Bring on 2007

Happy New Years everyone. It is still good to be home with the family. I saw some friends in passing atchurch but I did not get to greet everyone, unfortunately. So many people so little time.

So you would think that since I am home that I would have lots of outings and coffeetime with people. Well since this is my second blog entry since the Christmas hoiday, one could guess that my Christmas holidays were not the social event of my year. It doesn't help that I have a horrid chest cough and a raspy voice. I can't really call people up and say, "Hey want to go for a coffee so that I can breathe all my sick germs on you."

In fact my most intimate moment this holidays was with my optometrist yesterday. I have not had a male gaze into my eyes for quite so long. In fact we sat nearly nose to nose and I had to answer all of his questions in my deep throaty voice. "Yes I have been thinking about contacts" "OK I will make another appointment with you at Easter time to get contacts fitted." I found a lot of humour in the situation.

Anways may all of my readers (there might be 5 now) have a blessed new years and find true intimacy and lots of adventure in 2007.

Ahh Christmas

I am at home enjoying a much deserved Christmas break and life is grand. I love Christmas and other family celebrations. I am lucky to be in a family where everything is celebrated and that philosphy is being handed down to my nieces. The oldest niece celebrates everything with you. "Yeah Jen you got the top off of the jar of salsa. Hip Hip Hurray." She is the biggest cheerleader for everyone. The youngest niece finds joy in everything and spreads that joy to everyone. "Den, Chrisa mis lights." So needless to say. opening presents was a lot of fun and took a very long time.

This Christmas though was tinged with bittersweet sorrow. First, there was my cousin Wendililly who is off galavanting in Europe and having a difficult time being alone. We missed her presence alot. The strategically placed pictures of Wendy and the surprise phonecall did not ease our longing for her. Then there was my sister, who is having another difficult pregnancy. She can't keep any food down and is losing weight. Her energy is at an all time low. She had to be taken to the hospital on Christmas to get intravenous fluids given to her. It was hard for me to see my normally vibrant sister struggle to smile and laugh. Then there was my brother and sister in law, childless and waiting with hopeful expectation for a mother to choose them to adopt her baby. You could sense their enjoyment of the nieces tinged with something else. Then there were all the other private sorrows and struggles.

Truly real joy is found in the midst of heartache and pain.

Reasons

OK as I promised here are some pictures showing you the reasons why I love Trout. (I never knew it was so easy to post pictures. I will definitely be doing this more often.) UM yeah that was written before I tried. Dial up and uploading just don't mix well. Oh well I will get a few Christmas cards written - multitasking is where it is at.

#1 - Spawning Fish. Both in the spring and the fall, the creek just below my house has fish battling the current and predators to lay their eggs. This fall, the bottom of the creek was carpeted with fish. The creek is shallow enough that the fins stick out of the water. The locals love it. They will bring down their families, quads, nets, sticks, rocks and baseball bats to catch a load of fish to smoke. This will feed them for the winter.

#2 The Predators. I teach science so here comes my lecture on the food chain. If you have an abundant food source, you will have an abundant number of predators. This shows a healthy ecosystem. Well, not only do we have a carpet of fish in our stream, we have a family of eagles living right by the creek. At any given moment, I can look out my window at the tall tree across the creek and see an eagle or maybe two. They are bald eagles but last spring I also saw a golden eagle. It was so beautiful. My favorite Trout moment is when I was going for a walk and within two minutes I saw a bald eagle, a blue heron and a pelican fly right over my head. People pay big bucks to see this type of wild life in an isolated setting.

#3 - OK that is all the pictures I have folks but there are many more reasons why I love Trout but for legal reasons I can't put their pictures up - I hate FOIP. But all those other reasons make it so worth while to be up here. And what is better, I think they are finally coming around and realizing that I mean business and even maybe possibly respecting me for it. I haven't been sworn at personally for over a week now. Things are definitely improving. There have been no major tragedies this year in the community. Yet this peace is tenuous at best. At any moment, another straw could enter my students lives and start an avalanche of issues. I pray that the peace will hold. Not for my sake but for the sake of my students who have seen way more than they ever should and who have endured such pain. I pray that the peace will hold so that they can rebuild their self-esteem, regain hope and relearn the beauty that life offers.

Forgotten but not gone

I knoe it has been awhile and I know that I have yet to post the promised pictures and I know that I really don't have any excuses but I am going to try to make them up anyways.

Excuse #1: Dial up internet. I get so frustrated with the slowness that I only set one day aside to do all internet business. Sunday is my day to read e-mails and explore the internet and I have been busy for two weeks of Sundays.

Excuse #2: Television. It is both by bane and my joy. Yes it does while away the lonely hours in Trout but I find that I don't do anything anymore except sit on my butt and watch TV where as before I would sit on my butt and surf my excurtiatingly slow internet.

Excuse #3: New Trout Technocrats. You see before, back in the day, it just use to be me surfing the net so the dial up wasn't so bad. But now the locals are buying computers and connecting to the net. I have no idea how this fits into my excuse for not updating my blog but it is a useless piece of information.

Excuse #4: Big Brother. You see we have high speed internet at school but it is very closely regulated. A lot of sites are blocked and um "they" watch what you are doing. I really don't want the powers that be knowing I blog because often I talk about them.

Excuse #5: Family Reunions. Two Sunday's ago I was in Saskatchewan celebrating my Grandmother's 90th birthday with the rest of my family. It was worth missing my blog for because in celebrating her we also celebrated God's faithfulness. He has been faithful to her and to her family. I hope that faith is a legacy that will continue on for many generations in our family.

