Soft, in the quiet far off peal ( Read more... )

It is June. June is meltdown season. June is when my daughter finally has to face up to the fact that she hasn't been keeping up on her out of class work for the entire term, there is no way to catch up at this point, and she is likely to lose a full semester of credits ( Read more... )

I have four more classes to teach ( Read more... )

I am a 42 year old woman with a PhD, a demanding, intense job in a stressful environment. I have a teenaged daughter who is diabetic, and a husband who has a rare form of cancer -- so rare that now that he has lived five years beyond initial diagnosis (with the assistance of three major, organ-removing surgeries) there is no prognosis possible ( Read more... )

Wash hair. Brush straight. Brush bangs off forehead (repeat until they stay!). Twist [waist length] hair into a rope, wrap into bun, secure with pins. Shake head. Adjust pins accordingly ( Read more... )

Recently, I seem to have awakened to the fact that my body is not just a transportation medium for my brain ( Read more... )

I've always wanted to be the sort of person who coloured outside the lines -- one of those bright, flamboyant, confident people to whom one would never even consider applying the rules. I've always wanted to be an exotic bird, with bright dramatic plummage that would capture the eye, and burn into the mind the memory of its beauty and grace ( Read more... )

It is getting to the end of term now, with everything that means -- the students you've never seen in class suddenly surfacing during office hours wondering how they can avoid failing, the teaching assistants looking daggers at you in the hallway because it somehow escaped them when they looked at the syllabus that there would be marking when their ( Read more... )

The word for today is 'no'.

No surgery.
No new date.
No explanation.

That is all.

There's a Stan Rogers song that made me cry for years and years, everytime I heard it. It's called 'First Christmas'. My family, only ever nominally Christian, always got together at Christmas. While we weren't very spread out, as Canadian families go, we were just far enough apart that 'dropping in' wasn't possible, and just busy enough that ( Read more... )