life is good, but my memory? not so much.

it was a rainy, dreary day. i had to pull out a warm sweater again when i dressed for work. but despite that, it was a good day. great collaboration with a colleague. good progress on some of my projects. and a general feeling that i am regaining my confidence and getting on top of things. however, i'm not on top of everything. husband went to scotland today and tho' he told me last week, i didn't remember until he called around dinnertime from edinburgh. it's rather worrying that i don't even remember that my husband is flying to another country (tho' i did wonder why he was looking for his passport yesterday).

but at the end of the day, the rain cleared and i had walk in the garden with my camera. all of the cats came out to play, as did the sun, and it cleared my head and left my soul refreshed. despite a week filled with teachers having nervous breakdowns, time that flew by too quickly and cloudy, rainy days, a walk in the garden, accompanied by playing cats and the beauty of the golden hour sunshine on raindrops really truly can make it all better.

throwback thursday mother's day edition: young reporter

since mother's day is approaching, i thought i'd share some photos of my mom as a young markets editor at the sioux falls argus-leader in what must have been the late 50s. i wish she'd saved ALL of these clothes, as i'd love to have had them.

looking very serious about her work. i remember we had a typewriter like that around the house when i was a kid - i think it's a royal and it was a real workhorse of a machine. i do love the clickity clack of a typewriter.

how great is that skirt and jacket? i'm not sure what that is she's looking at, but there were a few of these photos that seemed staged for some purpose or other. unfortunately, i don't know the story behind them, but i hope when mom sees them, she tells me.

apparently even then, you could be too busy to leave your desk for lunch. bad habits carry on through the generations, tho' i try not to do this too often.

this one is obviously staged. i remember that yellow dot-tape from my childhood - mom used to set type in our back room and the tape from the compugraphic machines would come out in long yellow ribbons, filling a big plastic garbage can. you had to type into one machine and run it through another machine that looked the same, but turned those yellow ribbons into set columns of type for the paper. i love that one shoe has fallen off. this photo has penciled crop marks on the top and side and on the back, there's writing.

i think it says, "keep deep (as marked) Sunday" and i'm not sure what that signature says - andy? or wiley? it was obviously used in a photo spread in the sunday paper.

happy mother's day (a little early) to mom and happy throwback thursday to the rest of us.

scenes from the spring exhibition

what would homer do?

i came home to an email from the school principal today. i've written previously about the shocking lack of communication skills displayed in these emails and today's was no exception. if i were working on a ph.d. in rhetoric, these mails would be absolutely fascinating. as it is, i'm a parent of a child who is in a class with what is essentially (and unfortunately) a really bad, weak teacher, so the mail is more worrying than fascinating.

for some time now (school started in what, august, so approximately 9 months) this teacher has had trouble controlling the classroom. she hasn't been able to gain the respect of the students at all and they are often noisy and restless during her lessons (which are danish and history). oddly, this class seems to respect their other teachers, but that's curiously not mentioned in the mail from the principal.

today, this poor teacher apparently had enough and gave up and left the classroom in tears after saying to the class that they could just go home and laugh about her with their parents. when i heard that, i was definitely not laughing, as it seems to me to be a very sad and revealing statement from a frustrated teacher who feels desperately unsupported in her work. the kids reported that she went to the principal's office and had a good cry.

in the meantime, the principal came down to the class and sat them down and had a talk with them about, as near as i can tell from her email, soccer and drippy faucets. because vague metaphors really speak to the 7th grade mind.

the email assures us that she has turned off the drippiest of the faucets and that all will be just hunky dory going forward because the students have understood the gravity of...erm...leaky faucets. whether the school understands that they have a problem and need to give extra support to a teacher that's clearly floundering in her work is less clear. and whether they further understand that respect between students and teachers is something that must be earned or commanded through force of personality, is also unclear. actually, i'm being sarcastic; it's pretty clear that they don't understand that at all.

they also don't seem to have made the connection that this class, which is largely composed of the same students as it was last year, over at the elementary school, was not a problem then and isn't a problem for other teachers at the middle school. and that therefore, it stands to reason that maybe the teacher is the problem.

i don't want to kick someone when they're down, but a teacher who has struggled with what is arguably an easygoing group of young people for nine months without success clearly has a problem. when she begins airing the dirty laundry of personal problems at home in class, including that her son is hearing voices, and that she's struggling with health issues after a lung transplant, it is quite possibly the equivalent of waving a big red flag. young teenagers have enough troubles of their own dealing with puberty and all of the changes wrought by that, without having the unexplained symptoms of their teacher's child brought into the mix. what are they supposed to do with such information? how are they supposed to react? will it make them worry? will they wonder what it means? why on earth would you as the teacher tell that to your 13-year-old students? how can she not see how wildly inappropriate that is? why is the filter switched off (just to bring in a metaphor, ala the principal)? and why is the school not effectively supporting a teacher that's so clearly in need of some serious support?

but i'm not sure what i can do about it. i could write a mail to the principal, expressing my concerns and she'd fob off a few more dissertation-worthy metaphors on me and nothing would change. i could send her a link to this blog post, but she would probably just think i'm a big meanie (really, i'm trying to work out what i think about it, and this is how i do that).

i spent some time this evening, looking at the website of a nearby private school, as that's my way of feeling that i might be able to change things. but what i really want is for this school to clean up its act. i want them to start communicating in an honest and open way and face the problem head-on. and i want them to either provide a whole lot more support to this floundering teacher or i want them to remove her and promise me that she's not going to be my child's homeroom (and danish and history) teacher next year. in other words, i want them to grab hold of the reins. we pay an awful lot of taxes and frankly, they owe us that.

i don't know what homer simpson would do in such a case. i'm not sure he'd much notice. but if he did, i think he'd be fiercely loyal to his children and go in and demand the best for them, even if he did it a bit clumsily. so maybe i should do what homer would do. my own little lisa's future might very well depend upon it.

