If you want blog readers, just review a movie!

Holy cow!  Ever since I went to see that movie whose name I won’t mention again, I’ve had a mountain of readers.  I wonder if they read anything other than that movie review.  I feel popular.  Well, not really.  Anyway, I’m surprised that so many people find me just because of that one post. So, hooray and welcome!  I hope you all read another post or two along with the movie.

San Diego AVID Summer Institute

This is the view from my hotel balcony in San Diego, where I’ve just completed my second AVID Summer Institute of the summer.  This one was great.  My presenting partner and I have very complementary personalities, the participants were eager and interested and it really all went quite smoothly.  I kept setting my alarm for 5:00 AM, to get up and walk or swim and after the first day, I did neither. It was so hard to wake up that I just puttered around in my room until time to go to work at about 7:00.

Each night I’d lay down to sleep with my balcony door open to the breeze.  It was nice until the cigarette smoke from the balcony below wafted in.  The first time it happened, I called the front desk to ask if I was in the wrong room.  They assured me that the smoke was not supposed to be happening, and they called and took care of it.  The next time, the desk said that if they were smoking on their balcony they couldn’t do anything about it. That seemed wrong to me, but I didn’t know what else to do apart from confronting the scofflaws (Heaven forbid!), so I closed my door until the middle of the night when the room got too hot and the smokers were sleeping.  Then I’d open it again and let in the coolness.

This thing about rights of smokers and non-smokers is a tangle I think.  The freedom of one so overlaps with that of the other.  And of course, I think my freedom of breathing clean air should surely supercede the freedom of someone else to breathe smoke.  And I know the smoke breathers see it the other way.  I just wish they’d stop.  For their sake as well as mine!

HEARTHEARTHEARTHEARTHEARTHEARTHEART

I’ve always loved these cement benches in downtown Sacramento.  I never thought of how many ways you could read the word “heart.”  It pleases me every time I see it.  Tomorrow the AVID Summer Institute begins.  This is my fourth year of leading the High School Administrator strand.  I’m a little uneasy because my co-presenter is unable to attend and I don’t yet know who I will be working with.  That’s right, I did say that it starts tomorrow.  I always like some time to arrange things with the other person before this event begins.

I have another issue.  I don’t think I have enough clothes with me to make it five more days.  I’ve already been gone for five days, to a wonderful event in Lake Tahoe  (More about that in another post.) and I’ve kind of depleted my store of good clothes.  I went shopping at Macy’s today and bought a dress and sweater, good for the first days of school as well.  They were having this wierd sale, in which they took off $10 for every $50 I spent.  Great, I thought.  The only catch is that I can’t pick the items up until Wednesday, when the sale officially begins.  I went for it.  I can make it until Wednesday.  Definitely.

My biggest issue is that I’m bone tired and I’m about to begin a very high energy, high pressure week of work.  I went out tonight and had a fresh Chinese chicken salad at the Asian diner, small stuff compared to all I’ve been eating in Tahoe for the past week.  I feel like a stuffed turkey, ready to truss and roast.  Unfortunately, I kind of look like one too.  (Possibly more about that in another post, if I can bring myself to talk about it.)

And on that note I guess I’ll go upstairs and do some laundry in the bathtub.  Enjoy your day.

UPDATE:  It’s over and I’m home.  I worked with an awesome guy who was super dynamic as a presenter.  I sort of felt like I ran along behind him, which wasn’t exactly a great feeling, but is actually inconsequential.  We received good evaluations and it’s done.  Now I have a week off  before I go do it again in San Diego.  This time I’ll be more prepared and less tired going into it than I was in Sac.  Bring it on!

Making Mandalas

One summer, I think it was about 2004, I made mandalas.  I carried black paper, colored pencils, a sharpener and a compass in my bag and I made mandalas, sometimes several every day.  It was kind of a way to check in with myself, to recenter my focus.  Some of them were really tiny, only about two and a half inches in diameter, and some took up the extent of a piece of black artagain paper, about nine inches across.

Amazingly, doing this art actually did help me to recenter myself.  It was like art meditation.  In the past week or so some of the old mandalas have resurfaced, maybe a reminder that I need to get something going.  It is so easy to get mired in the decluttering that I fail to start smething new.  I just keep on clearing out the old stuff.  Learning from what I find?  Certainly, to some degree.  But it’s time to start some fresh activity as well.  So, yeah.  I’m going to do that.  Photos to follow!

