Tag Archives: life

Anything and Nothing

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I am reveling in the fact that I am all done my coursework until the New Year! It is an incredible feeling, after 14 months of more-or-less non-stop school, to have time to do anything or nothing. I am enjoying being able to come home from work and read a book or knit, guilt free. I can go to bed at 9pm without feeling that I’ve missed out on school work. Or I can stay up until midnight reading a book “for fun”. It really is a wonderful thing. Whole days have gone by without me turning on my computer. The computer may feel left out, but I love leaving it off! The downside is that I am getting out of practice writing and my journaling and blogging suffers.

I’m also beginning to prepare myself for a busy January. I’ll be doing my practicum (here and here) four days a week as well as hopefully working two days a week. That will give me approximately only Sunday, and the odd Thursday afternoon, to sleep, read, and catch up with people. As a result, I’ve started to let go of other commitments. The major weight lifted is that I’ve resigned from the committee at church that was sucking up my time (and my soul…).

Until then, I’ll be reading up a storm and working on some knitting projects. I sewed a skirt on Saturday and started a new knitting project on Sunday. I’m ambitiously reading a 700+ page non-fiction book “for fun” and have four more on the floor to get through between now and Christmas. I have a good supply of chocolate and tea, not to mention the leftover mulled wine and spiced apple cider left from my party on the weekend. I could get used to this.

#yyjsnowapocalypse

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For those of you not in the Twittersphere, the title of this entry is a Twitter hashtag. What is a hashtag, you may ask? It is a way to create groupings on Twitter. For example, people “tweeting” in Victoria often use #yyj to signify that the content of that tweet relates to the city of Victoria. YYJ is our airport code.

Monday, the Victoria hashtag of choice, however, was “yyjsnowapocalypse”. Plain and simple, this means that when it snows, we freak out while the rest of the country enjoys a good laugh at our expense. What constitutes a snowstorm in Victoria has the rest of the country merely increasing the speed of their windshield wipers. Jack Knox, of the Times-Colonist, wrote a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek piece about this in his article last week.

Consequently, I’ve devised a step-by-step guide to Victoria’s snow weather:

  1. Environment Canada issues “Heavy Snowfall Warning” for the region.
  2. Mass hysteria and panic ensues: salt and snowshovels sell out, stores close early, people leave work early, a run on tire shops occurs as people rush to get tires installed.
  3. The first few snowflakes fall.
  4. Hysteria continues and the weather is now all that we can talk about.
  5. It continues to snow. Perhaps a collected accumulation of 4-6 cm.
  6. Public transit is running 1 hour behind on the routes which are still open. Many routes are suspended or have altered routes.
  7. CRD Police forces close down certain roads, specifically anything with a slight incline or decline.
  8. Anyone who did not  already leave work early, does. Shops close, meetings are cancelled. Taxis make do a roaring business driving everyone who was too afraid to drive their own car home.
  9. Three days later, the city is still reeling and Gillian is still riding her bicycle.

Seven

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Everyone has defining moments, the kind that you can point to and say “I remember where I was when…” For many people of my generation, we can remember where we were, what we were doing when Princess Diana died, when the aeroplanes crashed into the Twin Towers. For my parents generation, they remember when man first walked on the moon, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and so on.

For me, I add November 5, 2003.

November 4, 2003 was a fairly normal day in our abnormal life. We had some good friends from our Ontario days visiting us in Prince George, where we lived at the time. At home was Dad, Mum, and me. Jen was at school in Edmonton. We did the usual dinner, spend some time with Mum, go to bed. I likely stayed up late working on a paper in the den. I don’t really remember anything special about November 4th.

Sometime between 5 and 5:30 am on November 5th I woke up to Dad pounding up the stairs. He had been sleeping in the living room on one of our bunk beds, beside the hospital bed Mum had been sleeping in for a few months. I jumped out of bed and met Dad at the top of the stairs.

“She’s gone. She must have stopped breathing sometime after we were up at 1am. I woke up and didn’t hear the oxygen going any more and I knew something was wrong. She’s gone.”

And now, when people recite the old verse, “Remember, remember the Fifth of November…” I remember. But I remember someone else.

circa 1981
Photo from Aunt Nancy’s slides.

November. School and San Fran.

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And then it was November. I’m not sure where October went. Nor September for that matter.

One week left in my coursework and I am frantically researching and writing my final paper for the course. It isn’t supposed to be long but there is a lot of research in the area and it is harder to write something when there is a lot already written on the topic. I feel like I have to read absolutely everything before writing the paper which has meant at least 3 days of reading and note-taking so far. All of that for a ten page paper seems excessive.

