Today’s word is change, but I’ll warn you now it includes 2 stories, and the picture is unrelated to the main story.

Change story #1 – found a lovely loveseat that fits just very snugly into our front porch. And we had our first supper in the porch today. A lovely change in the room and signs of the changing seasons. Picture below.

Change story #2. Some of my residential clients, who tend to be seniors, sometimes show me pictures of their grandchildren during lulls, reboots, waits for something to install, etc.. Usually these are pics of babies and toddlers. Today one such couple, who don’t know me very well at all, showed me a picture of a beautiful young woman, and before I could comment, added “This is our grandson. He’s transgender. And you know what, since he’s gone through this change, he looks just like his mom!” My first thought was “How do they know I’m a safe person to share this with? How do they know I won’t spout evil and hateful things?” And what followed was a lovely conversation about how he waited until his ailing mom passed before starting hormone therapy, because she wouldn’t have taken it well, and how happy he is, and how he moved to Vancouver because he’s more accepted there. And they showed me pictures of him as a 350 pound hulking man a few years ago, and 170 pound woman today, and about diets and surgery to remove excess skin. They clearly love him/her deeply. That also had me thinking about change, but I didn’t take any photographs.

Some families are linked by blood, and others are just wonderfully adopted!

In keeping with today’s word, I had my lunch quickly and then spent my lunch break walking in Gabriel Dumont Park, discovering the wonders of winter and spring along the river. I came across numerous discoveries, but I’ll keep this post to just one. You might see a few more pictures from today’s walk once I’m free from this daily word rigour at the end of the month. One small discovery today – that wild rose bushes can be stunning even in March!

Today had lots of lovely relax moments – post-sermonizing, lunch with good old friends, a quiet afternoon cortado, opening race of the F1 season, and a nice honey and oak scotch in the evening! And as the weather warms, I start to think again about my favourite, seasonal relaxing spot, our front porch. We retired one big chair last summer, and now with Abby and her chair also missing from the porch, it’s time to think about new furnishings for this happy place. Bags of soil and winter car cords will soon give way to one of my favourite happy places. What should go here? I saw a double reclining loveseat at Village Green last week. That looks intriguing.

Today’s word is forgive, which is an impossible word! So I’ve conceded defeat for the day. So you will just have to forgive me for not posting a photo today, or you will have to forgive me for posting this annoying looping video of the angry “Wait!” man hidden inside each crosswalk button.

I hear spring! Can you?

Give up? Give way? Give out? Give away? Give ‘er? There are so many gives! What gives?

One of the ways I have given is giving my blood. So here’s a pin from a few years ago. But even better than that, it wasn’t until I photographed this pin on my bulletin board that I noticed the dark humour of the quote I happened to pin directly below it. Morbidly funny.

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.