Point and Click

The premise of this blog is that I have some sort of weird aversion to adventure, and I wanted a place to explore that a little, and also do some writing and share some stories. Not all of my posts are about attempted adventures, of course, but that's the general expectation.

It seems like, though, I might also take a moment now and again to acknowledge some things I do that are in fact pretty adventurous, at least by other people's standards. For one, I am a high school teacher. Lots of folks would rather take a fork to the eye than hang out with teenagers and expect them to do school work. But I love teaching. And an extension of my teaching is another thing I love to do that even lots of teachers fear:

Presenting.

Give me an hour in front of a crowd and I'll whip up a string of activities and a slideshow lickety-split.

I did not know this about myself until 2004, when I became a Teacher Consultant with the Maine Writing Project. I sort of accidentally fell into it, and it changed.my.life. Ok, maybe not my life, but certainly my career. I attended the Summer Institute for teachers and one of our projects was presenting a workshop to the class. I had never done such a thing, but I threw myself into the planning, and ultimately produced my first workshop:

This is the cover sheet from my workshop presentation at my first conference, where people actually paid to take my workshop (and other people's, of course. I have yet to be the headliner, but a girl can dream*). The title is goofy, with my attempt at referencing The X-Files, which had already stopped airing in 2002. But it launched me. I loved it.

Since then I've presented at many Writing Project conferences as well as offered professional development at my school. Some of my favorites include:

At this conference, I discovered the Holy Grail of presenting, a presentation remote, which happened to exist in the room where I was presenting.

Playing games at a conference was definitely a hit!

This was my most recent presentation, on academic honesty, to my entire high school faculty.

After fourteen years, I finally got this baby:

This is my Logitech Spotlight Presentation Remote with Bluetooth, and it has really upped my presentation game. 

So I may be afraid of bugs, roller skating, riding a bike, and a host of other things, but give me a room full of teachers, a projector, and a presentation remote? And I am Queen of the World.

*I'm not really a bucket list sort of person. I don't want to skydive or hike the AT or scale Mount Rainier, but if anything is rolling around at the bottom of my figurative bucket, it's giving a Ted Talk. Maybe someday...

Backyard Adventures

Hey, this adventure-averse lady just realized something: I have adventure happening right in my own back yard.

Meet the girls:

These are our Buff Orpingtons.

Well, no. These were our Buff Orpingtons.

Goodness. There's history here.

Way back in 2012 we decided to begin our chicken adventure. It's chronicled here in a blog I started in all my chicken-raising excitement. Loved that blog. Life got in the way, though.  Still, I look back at our first girls, barred rocks and sex links (I kid you not), fondly.

Unfortunately, a fox looked at them fondly, too. And foxes are sneaky as F&@%.

Our first girls lived mostly in a chicken tractor (described and photographed in loving detail on the ol' blog) but when we moved to our current house, they upgraded to a coop that was already in existence on the property.  It's well built, and we thought it was pretty well critter-proof, but a fox finally figured out how to work the latch.

They're super cute, til they run off with your chickens.

After a few months of general sadness and purchasing eggs from the grocery store (nowhere near as good as the eggs from our girls) we decided to raise chicks again. We dusted off the ol' brooder and got to work.

There are few things as cute as baby chickens (peep-peeps!), but woo are they messy. We were pleased when we could remove them from our dust-covered basement and deposit them in the coop (with a newly reinforced and hopefully fox-proof latch. It has proven so.).

And so the girls grew, began laying, and generally seemed happy in their new home. And we were happy with the return of fresh eggs.

Until this @$$#()!& showed up.

Caught two of these and relocated them. Cute but MEAN little critters.

It took us four nights—and four chickens—to figure out that the little creep was getting in through a teeny-tiny gap in the chicken wire, way up at the top of the coop.

So new fencing went up and all fencing was secured and re-secured.

Aaaaand....five more chickens were procured.

These girls, also Buff Orpingtons, were big enough to move right into the coop, albeit in their own pen.

So now we have eight chickens, a refortified coop, and a fridge full of fresh eggs. 