Because I am doing all of that, I haven’t spent nearly as much time planning the upcoming trip to San Francisco as I would like. I’m relying on my sister’s preparation and the guidebook given to me by my friend. A week from now, I’ll be basking in San Francisco-ness and enjoying the many shows there. I have no idea how/what to pack as it looks like it is 10 degrees warmer there than here but I need to be ready for rain and fog. Plus, I need to bring my computer as I’ll have to do some school work from there. At least I can travel and do school all at once.

Life and All That

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I went to a conference on Stress in the Family System last weekend. I’m pretty sure the stress part was describing me. One of the presenters was talking about the biological aspects of stress – that long-term stress results in hippocampal shrinkage (which is not good). However he also said that learning increases hippocampal size. My notes in the margin read “Hopefully my learning increases are countering my stress decreases.”

Its been a long few weeks. I’m trying to finish my last course on a strong note, however I’m kind of over paper writing at the moment. On top of that, I need to do some magic like I did this summer where I work myself ahead of the game so that I can go on holidays. I’m going on holidays the last week of my course… Not that school is providing all of my stress. There are plenty of other things contributing to that. I’ve begun to reduce me commitment level and hopefully things will be good from here on in. Getting back into a yoga routine has helped as well, though I’m still not going as much as I’d like to be.

Until next time… maybe check the side bar? 140 characters is about the peak of my mental contributions to the blogosphere lately.

Coming Soon, to a Church Near Me

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I feel like nothing noteworthy has happened over the last two weeks though I know that is completely untrue. In reality, I’ve been working my butt off organizing things for church this fall, keeping up with school work (and trying to learn things at the same time), going to concerts, and working 20+hours a week.

It is the first thing, fall programing at church, that seems to suck up all available time. I have a few theories about why that is. First of all, we’ve decided to undertake a fairly ambitious project this fall and I have ended up unofficially spear-heading it. We will be hosting an interdenominational moderated panel discussion of Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity. I’ve been working with a bunch of others, with varying levels of motivation and productivity, to draw together a group of people from within Victoria to speak to one or more of the questions Brian raises in his book. Each evening will also have some small group discussion time and a space for questions and answers. It has the potential to generate a lot of good conversations, continuing on some of the ones began back in May with the conference we hosted.

The time consuming part has been the liaising with various people to get them to be involved and the endless number of committee meetings that seems to entail. As much as I try to empower people to take initiative and make decisions for themselves, there seems to be an ingrained culture at church (my current one anyway, I have not seen it at every church I have been a part of, thankfully) where we cannot breathe without having someone hold our hands. In the process of planning large events, that usually means fortnightly committee meetings so we can go around and around in circles discussing the same issue repeatedly because we are not sure we are allowed to act independently. It drives me mad.

But, the sessions are going to be really good. I am excited about some of the panelists we have lined up and the conversations that will ensue. There is more information on the Facebook page if you are in Victoria and want to check it out.

Other People’s Sweat

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned I’d been doing hot yoga for awhile. I’ve been in and out of town over the last couple weeks, consequently today was my first time back at it in about 10 days. I went to a different class time than I usually go to and it was a little fuller than the 6am class usually is. Not to mention it seemed a little hotter than usual today.

Somehow, I managed to be sandwiched in between three men and the wall. Not that I minded or than their gender matters (other than the fact that men seem to sweat more in hot yoga), although the gentleman to my right was taking himself a little too seriously.

Everyone sweats in hot yoga. I, who do not sweat much on the court or field, even sweat in hot yoga. I don’t mind sweat; after all, it is cleaning out my body. On the other hand, I definitely mind other people’s sweat. So when said gentleman to my right enthusiastically swung his arms up on the FIRST POSE after the initial breathing exercise and showered me with a spray of his sweat, I knew it would not be a good class.

I spent a good portion of the rest of the class striving to stay out of the way of his spray.

At about halfway through the class, we transition from standing poses to mat poses. At this point I noticed that gentleman to the front of me is sweating profusely. How I missed this earlier, I do not know. All I know is at this point, his towel on top of his mat is drenched and it has begun to overflow to the floor. This would have been fine (although gross) if the overflow had not been snaking its way towards me. Fortunately, the class ended before I had to contemplate critical measures. I emerged, drenched with (mostly) my own sweat and will live to yoga another day.

Vancouver Photos

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Some pictures from last weeks time in Vancouver. I decided to play tourist in and around Granville Island, since it was lovely weather and I haven’t taken many photos around there before.

Oh, and I did some shopping. Hat, blazer, and dress are new… Yay for sales and for small, independent shops that we don’t have in Victoria!