Excuse #6: Those damn Liberals. Last weekend I let my geekiness show and watched the Liberal Leadership Convention all weekend. I put up my Christmas decorations to the intrigue and politiking of the liberals. I find politics rather fascinating. Yes I am a geek.

Excuse #7: Banking. I need to go do my banking and then teach myslf how to post photos - rather exciting. I promise that those pictures are coming and that I am still alive and very well.

Tune out

The other day I had to turn off the news. It wasn't because I couldn't handle yet more bad news from the middle east or another story that shows the absolute depravity of man. No it was because I couln't handle the fact that Tommy and Katie's wedding was newsworthy enough to open the news broadcast. "Finally TomKat is married. The dream wedding of the year in Rome." GAG!!! Maybe this does show our depravity - a million dollar plus wedding when there is starvation all around. Focus on annoying celebrities instead of the world's problems. AHHHH!!!

OK now that I got that out of my system - Today is a day of cleaning up computer files and backing up information. So thrilling I know. Then hopefully I can compress my computer files, put on new picture files and maybe even try to post some pictures that show the reasons that I love Trout. So stay tuned . . .

An eventful week

Tuesday was supposed to be staff meeting. At about 2:00, when I was supposed to dismiss my students, My sixth sense picked up a kerfuffle in the hallway. I wondered out of class and into the computer lab. My sense of smell was assailed by the smell of smoke. "What is going on in here?" I asked. One of the assistants answered, "There was a fire in here. There was smoke coming from there." And she pointed to stains on the ceiling. Black stains where last year the ceiling leaked during the spring melt. As I was shaking my head in amazement at our crappy school, one of the other teachers entered the room. "We need to leave the school now!!" Well of course we do. There was smoke coming from out of our ceiling. All of those practice fire drills and we forget to talk about what you do when you actually see one. The answer: Pull the fire alarm.

Anyways I digress. The school was evacuated for the rest of the afternoon until the source of the fire could be determined. Apparently one of the wires was smoldering. One of the wires that is not water protected. The wiring that got wet last spring when our ceiling leaked. So do you think they are going to actually fix the problem this time so that no more fires occur?

There was some interesting images and thoughts that came out of this mini adventure. First was the Trout Lake "fire truck". No lights, no cute firemen, no training. Just a toothless local driving the MD water truck that is also used to deliver water to homes. It is a good thing that there was only smouldering because if there had been flames, the "fireman" would have used water. Not a good thing to do with an electrical problem (or so I am told). The store owner asked us why we didn't phone the MD and ask them to bring a big fan in order to fan the flames and actually let the fire do some damage. Well if the wiring is not fixed and this happens again, we know what to do.

Well enough of that. On to other events. I have a visitor this weekend. One of the teachers from last year is here visiting. Right now she is watching NASCAR. It is so good having her around this weekend as it forces me to be more active. Friday, we went ice skating on the creek with some of our students. It was so nice to lace up my skates for the first time this season and skate outside on natural ice with the snow sparkiling all around us. Having my friend here reminds me of why I love this place. Having her here confirms that once again we are making progress in the school and that we have wonderful staff this year. A great mid fall boost of spirits.

Away

So I was in Slave Lake this week, hanging out with fellow teachers and learning about the developmental process of learning Math. It was very interesting. It made me want to teach kindergarten where you can start building the knowledge that they need instead of teaching Junior High where the students are so far behind. We looked at math misconceptions and I had a few "AHA" moments. Like, "AHA that is why student X has trouble with decimals" or "AHA I really suck at math. I still use my fingers to add - kind of - it's not as if I count them, I just visualize them. We spent two hours discussing counting and what could go wrong when a student is learning how to count. There is a lot of mistakes and errors that could happen in those little brains.

OK now that I have bored you all to tears with my Mathematic nerdiness, I should really move on. Last week, I told you, my faithful readers, about my difficulties in getting away. Well apparently my difficulties did not end there. I got to my hotel and automatically looked for a hair dryer. I just assume that all hotel rooms will have one available. That is a bad assumption to make. Then I went to brush my teeth. MMmm yeah I had forgotten my toothbrush and toothpaste. Good thing the hotel did have the foresight to provide their clientele with mouthwash. The next morning I woke up and tried to get dressed. I only had my sports bra and had forgotten a T-shirt. Then I tried to get my halloween costume together. Yep I forgot that too. So I decided to phone someone - you guessed it - no cell phone. Every once in awhile I have these episodes where my brain completely dissapates and goes away.

It was fun hanging out with teachers. One night we went to the pub and some teachers got a little intoxicated. One teacher gets really philisophical when drinking so we discussed religion. My friend, after discovering that I was "religious", gave up her crusade of finding someone for me in Red Earth - I already knew that that would be difficult.

Another teacher gets really needy when she is drinking so she exclaimed to the world how she loved men and tried to find me one. "Your life will change when you have a guy around. You need a man." Well anyone who knows me knows how that irks me. I tried to convince those around that in fact I was content being single. Later I thought about what I meant by that. You see, this lady needed someone to tell her that she is beautiful. Her opinion of herself depended on what a guy thought of her. My opinion of myself is dependant on what God thinks of me and He thinks I am very beautiful inside and out. I am content with that heavenly opinion.

So just a reminder to all of my readers (I think there is two of you). You are all gorgeous creations of God.