This one’s for you, Anvilcloud
I couldn’t resist. 🙂
I love a shrinking “to do” list!
1. Agree to final edits of video production for “An Uncomfortable Truth” (yeah, it is SO a knock-off of Al Gore’s film title, but it works) and get it and the cover graphic to the production company. CHECK.
2. Sign off on design work of a huge project (magazine, poster, etc.) that will get mailed to 10,000 churches, send it to the printer, and pray to God they can print it before my trip to Toronto, where I’d rather not show my face in front of my staff if it’s STILL NOT DONE. CHECK.
3. Sign off on design work of the annual report for the year that ended five months ago (it’s not MY fault it’s late! And it’s a month earlier than last year, so this is an improvement!) CHECK.
4. Send graphics for envelopes, posters and other assorted items from our new “corporate re-branding” line to the printer. CHECK.
5. Sign purchase orders for spending a WHOLE WHACK OF MONEY on above projects and pray that it’s worth it and the donations start flowing in. CHECK.
6. Pray that the mistakes that we ALWAYS find on completed print jobs will not be major ones this time around – like spelling the board president’s name wrong, or something equally embarrassing. (It’s inevitable – there will be mistakes, even though we proofread about 10 times. I tell people we do it on purpose – like the mistakes on an Amish quilt – to keep us humble.) CHECK.
It’s been a productive day at work. I have no idea why every project reached completion on the same day, but the stars must have aligned themselves that way. I love creative people like graphic designers, but given the very nature of their creative line of work (and the way their brains work), they don’t necessarily follow the ordinary protocol for such mundane things as meeting deadlines, returning phonecalls, and all those other fun things that go along with big projects like all of the above. I will be happy not to live with this twitch I’ve had lately from all the waiting I’ve been forced to endure.
And next week, if the printer’s machine breaks down and every one of these projects is horribly delayed, I will run away to a beach in Costa Rica and never come back.
Meme’s the word
I hardly ever get around to doing memes (my apologies if I ignored yours and offended you -please try not to take it personally), but I’m bored tonight, there’s nothing good on TV, and I really don’t feel like doing something mature and productive like laundry. (Plus I have to live up to my husband’s pronouncement that “all I ever do is blog”.) So here’s the one Laura passed me…
4 JOBS THAT I HAVE HAD IN MY LIFE:
– I dressed as a panda for a summer job and people got to have their picture taken sitting on my knee. (That was the year the local zoo had pandas visiting.) It was the hottest summer EVER and I was stuck inside a panda suit. (For part of the time – the other part of the time I was the photographer.) Yes, it WAS as hot as it sounds. Especially when grown men decide that it’s fun to sit on your knee. The next time you take your kids to the zoo, see the kitschy little photo booth where you can get your picture taken with a “zoo animal”, THINK ABOUT THE PERSON IN THE SUIT!
– I cleaned hotel rooms for a summer. Blech. Double blech. I suck at cleaning. If I were GOOD at it, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this post.
– My very first job was running a summer day camp in our local community centre. It still freaks me out that parents of about 30 children trusted their kids with three bored sixteen-year-olds. Trust me – we weren’t equipped.
– I spent one year working in data entry at a trucking company. Back then, I was naive and not very bold or I would have slapped that sexist arrogant truck driver with potent body odour (after 5 days in a truck and no showers) who used to think he could sidle up to me at my desk and touch my shoulder. Yuck.
4 MOVIES THAT I COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER
– I really don’t like watching movies over and over again. Once I’ve seen it, I rarely want to watch it again. There are a few I could tolerate the second (or third) time around though – Shawshank Redemption, Dead Poet’s Society, Music Box, and this year’s favourite, Little Miss Sunshine.
4 PLACES THAT I HAVE LIVED:
– Arden, Manitoba
– Steinbach, Manitoba
– Banff, Alberta (where I suffered through that chambermaid job)
– Winnipeg, Manitoba
4 THINGS I LIKE TO DO:
– ride my bicycle
– read
– write
– step off airplanes in new countries
4 OF MY FAVORITE FOODS:
– pad thai
– almost anything made with cream cheese, including the chicken dish I made the other night
– the pizza we get every summer that’s cooked in a wood-fired brick oven on an organic farm (the ambience is half the value)
– my mom’s cinnamon buns
4 PLACES I WOULD LIKE TO BE RIGHT NOW:
– that resort near the Serengetti in Tanzania where they bring you moist towels and fresh mango juice when you pull into the parking lot – one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been
– that beach in Greece where my sister and I finally “did like the locals” and went topless
– that little kitschy outdated motel in Truro, Nova Scotia, with the magical tree in front that looked like a burning bush
– that crepe restaurant in Quebec City where watching the crepe chef was like watching an artist at work
4 WEBSITES THAT I VISIT DAILY:
– almost every blog on my blogroll, but now that I’ve finally figured out about bloglines (I’m a little slow on the up-take), I usually just go there to see who’s updated rather than clicking on them one at a time
– CBC news
4 PLACES THAT I HAVE BEEN TO ON VACATION:
– Europe (backpacked through nine countries)
– Mexico (my only winter hotspot vacation)
– road trip through British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon, and California
– Kenya and Tanzania (technically it was a work trip, but it felt more like a vacation)
4 FRIENDS THAT WILL I THINK WILL RESPOND TO THIS:
– knock yourself out – lots of you have already done this, so I won’t bother naming you.
This is what it looks like when you let go of a plane 4500 feet above the earth
Yes (in case you’re looking closely at my face) I screamed. Wouldn’t you?
See the little blue blob above my head? That’s the pilot chute which the instructor releases while you exit the plane. It automatically ejects your main chute.
In case you’ve come late to this party, and don’t know anything about how exciting my life was for that brief period of time, you can see the video here, or read about it here.
And now we go back to our regularly scheduled programming of soccer games, boring days at the office, endless loads of laundry, groggy midnight puke-cleaning-up duties, and all those other riveting moments in my life.
What do you say?
In the car the other day, we were listening to a report about a women’s shelter somewhere in the middle east. The woman who runs the shelter was telling the stories of some of the women who’d come to them, desperate and alone. Sometimes, she said, they didn’t get to the women in time. She recounted the story of a young woman who’d gotten pregnant by her lover. Her family had found out and, to uphold their “honour”, her brother had taken it upon himself to kill her and cut her body in pieces. He’d carried her hand with him to proclaim to the community that their family had been cleansed of its sin and that they were honourable once again.
The questions began to flow from the three little listeners in our back seat.
“Did they just say her brother killed her? Why?”
“Did he really cut her hand off?”
“What did they do to the man she slept with? Did he get killed?”
“What about the baby she was pregnant with?”
“Do they ever do that in OUR country?”
“Why are women treated so badly there?”
“Why do they believe men are better than women?”
What do you say to three little girls, who’ve had no reason to believe that their value is any less than that of the boys, that explains the horror of a story like that? How do you say “it’s just not right” without sounding like you’re prejudiced against a whole race of people? How do you make sure they understand that, though things are much different here, we should not become complacent and ignore the plight of the women in places where it is not?
And, perhaps just as importantly, what do we do to help? Because sometimes I feel so helpless.