papers back on the other's pile we would read them first. It was in this way that we came to understand that we were asking some of the same questions although we had come to them from different perspectives.

We had some great conversations and somehow cooked up the idea that we should team-teach a grade 11 English class. In practice it meant having two classes but planning together and, on occasion, stuffing both classes into one ordinary classroom.

One day we had all the students sandwiched into a classroom to watch a film on Earle Birney. We had instructed them to take notes and both of us became quite agitated when we realized that we were the only two in the room scribbling furiously. Pat, being the more experienced teacher, had the wisdom to stop and ask the kids why they weren't taking notes. They replied that they didn't really know how.

That stumped both of us for a while and sent us chasing a whole series of questions that became the foundation of my teaching. We began to talk about what we paid attention to when we took notes and how we knew what was important and what wasn't. Pat had been reading Louise Rosenblatt and we asked ourselves how we could invite students to respond openly and thoughtfully to what they were viewing or reading. We wanted something from the students other than answers to questions we, as teachers, already knew the answers to. Pat commented, "I've never read a book in order to answer somebody else's questions. Have you?" Of course I hadn't.

We came up with what we called interactive notes where we invited students to reflect on what Pat called the 'good bits' of the text, the things that made them laugh, turn up their noses or want to bop the character over the head with a frying pan. We invited them to write as they read as a way of making their thinking visible to both them and us. We looked closely at what we did as readers and asked students to engage in a similar process. Mostly the students were glad to be freed from answering mind-numbing questions at the end of each story or poem.

It was Pat who asked me to present with her at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Edmonton. Before Pat, I had never considered that what I had to say might be helpful to others. As late as last year I had people say to me that they remembered presentations Pat and I had done together.

Our paths diverged as Pat moved on to a different job and then pursued her Masters. We talked occasionally and whenever we did, I came away excited by new ideas and possibilities for how to make learning conditions better for kids. About ten years after we worked together at Crescent I had another chance to work with Pat. I was tired of preparing grade 12 students for provincial exams and felt I either had to do something completely different or I had to get out of teaching. I talked to Pat about the possibility of going to back to Ernest Morrow Junior High, the school where I started my teaching career. Pat and Sharon, Pat's teaching partner, were doing some interesting work there.

Pat talked to the principal and I found myself on the first day of school in a gym with 300 soprano voices. That was only one of the shocks to my system moving from senior high to junior high. Pat and Sharon found a great teaching partner for me and the four of us spent two exciting years together. I seem to remember a bottle of red wine in the filing cabinet that would find its way out on Friday afternoons after the last of the kids in 'homework hotel' had gone. We were usually exhausted but we'd stick our feet up on one of the tables in Pat and Sharon's room, tell stories from the week and laugh our heads off.

At the end of my second year Pat and Sharon had the opportunity to found The Galileo Educational Network Association and our paths diverged again. When I had a deferred salary leave I did some work for Galileo and was once again swept up in the whirlwind of ideas and possibilities. The most exciting and rewarding periods in my career were the years I worked with Pat.

Now our lives have diverged for a final time. I attended Pat's memorial service last week, her death the conclusion to the six-year shadow of stage 4 ovarian cancer. And so September 2008 marks a new beginning for me, life after teaching, life after Pat. Pat who came with me to pick out my wedding dress, Pat who held my hand when I choked up reading what I had written during a writing retreat, Pat who asked me, when things were particularly rough, what I was doing for myself. Pat, storyteller, mentor, friend. In my mind's ear I hear her laugher and I will carry it with me into this new beginning.

You're right Pa

My mother often quoted my grandfather saying that he didn't know what he'd done but the day seemed to have gone by. I always thought that a little weird. How could you possibly not know what you've done in a day? I'm beginning to find out how quickly the days can pass and how little I can accomplish in them. It must be part of the same law stating that prep periods always go twice as fast as teaching ones. One of the highlights today was lunch with Malynda and Katherine, both of whom are getting ready to go back to teaching next week.

It's time for me to start devoting some time to my boxes again. We've been home from Europe for over two weeks and I haven't even looked at a woodworking tool, hand or power. I really don't have anything that's so pressing I can't be down in the shop. I've been seduced by the lure of surfing the net and playing with various ways to post photos. Maybe posting some box photos will help to inspire me to get back at creating shavings and fire wood.

This is the first box I made on the band saw. The top and bottom are purple heart and the case is ash. Notice the nicely turned knob on the drawer; that's courtesy of Richard.









Once I got the band saw thing going I made a whole bunch of pencil holders for the people at school. This shot was taken with the small Olympus that I got in 2003. I was in a hurry when I took the picture so I didn't do a very good job on the colour. The dark boxes are roasted maple. The process makes the wood more brittle and, although it's a nice colour, I'm not sure I really like working with it. The really light ones in front are from some fir that used to be the top of a bar in the basement of the house. We tore that down pretty fast. I'm interested in reusing wood and plan to make some boxes from the solid walnut headboard and foot board of Mum's bedroom suite. It has water damage so nobody wanted to buy it. The other boxes with the bluish cast (bad photography not the wood) are from poplar.




These are the boxes with the concealed wooden hinges that I learned to make in the course at the beginning of July. It was quite different to use power tools for most of the process but they are fun and they will look better once I get a finish on them. I don't know whether I'll make many more or not. The setup Rob had required 4 routers and a couple of jigs. Of course, I could always hand cut dovetails instead. I'm getting better at them and one of these days I'll even be able to do good ones more or less reliably.


It's kind of nice to see all the boxes lined up like that. Now I definitely need to add to the flock. I have a few people in mind for boxes and a couple of friends want me to make some for Christmas presents.

