Life is just too Noisy

"They told Samuel about the chaos of towns that they'd escaped. There were noises - hammers clanging at blacksmith forges, chickens clucking, dogs barking, cows lowing, horses whinying and whickering, people who always seem to need to be talking to one another.
There wasn't noise in the forest.
There were smells: woodsmoke filled the air in every season because it wasn't just for heat,but to cook as well;the smell of oak for long fires, pine for short and hot and fast fires.  The smell of bread and... the odor of stew cooking in the cast-iron pot over an outside fire or in an iron kettle hung in the fireplace, the scent flying up through the chimney and out over the ground as the wind moved the smoke around."  Woods Runner  Gary Paulsen

     I didn't get any farther in this book that the above quote, 5 pages in, and I had to stop reading to think about it. The words are meaningful to me. It reminds me of just how loud and noisy everything in my world is. All the time.  And how much I hate noise. I have become terribly noise-sensitive the older I get, but I know it isn't just an age-thing. And I know that I am hyper-sensitive, but that doesn't really help, either, just the knowing. I just appreciate silence so much more than noise of almost any kind.  It's also funny that those noises which Samuel's parents found chaotic, back in the middle 1700's, the noises of animals and blacksmiths, specifically, are noises that I could easily live with today. It's the noises of cell phones, ipods, radios and tv's blaring constantly ANY place you go - stores, doctors' offices, restaurants, malls, almost anywhere, that I just can't handle. Even my own house is noisier than it needs to be. It seems that the TV is always on (not by my choice) and that, in addition to that as background noise, then we add layers on top of that - youtube videos on the computer, talking on the phone or the ringing phone being ignored, and talking, talking, talking, sometimes, many times, more than one person at a time. I love the rare weekend at my house when everyone else is gone - and the TV and radio remain off the entire weekend, and the only noise is that from the world outside my front door  (well that and 4 barking dogs, which also can get annoying in a short amount of time, but them I can send out in the back yard to play and cease the majority of their shrill yipping at a stray dog or cat they've spied through the front windows of the house).
     I just don't understand our obsession with noise. I don't understand why more people don't appreciate, if not silence, then at least quiet. I don't understand why so many people feel the need to just talk, nonstop, all the time. I literally have a very short attention span for listening to people talk - unless it is a quiet, one on one type of meaningful conversation. People who want to read you their latest "tweets" or their entire cell phone text conversation with another friend, I just don't have the ability to listen politely to, and feign interest. It's not because I'm not interested in that person, just that my capacity for what my brain deems "meaningless" noise grows less and less every day. I guess I try hard to just "tune out."
     I don't just LIKE quiet - I CRAVE it. I need it. It's essential to my well being. Probably even more so after having to spend 7+ hours every day in a very noisy school with very noisy children. I day dream all the time about a cabin in the woods, a cabin without electricity. A cabin that is just simply peaceful and quiet. I would love to wake to, and go to sleep to, nothing more than the croak of ravens playing in among the pines, and dogs barking outside and those chickens clucking as they scratch in the dirt, looking for their breakfast. 
     And the smell of woodsmoke is also integral to my dreams - scents of things wake my emotions and imagination faster than sounds or sights always. And the scent of woodsmoke, especially that carried on a cooling breeze, or a brisk wind, outside, reminds me of so much that is, and has always been important to me. Home, friends, family, simplicity, guitars, warmth, silence, simplicity. Woodsmoke and silence just naturally go hand in hand. I hope I"m headed their direction, because this world I live in now is just too noisy for me.

Happy Easter

Saw this on facebook, and really liked it. Happy Easter everyone.

"Mrs. P, What's Adultery?"

So, it's "TEST TIME" in NYS. Ugh. This has become the place I've NEVER wanted to be and always swore I would NEVER be - "teaching to the test."  Why and how that has happened is food for thought for another day (and involves lots of stupid acronyms like APPR, SLO's, etc.)  I have 4 days of school this week, then Friday and all next week off for Easter/Spring vacation. Then, we go back to school on Monday, April 16th, and WHAM .......Tues through Thurs that week STATE TESTING begins. Whoo hoo. Not. Yeah, the kids will do fantastically well after a 10 day break.  Not.  So, on Friday, in an almost-last-ditch effort to cover a few mundane topics that we haven't yet, I had planned to teach, OVERTLY, the skill of "inferencing."  I had this great little worksheet that would help us out all printed out, pulled from a teaching website I use frequently. Apparently, in my old, grey-haired years, I forgot RULE #1 of teaching 101 - "Never give the students ANYTHING you have not read thoroughly yourself."  (That goes, hand in hand, by the way, with "NEVER SHOW A MOVIE, or READ A BOOK WITH A CLASS that you haven't seen or read AHEAD of time!!!")  So, I photocopy 60 copies of this nifty little worksheet on Inferencing.   Take it to my 6th grade class across the hall. LUCKILY, someone up there is looking out for me......   instead of handing it out, directly, and going through it, as I had planned, I had to wait for that teacher to do a small mini-lesson herself on how to inference. As I was waiting, I happened to glance through the 4 examples listed on my worksheet, since I hadn't, you know, actually READ it all ahead of time. OMG!!!  I got to the 4th example and almost passed out - THIS, BELOW, is what I was about to give my 11 year olds to read and discuss: 