And I have a new favorite social media hangout: The Maine Poultry Connection on Facebook. Jon learned about this group from a guy at work, and that's where we got our newest Buffs. He logged in, saw a post about Buffs for sale, and bing-bang-boom, that was that. I don't think he's been back since.  But I? I have found my people. Good advice, good humor, good times!

Raising chickens is not super difficult, but it certainly has its challenges.  And I think that qualifies as an adventure.

The original girls

Eggs!

With a young Buff O.

Adventures in Teaching: Home Sick Edition

"Gosh, I'm not feeling all that great today. I think I'll call in sick from work," said no teacher ever.

I'm on day 3 of missing work for my current illness, a viral infection somewhere along the line between cold and flu. I think I'm finally on the mend because I am sitting up-right and typing without disastrous results and my fever seems to have abated.

But that means facing the horror of what may or may not have happened over the past three days at school. Talk about an adventure.

Teachers will tell you, repeatedly and without your urging, that it's easier to go to work sick than to miss a day. Sub plans, especially those drawn up at the eleventh hour and usually with a pounding headache or between bouts of nausea and vomiting, are challenging to craft. On any given day, a teacher has not only classes to teach, but meetings to attend with colleagues, administrators, and/or students, materials to prepare, emails to carefully craft or respond to, papers to grade, and plans to develop for future classes. Miss a day, miss a lot, as they say.

It's easier to stay home if you are literally unconscious rather than mildly incapacitated.

Today I am beginning to face the music: an email from a parent that came in on Monday, details from guidance about four different students, department requests for materials (I'm a department head),  messages from three students who tried to find me at some point during my absence, and looming deadlines for college recommendations, professional development planning, and a stipend position application I have yet to fill out. Not to mention all the planning, teaching, and grading I didn't get to in these three days. I am very grateful to have colleagues who teach the same course as me and who are willing to step in to make copies, share lesson plans, and even teach my kids when their schedules allow. They are as busy as I am, but they, too, know what it feels like when suddenly you can't make it in.

Like I said, being knocked out cold is easier.

But therein lies an important truth: if I hadn't been able to send a few quick messages about plans and coverage, about rescheduling meetings, about notes to share in the meetings that went on with out me anyway, the world would have kept on turning just the same. I'd be facing most of the same music today.

Kevin kept me company while I was stuck in bed for three days.

When I was lying in bed, binge-watching AP Bio on Hulu*, I was lucid enough to be fretting all the things I was missing, but I really wasn't capable of functioning in the world of other human beings. I couldn't even read. But in my calmer moments, I was able to remember what one of my former department heads said when I told her I had to miss work: "Take care of yourself. The students will be fine." And she was right. My missing a day or two or three of school is not likely to impact the lives of the students in any measurable way. It will be annoying to fall behind, but I'll get us caught up. It will be annoying to reschedule meetings, but they will still happen eventually. I may have a miserable weekend spent on work that didn't get done, but come next June, summer will arrive and I won't have anything left to grade or plan for. And that's the truth regardless of missing a day or not.

Teachers feel bad about missing school because a) we don't like letting our kids down; and b) we don't like putting extra work on our colleagues. Teachers, on the whole, are pretty noble lot.

Well, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this little nugget of an article from The Washington Post: 1 in 4 U.S. teachers are chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school.

Say what, now? Here I and my colleagues regularly bemoan being absent, but this article discusses teachers who feel so unsupported and anxious about working, that they miss school enough to be categorized as "chronically absent." And that does have consequences on student achievement. 

I'm pretty lucky that I want to go to work each day (well, most days—I'm not a saint). My colleagues are rock stars and my administration is supportive. 

I must not be 100% yet, though, because I wrote this blog entry instead of grading the papers that came in last week...guess I'd better get to it.

*Thought for future post--the representations of schools and teachers in mass media. I should probably hate AP Bio (the show, not the actual subject), but it entertained me greatly. I'll have to determine if that was fever-induced or for real!

Am I a Boat Person?