Hot, hot, hot!! Fried egg on the sidewalk hot!

Well, you got it.  It is summer in Chico and in a big way.  104 degrees today, and not supposed to drop below 100 until Tuesday.  That means rocky sleep for me for a couple of nights!  When it gets hot I go to the movies.  YEAH!! Today I went to see “The Proposal,” Sandra Bullock’s latest comedy.

This movie made me laugh which counts for high points in my book!  I think her costar is  in a somewhat different age group from her, but it didn’t matter.  It was pretty believable.  The characters were developed well enough and the costars were great.  Betty White and Mary Steenbergen played the guy’s mom and grandma and were delightful.  The dad was that actor whose name I don’t remember who was in Officer and a Gentleman with Debra Winger about twenty years ago.  I’m missing the details, but you can go to a website for those.  Bottom line,  I loved it.  It was a perfect hot afternoon matinee movie.

I think I need a bigger air conditioner.  I say that every summer, and it is still true.  Every year I think I’ll sell my house and get one with AC and every year I don’t manage to do it in time so I spend another year here in the hot house.  Oh well.  I can always go to a matinee!  Enjoy your summer day.  Keep cool!

Recentering

I love how gloriously centered this gardenia is. Each petal pivots and swirls from the center to the outer edge, the whole thing nestled in those waxy leaves and exuding a fragrance like no other. A few years ago a nurseryman came and looked at my yard and told me to remove the gardenia, but I couldn’t bear to. And I’m glad I didn’t. Right now it is covered in huge blossoms like this one. Can you smell it?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately and I’ve realized that the essence of my current quest is a need to recenter myself. I’ve been kind of off-kilter about my job for some time now, and have done a lot of writing, thinking, talking and meditation about that. I’m at a resting place with regard to that, at least in this moment. However, it seems that I couldn’t quite let go of my imbalance.

About two weeks ago I decided to buy a house. A second house, for I already have one. This house was located close to my granddaughter’s house and I loved (still do) the idea of her being able to just drop in whenever she wants to, now that she is old enough to ride her bike a little ways on her own. It all seemed to be lined up really well, because my older daughter and her husband are looking for a place to live and wanted to rent my house. It was a match made in heaven. Or seemed to be, except that the seller never responded to my offer. After 10 days, and rumors of his irritation with my low price, never mind that he received another low offer while he was entertaining mine and rejected it, he never responded. No counter offer, no rejection, just talk. And it didn’t seem like anyone was pushing him to do so. Everyone just kind of waited around while he threw tantrums. Finally, when it looked like just agreeing on a price could take months, if it ever happened, I rescinded the offer.

While it felt like I was taking care of myself in doing that, and I really did think it over before I did, being on the other side of it has left me feeling off kilter. Mourning a little bit the loss of the dream I had woven in those ten days. Not quite understanding why it didn’t work. What I missed in weaving that tapestry. Once again I feel imbalanced.

Now it’s Sunday night, and I’m looking at another week with time to do whatever I want to do. I think that I will spend this time releasing some stuck places. Getting rid of some stuff and re-finding something else that isn’t about places or stuff. Something that involves a little finer focus, some centering and relocating myself within my space, on all levels.

How about you?  What do you do to release yourself from the bindings, be they physical, mental, emotional or spiritual or some combination of them all (and really, when we’re stuck it is always on more than one simple level!)?  I’d love to hear what you do when you notice you need to shake things up and clear out the stuck spots.

BSLE Day 18: Focusing on the Experiment

Today I went to school and kind of cleaned up my classroom so I don’t have to go there again for a while.  For the past couple of days, since I typed up my list of to- and not-to-dos, I’ve been focusing more on this experiment.  It gets to be evening and I go, “Oh, just go take a walk.  Then you can check that off.” or “Finish drinking your bottle of water.  You know you need to.”

I’m coming around, I think.  There remain a few things that I haven’t gotten started yet, but I have faith that I will.  Next on my list is the Shiva Nata practice.  I think I’ll get that going tonight.  Check.