Ruby sat on the bed she shared with her husband holding a hairclip.  There was something mysterious and powerful about the cheaply manufactured neon clip that she was fondling in her newly suspicious palms.  She didn’t recognize the hairclip.  It was too big to be their daughter’s, and Ruby was sure that it wasn’t hers.  She hadn’t had friends over in weeks but here was this hairclip, little and green with a few long black hair strands caught in it.  Ruby ran her fingers through her own blonde hair.  She had just been vacuuming when she noticed this small, bright green object under the bed.  Now their life would never be the same.  She would wait here until Mike returned home.

8.  Why is Ruby so affected by the hairclip? _______________________________________________

What in the text supports your idea?

9.  How has the hairclip affected Ruby’s relationship? _______________________________________

Oh yeah, hell yeah, I TOTALLY want to teach my 10 and 11 year olds about ADULTERY. WTH??? Why was this even ON a teacher website?  Thank you GOD for that 10 minute pass that allowed me to change my plans MIDSTREAM. Hey, I'm a teacher. I'm nothing, if not totally flexible!!!

The Beginning of My Dream

     In May, these beautiful babies will be in my care for two full weeks. I can't wait.  So much more to say... but I'm still having trouble putting my feelings, hopes, dreams, and excitement into words. This will have to suffice for today. I've only watched it 11 times since she posted it for me last night!

"Have a Good Day, Gary"

      Early yesterday morning, I stopped for coffee at a large gas station/convenience store in a much bigger town than my own where I had gone for a teacher workshop for the day. I went in and  headed over to pour my coffee.  I noticed a rather scruffy looking, kind of dirty, down and out looking man who looked to be in about his mid to late 40's.  He was holding very tightly to a well-worn bank envelope, holding it up close to his face, thumbing through it, with a cup of coffee, already poured, sitting there, steaming, on the ledge in front of him. My instinctual first two thoughts were: "Oh, poor guy, I hope he has enough money. If he doesn't, I can cover what he's missing, so he gets his cup of coffee" and "he looks like he might be either an alcoholic or a drug-abuser or a homeless person, who really NEEDS his cup of caffeine this morning."  Yep, I made a quick judgement based on looks and actions, without really knowing anything about this man.  We all do, and I don't really feel badly about it. I wasn't looking down on him for it, just assessing - too quickly - the situation and thinking I might be able to help.
     I ended up in line behind him, and when it was his turn, the cashier, a middle aged short chunky woman with a nice smile, said brightly, "Good Morning, Gary."  Ah, she knows him, I think. That's good. And he hands her his money without being told how much, so I started realizing he must be a regular. Also good, it seemed, somehow. Then, when she gave him his change, he held it out over a jar on the counter used to collect spare change and dollar bills for Muscular Dystrophy long enough to catch her eye. Then he dropped it in, and smiled a lopsided smile at the cashier, and she nodded back at him and said, "Thanks, Gary. Every little bit helps!"  It was at that point I realized he was not an alcoholic, nor a drug abuser, nor even homeless - he was simply a little challenged in his abilities, and was probably a resident of an nearby adult home.  That explained the envelope held right up to his nose. It wasn't that he didn't have enough - it was probably difficult for him to count the right amount out, or tell 1's from 10's maybe. Again, I didn't feel badly that I had misjudged him, because I wasn't judging him to look down my nose at him, just really making an assessment,  based on the few observable things I could see.
     Needless to say, when the cashier rang up MY coffee, and asked me if I wanted to donate a dollar to Muscular Dystrophy, I said "sure."  I felt like, if that gentleman could donate HIS change, I could certainly spare a dollar of my own. The cashier then mentioned that a friend of hers had been in and was really grateful they were collecting money for that particular disease, because her sister had just been diagnosed with it, or something like that. I said, "well, it's a terrible disease," just to add something relevant to the conversation, and she responded with,"They all are, honey. They all are."  And, she's absolutely right.
     Those five minutes I spent in the Country Fair Store yesterday morning truly made a significant impact on my day. It is still reverberating through me today. I don't feel any pressing need to over anaylize it to death; it was just a good encounter, and a good set of circumstances with which to begin one's day. I'm glad it happened to me.

