Great photos! I have a wonderful photo of Leah I took when she was 4 sitting in a pile of leaves, and I'm very partial to leaf pictures. I haven't been reading your blog for a while, so I will now comment here on one of your previous posts.
On the subject of Word's spellcheck word-replace function, I once received a paper to edit that was written by someone whose first language was Japanese. He had apparently run the spell check in order to clean up the paper, but had hit replace in a few places that he shouldn't have. The paper was on borehole geophysics, and he had OK'd the change from 'borehole' to the Word suggestion of 'brothel'. Now that was a fun paper to edit. My favourite part was when he discussed 'excellent brothel conditions' and I wondered what would constitute excellent brothel conditions: pretty girls? soft beds? good scotch? cheap rates?
Great photos! I love photos of children outside playing. It just seems...right. Ummm...did you have your children racking up the leaves at a park, or do you have a park bench in your yard??? Very fancy!
FUN! I love the annual rake-the- leaves-jump-in-the-pile-repeat-repeat-repeat. Much fun! Until the leaves are all shredded in tiny pieces all over the lawn and impossible to bag up...
Awwwww, those are awesome shots!! I'm torn, in our current cookie cutter home, we have no yard, no trees, thus no leaves...on the one hand, I'm grateful to have no raking, but on the other, my kids are missing out on one of the joys of childhood! Maybe I need to take a quick trip to the cottage this week....
:-))
Anonymous said…
I'm pretty sure child labour laws only apply to situations like taking your kid out of school so they can engage in paid work. Forcing them to rake leaves during their off hours is TOTALLY allowed. Maybe even encouraged.
To my American friends, I'm sorry. Not in any kind of distanced, pitying, smug way, because I believe we are headed in a similar direction here in Canada, and I am sad and sick at heart. I told myself I wasn't hoping for the other outcome because I was afraid to, but I realize that I absolutely was, because I was not prepared for how bad this would feel. Some random thoughts I am having about the whole thing. 1. I'm going to try not to hate anyone. For a while at least. I am totally cool with anyone else hating people that helped this happen. A lot of them did it out of hate. Some did it out of ignorance. Some are struggling and desperate and thought this was a solution. I know that's not an excuse, but it makes me think of when I read The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He said that he didn't feel like he could judge people who betrayed their fellow Jews for favours from their captors, because he was never given the opportunity and if he had he couldn't ...
I've had a couple of bemusing interactions recently - the kind where I couldn't figure out if I was being weird or they were. One was a Japanese teacher who came in to the library the morning of Chinese New Year and asked me in a concerned manner if I thought her dress - floral with a mandarin collar - was cultural appropriation. The other one was actually just an overhear - I was walking towards the library and I saw an EA standing in an open doorway answering a teacher, "no, I don't have any kids. I'm only 26." This didn't strike me as super weird, but would you say that? 26 isn't old, but it seems amply old enough to have kids, surely? So remember the Gabapentin my doc prescribed before Christmas to try during the daytime for fibromyalgia pain, but I was holding off on trying it because it causes drowsiness and then I forgot all about it until my massage therapist mentioned it a couple of weeks ago? I know, probably not, neither did I, lol. I start...
Seriously you guys, I am SO SICK, and I have been stupidly engaging in presenteeism even though I am STRONGLY DISAPPROVING when other people do it. It's not because I think I owe anything to the school board (oh my goodness I do not). It's not because I have delusions of grandeur about how important my job is - wait, maybe I do, because at some of my schools my classes have already missed two weeks of library because of EQAO (which necessitated students writing exams in the library), and it's almost the end of the year, which means most of the librarians are closing the library to circulation soon if not now, and I really didn't want to make them miss one of the last library periods. Also, and I am putting myself out there so try to be kind, I have realized that there is a dumb little part of people-pleasing oldest-child self that always suspects that if I call in sick people think I'm faking, so it's a tiny bit gratifying to go in and have people say oh my GO...
Comments
On the subject of Word's spellcheck word-replace function, I once received a paper to edit that was written by someone whose first language was Japanese. He had apparently run the spell check in order to clean up the paper, but had hit replace in a few places that he shouldn't have. The paper was on borehole geophysics, and he had OK'd the change from 'borehole' to the Word suggestion of 'brothel'. Now that was a fun paper to edit. My favourite part was when he discussed 'excellent brothel conditions' and I wondered what would constitute excellent brothel conditions: pretty girls? soft beds? good scotch? cheap rates?
:-))