I had something more thoughtful in mind for honour, but my day didn’t leave me time to get those photos taken. So instead here’s a picture of a situation where someone did NOT honour my personal property. (I realized only today that the siren alarm ringing last night was MY car.)
One of my tasks today was to teach some staff at a client organization some email skills. All of these staff have worked at this place for years, and used email in their day to day professional work. I had imagined certain tips and tricks that I could offer to them, even demonstrate, to help them use their email to better accomplish their tasks and organize their workflow.
I had not imagined that the most significant teaching moment of the day would be informing two of them that their email program had an address book!, which could keep track of people’s email addresses, and using it could greatly improve their ease of sending emails to people!
Part of me just thinks “What?!” and “huh!” and “How do you function in your job?”
And part of me realizes this is a teaching moment for Les – the best lesson may not be what the teacher planned, but what the student needs.
Technically I suppose spring will come no matter what you believe or hope for, or no matter how pessimistic you are. But I like to believe that spring is the reward for persevering through the winter, or maybe even thriving through the winter. Perseverance is a gently powerful force. Not unlike this trickle of water over the solid ice – more about time than about apparent strength.
Today’s word is persevere! How perfect for it to be the word of the day for the Vernal Equinox.
Today’s word is smile. In related news, Eileen came home today!! 🙂
Today’s word is care. Twice in the last 9 days I found myself deep into a conversation about caring (and I didn’t even know this word was coming up). Together with a few friends, we were reflecting on how much we don’t care, or do care, about different things, and how that changes as we age mature. There are things I thought were terribly important when I was younger, including things theological, moral, and philosophical, that I just really don’t care about any more. And other things I didn’t give a passing thought to in some earlier time, that I care greatly about now. And to be honest, there are some things that are super trivial that I care way too much about. (The word you are looking for here is “petty”.)
Amidst all that delightful complexity and conversation and friendship, there remains the simple valuable act of caring, lived out in simple ways and small acts. This evening, with both of our spouses away in foreign lands, Rod S and I cared for each other over a shared supper, and wonderful conversation.
When I instructed Rod that he needn’t pose, that he should just continue eating normally, this is the pose he struck!
I do contract work for a company from Toronto that manages IT for national chains. So I find myself walking in to Bootlegger, Tip Top Tailors, Rickis, Comfort Inn, Golf Town, Hertz, etc. and asking to be let in to their back room where their IT stuff is. Only one single time did someone ask for my ID or some proof of the validity of my request. They lead me to the back and then leave me there alone for any length of time. Apparently these people know nothing about hackers or corporate spying, and have never watched a spy show on TV. That is seriously misplaced trust.
Today I was doing just such a thing, left alone again, when I looked up directly above their IT rack, to see a water heater suspended on a platform directly over all their electronics. I guess water heaters never fail. Misplaced trust, again!
Inspire is an awesome word for the day. You might expect some inspired photo to accompany it. But NOPE, apparently it’s antonym day. I went to a community association presentation by some City of Saskatoon staff, and the presentation was so uninspiring that they couldn’t even bring themselves to use the whole screen for their presentation. It’s like they are not even trying. Which is too bad, because the topic of the meeting and the plans are really cool. It was a perfect opportunity to inspire! But they presented it in a way that almost invited complaining. Uninspired!
One of the ways I like to create is with food, and creativity generally means taking some risks and making some errors. I tend to take bigger creative food risks when I’m cooking only for one, as I am this week.
So today’s experiment is simply pizza. And since I’m also borrowing a friend’s sous vide machine this week, that too has played into the experiment. Today’s pizza is on a standard home-made crust with an unsweetened black pepper sour cherry sauce, topped with rosemary chicken breast (this was the sous vide part), drizzled honey, brie and chateu de bourgogne soft cheeses, and finished with charred kale.
This time the experiment worked pretty well. Too bad Eileen’s not here to share it.
Today’s post is dedicated to my Aunt Anne Krueger, whose funeral is tomorrow. As a young boy I was oblivious to the importance of this, but while I was a growing up in the Menno-land of southern Manitoba in the 60’s and 70’s, she demonstrated that women could have a voice, an opinion, a sense of humour, and strength of character, much like her mom! The importance of such models cannot be overstated!
And what possibly could the picture below have to do with any of this? The last several weeks have had a surprisingly large number of funerals and deaths, so I’ve been thinking about things ethereal, even heavenly. And I’m pretty sure that any notion I have of what heaven is like is way off. So I like this photo, which reminds me that simple and obvious things may not be or appear as I expect them to be.
Today’s word is ‘envision’, which I found a little hard to wrap my head around. Sometimes people use it as a synonym, perhaps incorrectly, for ‘imagine’, as in “I can envision that”. So I’m going to run with that idea, and give you the tiniest peek into my imagination, by posting a collage of some of the photos I chose not to use over the last 12 days of calendar word pictures. I could envision each unused picture shown here as connected with one of the calendar words so far. 