A Light Dawns

     I have another post I'm working on, trying to explain all the good that has happened lately, and why, but it is a complicated post. I've been thinking on it for two weeks. I'll get there, when it gels a bit more. In the meantime, today is the end of my week's break, and I'm sad about that, but happy that I've had such a relaxing, do-nothing, and therefore awesome, week off.
     Today, though, I think I FINALLY discovered why my house is not pristinely clean and sterile, the way I'd like it to be, and why I never am caught up on school work.  I started out the day studiously attempting to do lesson plans, and work on my interim assessment that was due several weeks ago. And I DID actually get some work done. But along with a SMALL amount of work, these are the other things that we did around here today:

• let the dogs in and out... about a million times
• made strawberry jam out of the left over strawberries that I didn't want to go to waste
• made home made 7 grain bread
• made home made vegetable soup
• fed the rabbit
• fed the chickens
• let the dogs in and out, at least another hundred times
• changed the sheets
• washed,dried, and folded 7  or 8 loads of laundry
• made vegetable beef soup
• wrote checks and addressed envelopes
• had a great on-line chat about the Iditarod and mushers and life in Alaska
• built a fire in the fireplace
• made two blackberry pies
• boiled the juice from the thawing berries down to make syrup
• talked to my daughter at college twice
• texted a few times
• finished sewing the last door curtain for my classroom
• found the material and rubber stamps in the basement I needed for some sewing and crafts when I have time in the next week or two

AND, the list goes on and on. It's not that I did all this stuff by myself. I didn't. I had help. But it IS the reason that, between all of us here, the house is not spotless. We have hobbies, and do a lot of living here. We usually eat good food, not food out of boxes. We freeze, and can and cook, and sew and play and clean when we can, and try to be good people. I guess that simply means that the vacuuming, and picking up, and paper grading, and kitchen floor washing will get done, but only when they rise to the top of the priority list, not on a regular schedule. It's ok. At least I finally understand why it doesn't just happen.  You'd think that realization might have come to me a few years back, say, oh, about 25 years ago when I began "keeping house" here. But, better late than never. I can go to sleep on clean sheets tonight, finally at peace with understanding WHY a clean house just doesn't happen here often enough. But, the strawberry jam on my toast in the morning will taste pretty darn good, I think. :)

Hope is a Good Motivator

     I look back at the last time I posted, realizing it was the last time I felt even remotely like putting words on a paper until just the past couple of days.  Christmas is, hands down, THE most stressful time or event of my entire year. And, right after Christmas, we settle in to that (for me) dreaded month of January. It has been an odd winter this year, the least winter-like winter we've had in memory. Today is February 12th, and although there is snow in the air today, and maybe an inch or two on the ground from yesterday, it is the most snow we have had all winter. It has not been particularly cold, nor snowy, but it HAS been cloudy, dreary and grey too many days. That affects my mood, drastically. And I have been SO unmotivated these past two months. I haven't felt like writing. Or reading. Or sewing, or baking or ANYTHING. My internal wheels have been spinning nonstop, though. I guess that's almost the unfortuate part of being an introspective person to begin with, and then, to combine that with a month with no external motivation to do anything BUT think.... I"m not sure if the end product of all that thinking will be good or bad. I guess it depends on who's perspective you get  - 
     -right now I am awaiting a decision, hopefully tomorrow, which could begin to put the wheels in motion for the first of MANY changes. Maybe, maybe not. I just know that IF the answer is "yes," then I am poised on the edge of some beautiful and scary changes - beginning in May. If the answer is "no," then the changes may still be there, they will just be more difficult to make and could have far more serious consequences. I am praying very hard for a "yes," even a grudging one, and then will let you know. The thing is, that this weekend, before that answer, there is HOPE. And I have not felt hopeful, have not looked forward, to anything this good for quite some time, so even the hope feels good. Hope motivates. I cleaned out the entire living room yesterday - sorted all bookshelves, book cupboards, got rid of lots of excess, scrubbed, dusted, etc. I was productive, with something to show for it, for the first time in ages. I am now about to go upstairs to work on our bedroom - sorting clothes, books, etc. up there. I know it will be another productive day. If the answer is "no" tomorrow, then I know that any motivation I currently have will slam to a halt, and it will take FOREVER to dig myself out of the disappointment. UGH. Not looking forward to having to deal with myself if that is the case. I LIKE feeling happy, hopeful, and motivated. Don't we all. Well, off to clean the bedroom before I lose that motivation, however fleeting it MAY be....fingers crossed for tomorrow.