Because I'll be working in the shop a lot, I'm looking forward to is wearing T-shirts, jeans and sweats most of the time. I'm lucky that I never did have to wear high fashion 'lady clothes' to work. One of the things I did accomplish this week was to go through my clothes and get rid of a whole bunch of school stuff. My tiny closet is still a bit squished so I'll have to have another go at it sometime, but I don't seem to be able to do it all at once. I've kept some of my favourite school blouses; I'll still need to be presentable on occasion. Who knows, maybe I'll get tired of wearing T-shirts and scurbs and I'll want to put on something else. That too will be an adventure.

Teaching Dreams

Okay, so the picture has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. I just wanted to try putting a picture in. We were out taking photos at Elbow Falls yesterday, a spur of the moment thing to get out of the city and have a ride in an air conditioned car since our house isn't. 33 Celsius is definitely too hot for me.

Anyway, back to the subject. I wonder how long it will be before I stop having teaching dreams. I had another one last night. It was different from the usual theme of them. Usually I'm at the wrong school, classes have started and there's no teacher in the class at the school where I'm supposed to be. I frantically try to call someone or sometimes I get stuck in traffic. Occasionally someone has stolen my car when I try to get to the right school. I've never had the dream of being in front of a class in my underwear although I hear that happens to some people.

Last night's dream had a bit of a twist to it. I was in the right school. I had retired but for some reason my retirement hadn't quite taken effect so I was loading stuff out of the school into my car. I came into the school for another load and when I got out to the parking lot my car was gone. Since it has a built in car alarm and key less entry and start-up and the fob was in my pocket, I refused to believe that it was gone. I searched all over the lot and gradually people were leaving in their cars. When there were only about 6 cars left I had to admit that mine was gone.

Change of scene. Now I'm in the school and I have to spend the last three days of August there before I'm allowed to retire. That really isn't so bad because I don't actually have to do anything. I wander around talking to a few of the young teachers but there are very few whom I know and most of them just give me the look like I'm something from outer space. I try to find a place where I can hang out and be inconspicuous but every classroom I try is either locked or is full of kids, apparently with no teacher. I'm not sure how that all ended because my alarm went off and I woke up.

I'm sure the Freudians would have a lot of fun with those dreams. It is interesting how they seem to have flipped between not being able to be somewhere I should be to being where I should be and not knowing what to do about it. Ah well, life after teaching will be a continuous adventure as, come to think of it, was teaching.

I don't seem to have the font selection I had last night so this will have to stay as it is. That may be because I went through Picassa instead of through Blogger itself. Many things to learn.

Back to School Flyers

Has anyone else noticed that the 'Back to School' sales seem to be starting earlier and earlier? I swear I walked into Staples near the beginning of July and they had all the school supplies laid out. I can understand that people may want to plan ahead but it makes a teacher's (even a recently retired one's) heart do a little flip, and not for joy either.

Now that it's just a week before school starts I notice all sorts of things affect me differently than they did when I was teaching. I saw some yellow leaves on the road today when returning home with groceries. Normally that would give me a little stab of anxiety. Not today.

At the Co-op on a Monday there were a whole lot of people with grey hair. I thought to myself that this is the retired set that I'm now part of. Every other summer I've made no attempt to get into the habit of shopping during the day on a weekday because I knew that it would be short lived. I'm thinking that Monday afternoon might not be such a bad time besides with all that grey hair around the carts seem to move more slowly so it's easier to zip in and out of traffic. Well not really traffic exactly, but not so dead you could shoot a cannon down the aisles either.

It's a strange transition. I don't feel like one of them. I also don't feel old enough to have an account with Elderhostel but, man, do they have some cool trips. In addition to shopping on Monday, or Tuesday or whatever day I want, I'm starting to think that three holidays a year would be good. Something pretty in the fall, something warm in the winter, and something in the summer if whatever it is isn't offered at another time.

Although most of the time I don't doubt my mother's wisdom I'm beginning to wonder about her assertion that once you're retired you don't need to spend as much. That may be true when it comes to 'need' but 'want' is something entirely different.

So, what am I looking forward to?

Going to bed and sleeping until I wake up.
Sitting in my PJ's with a cup of tea looking up whether Celestial Seasonings still makes the cool brew ice tea.
Hanging out in my shop making boxes and firewood.
Going for a walk in the middle of the day.
Taking my bike out and pedalling to the zoo to take pictures.
Riding the bus around the whole loop.
Going to a movie in the middle of the afternoon.
Having coffee with friends.
Having lunch with friends, the same ones or different ones.
Taking courses perhaps in watercolour painting, or djembe.
Thinking up projects to build and then building them.
Being able to make appointments during the day without having to call a sub.
Lying on the couch and reading a book all day if I feel like it.
Actually watching TV, although it is so far off my radar I'll have to make a point of it.
Touring around the city taking pictures of the fall colours.
Having to actually pay attention to school zones.
Getting back into the gym habit so I can run some more half marathons.
Eating when I'm hungry instead of trying to fuel up for four or five hours.
Being able to go to the bathroom without having to do a safety assessment first. (Is anyone likely to punch anyone while I'm gone? What if the principal phones when I'm out? What if there's a lockdown?)
Relative silence well as silent as it can be with two budgies and a cockatiel. Getting in the car and making a trip to see my aunt in Drumheller.

I'm sure there are a bunch more things I haven't even thought of but that will do for a start. Of course there will be days when things don't go right and I get grumpy and I'm sure there will be things about teaching that I'll miss, just not yet.