I am having that love/hate relationship with my computer again!

My computer has possibly died permanently and my computer fellow has been gone out of country for a bit. I hope that it hasn't died but am not going to hold my breath about it.   My wonderful husband brought home his laptop from work so I could tinker a bit.
So - hello everyone!  I have missed reading your blogs and keeping up with what is new in your writing, lives and quilting worlds.  I hope that I can still be allowed the privilege of entering your world and that you will once again, share mine.

It is once again back to work for me.  My summer has come to an end, although our temperatures are still in the 30 degree C's and everything continues to be green, the school year has started once again.  Sigh.  It has been wonderful seeing all the kids and staff from last year and catching up with them.  It always amazes me how much kids change from grade nine to grade ten.  Not only do they grow in height, etc but in maturity.  Most come back much more sure of themselves and have a whole new perspective to offer the coming year.

Take care!  I will be checking into your sites in the next week or so. 

Closet Poet

I was laughing to myself the other day, totally in sympathy, when I saw how the kids at school were struggling with poetry. With poetry, it either clicks right away and you get it or it doesn't and you have to struggle through. I have seen tons of kids struggle but enjoy the rewards of their struggle when they have their aha! moment. Compounding this is finding poems for a certain theme and understanding how to share and reword it into a critical essay with a reasonable amount of intelligence. Again, easy if it clicks - a real curse when it doesn't.

I was talking to a couple kids how I had had a themed poetry assignment when I was in high school and how I dealt with it. At that time, I mentioned that we also had a very small library and, unlike today, absolutely no internet for resources. Being a typical teenager, I procrastinated until I had only the weekend to do this long assignment and I had to work one of the two days at my part-time job. I think we had to find ten or so poems to use. I hit a dead-end getting poems because the library was closed by the time I was off work but I wasn't willing to call it quits - my marks were good and I wasn't willing to take a fall, especially because of my own idiocy. After a brief moment of thought (remember - time was of the essence), I sat down and popped off ten or so poems of varying lengths and styles dealing with the theme. I added made up names for the poets/authors and anonymous ones for some of the others. It was easy to write a critical review of the them because I had written them and knew exactly what the poet intended and the styles that were used! As I recall, I got one of my best marks for that assignment.

I still laugh to myself when I think of it!

(That little microsoft guy above says it all!)