*like how i made that photo fit the post right there in the very last second? 

the view from sunday night

the view from sunday night is of one of those dinners that i love best. it's when i rummage around in the refrigerator and throw together something that will probably never be repeated, not because it doesn't taste good, but because i'll never have that particular combination of ingredients lying around at the same time again. this was marinated turkey breast, cauliflower, onions, sweet potatoes and half a bag of fresh spinach, stir-fried together and then i added a jar of apricot-coriander tagine sauce (store-bought). i served it with my new favorite starch - bulgur with vermicelli. it was pretty delicious.

my minfigure collection had a bath today. this house is very dusty - the soil out here is very sandy and we almost always have a west wind blowing - so they definitely needed a good spring cleaning. it took me over an hour. i've got to find a better way to display them, either that or get a cleaning person. tho' that project motivated me to do a lot of other dusting and tidying and vacuuming getting down to the business of pairing up the socks in the sock basket. it has turned a bit cold and grey, so it was a good day to stay inside and do such things. i also baked a banana bread since we had some old black bananas. i always feel both virtuous and in touch with my grandmother when i make banana bread, as it's her recipe i always use.

our local art group had our spring exhibition this weekend - this was how our pieces ended up. i say our because they were pretty equally husband and me, tho' the talisman one hanging on the wall was mine and if i'm honest, the driftwood man in front was mostly husband. i laid out all of the pieces, but he's a genius at putting them together. there was a slightly funny story with the talisman one - i was turning it in and there was a woman writing it into an excel sheet on her computer. i said it was called "talismans" and she actually questioned my english, suggesting that the plural should be talismen. not exactly a dumb idea, but still. and even when i said i was sure it was correct with an "s," she and her boyfriend tried to argue further with me, informing me of how the plural of man is men. and i'm the one who is a native speaker. i wasn't sure whether to laugh or slap them, but you have to admire their cheek. it was a very interesting and well-attended exhibition. i'll share some more photos tomorrow. my internet is quite slow this evening. that happens on sunday evening when everyone down the road must get online as well. it's just one of the "perks" of living out in the country.

i told myself i wasn't going to go for the simpson's minifigs, but always, i couldn't stay away. i didn't get any of the ones i really wanted (marge, lisa) in the first round, so i went back to the employee store on the way home. despite carefully picking a bunch of different bump codes, to try to avoid duplicates, i got several more scratchy and ned flanders. grrr. still no marge and lisa. i think they're onto us with those bump codes and they just don't work anymore. the figures are really pretty cool and i did used to watch the simpson's quite regularly. i think in the states, there's a special lego episode on this evening. i've only seen the trailer, but it looks quite cleverly done. i'm looking forward to seeing that, tho' i don't know when it's going to surface here in denmark.

and that's about it...nothing big or major, just an ordinary weekend.

little skrot man

how awesome is this little assemblage that husband put together? it's for the creagive art exhibition this weekend. i've got another piece with my photo of the ship being scrapped to go with it. we make a pretty good team - i collect the pieces and lay them out and husband puts them all together. i insisted that the eyes be two different sizes, as i love the expression it gives. the hands are all him. and the one is flipping off because it fits with the theme of skrot (op) (scrap, in danish, but more loaded with meaning when you add the "up" bit).

it's been a pretty great week. husband i made art together. i've met lots of new people. i survived a public speaking engagement today and was very inspired by the other talks as well. it was a sort of TED-like conference, only even better speaker/topic quality (better than TEDx Copenhagen, anyway). tho' i did have moments, while i was listening to the other talks, of feeling i have simply not been doing enough with my life. it struck me, once again, that i do best when i get out and see and experience new things. it gets my ideas flowing. maybe i'm not really made for the quiet country life. tho' i am grateful to have it to return to when i've been out and about.

i think i feel that confidence i feared was gone slowly returning. and that's a very good thing.

spring exhibition - works in progress

our local art group's yearly exhibition is on the horizon. which means that we've stepped up the creativity around here. i'm putting together some rusty bits and pieces with driftwood, to fit the "skrot" (scrap) theme.

these are going to hang from something or other in a way that's still but a vague and blurry (partially due to my eyes being very affected by the birch pollen in air) picture in my mind.

i like that this one ended up having a kind of talisman feel.  it has slightly less rusty bits, but that's just the direction it went in.

tho' i'm still composing in my head, i know that the pressure of the deadline and an otherwise rather busy week will work together to make it happen. that's how it always is. i'm a girl in need of a deadline.

this old bottle of ink i got in a box of goodies at the autumn flea market a couple of years ago. rather fun to put it to use .

this broken pot is a piece that our drink & draw group worked on together on friday evening. the hostess of the last drink & draw dropped it and thought it would be a good idea to paint the shards and try to reassemble it. so that's precisely what we did.

i love how it turned out, even if it did take me 2 days to glue it together. we've got plans for it as well, involving some old shoes, a horse hoof with the shoe still one (the rest of the horse was long ago fed to the lions at a nearby zoo - that's how we roll in denmark, after all, we do like to keep our lions fed). due to all of us using the same inks, it harmonizes but bears the style of each of us. i like that. i'll be sure to share the final version once it's finished. i've passed it along to another from the group now.