Y'all, we got a boat.

Friends on Facebook are probably sick of me posting photos like these (ha ha! I'm posting more photos of my family boating! #madeyoulook #cantstopwontstop #didiusethesehashtagscorrectly)

Having a boat seems like a very adventure-y thing to do and to post about on this here adventure-logging blog. So here we go.

When I met Jon, he had a sailboat. On our first date, he told me all about it and about some of his sailboating adventures. I enjoyed the stories, but the interior monologue I had going included things like:
*Wow! A sailboat!
*If this goes anywhere, I'll get to go on a sailboat!
*Oh shit. If this goes anywhere, I'll have to go on a sailboat.
*Uh...I'm prone to seasickness.
*What if I hate the sailboat?
*What if we are perfect for each other in every way except the boat comes between us?
(Remember, this was all on the first date.)

Well, there were many more dates, including a moonlit ride in the dingy around the harbor where the sailboat would eventually be moored (it had not yet been put in for the season), which provided evidence that the boat was very exciting and important to Jon and increased my anxiety about the boat coming between us.

Eventually the sailboat made its way into the ocean and I made my way onto the sailboat.

Much to my surprise, I kind of liked it. I took Bonine every time and never felt sick. Of course, we always went out on bright, sunny days. And it wasn't 100% fun and games. The thing about sailing is the need for wind. When there was no wind, we motored around at a very slow speed. When there was a lot of wind, we heeled right over and I freaked out. True sailboat people love this feeling. I did not pass the true-sailboat-person test.

Also, going sailing is a big process. We could get the packing of gear down pretty well--Jon had worked out a lot of those kinks in the years before he knew me--but we had to drive to the marina, schlep our stuff to the dock, drain rain water out of the dingy, pile in, putt-putt out to the boat, load the boat with our things, prep the boat (battery, hatch doors, sail prep, etc. etc. etc.), tie off the dingy, drop the mooring, and then s l o o o o o w l y motor out of the harbor into the relatively open water of Casco Bay. Then maybe we could sail. The sailboat is not a speedy way to get anywhere. Running on the motor, it took a good two hours to get from Freeport to Portland, under sail, longer, what with the need to zig zag to get just about anywhere.

And now, a math problem:

The process of getting ready + my fears of there being too little or too much wind + finding the oomph to complete the process and quell my fears + a kiddo with a schedule of her own adventures to manage = very few boat days.

We finally faced the inevitable, that we were not using the sailboat enough to warrant the amount of money it costs to maintain one (maintenance, mooring fee, putting it in fee, taking it out fee, hauling it fee, and so forth).

If I made a very short list of the worst days in Jon's entire life, the day he sold the sailboat would probably be nearish the top. The man loves to boat.

So of course I promised that I'd support us getting another boat eventually.

Enter camper, trip to Disney, new house, and many, many house projects.

Exit boat dreams.

Except not really. I always knew we'd get a boat again someday.  Jon was less convinced. He's a gemini, so his fatalism wasn't surprising.

On Don's boat in Boothbay

Imagine his luck when a friend of ours took us for a spin on his center-console motor boat on a visit to Boothbay last summer. Suddenly, I wanted a boat. Badly. It was so cool on the water and so hot on the land. For the rest of the summer, I kept saying things like, "Gosh, it's hot. This would be a good boat day" and Jon kept hearing me say "we should buy a boat."

And here we are with our own 23 ft center console with a t-top.

This produced a whole new crop of fears for me. Now we had a boat to trailer, which would mean "putting it in" and "taking it out" each time we wanted to use it. My visions of this process included pick-up trucks getting sucked under the water, or me driving the boat into the dock (or jagged rocks because SCARY!). I fretted about it for weeks during the looking-and-buying stage.

But what's a fun adventure without me fretting about something?

Turns out (thank goodness) it's not that bad of a process. And I am proud that it only takes us on average five minutes to put in, and maybe five and a half or six to haul it out.



Does all of this make me a boat person? (Nah. Let's not get carried away, on the tides or otherwise.)