Keeping my promise to ride through the winter this year (my first year of biking to work twice a week) hasn’t been hard.  Of course, the impressiveness of this all-season feat is considerably diminished by the fact that we’ve had very little snow in Toronto this winter.  Beating the cold is not a challenge; surviving snow covered roads, on the other hand, can be.

But tonight I finally I finally got to try out the treachery of winter riding.

Luckily, I had my cycling expert girlfriend with me; she had ridden through ice and snow to bring me dinner at school, where I was staying late to rearrange my classroom – long story, separate blog post once time permits – and accompany me home.

After a briefing ("go slow, don’t lean into turns, get off saddle and put one foot near ground in case of instability, ride straight, no braking…."), we set out.  Rather than my usual fast fare, I opted for Vivaldi’s Quattro Stagioni in my headphones to guide my slower pace and carry me through the slushy ride home.

It was definitely slower, but not as treacherous as I had anticipated. 

I heeded my girlfriend’s wise advice, and made all the right accommodations, resulting in only one near slip, and no falls at all!  Yay!

Soon, we were turning into a familiar driveway and stopping for a quick photo in the parking lot out back of our building.

My first ride in the snow.

The guest pastor at church this morning spoke about needs vs. call.  The needs, he noted, are great, and many very legitimate and even urgent. But that doesn't mean we are being called.  "You can't be passionate about the whole world", he suggested coyly, encouraging us instead to be selective and focussed in our giving and in our prayer.

It kind of reminded of me Nancy, a principal I heard speak at a leadership development event when I was a new teacher... she likened many of us then young, eager teacher leaders to shirts on a laundry line, flapping in the breeze, unfocussed and all over the place, wherever the wind blew us.  She encouraged us to search out and follow our passion, find our niche, and really focus our energy on becoming strong, skilled leaders in one area, to make a powerful impact in that area.

Focus has never been my forte.  It all seems so interesting, so important... saliency is something that eludes me, apparently.  In choosing one path, I grieve the many I did not select.  (The good thing about teaching is that the paths are many and a great number of them intersecting, so there is plenty of opportunity to stumble upon the important stuff repeatedly in case one misses it the first time!)

But back to the good pastor's message this morning... it reaches beyond the realm of my chosen career in public education of course, where there is much need.  Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the quantity and intensity of the need in my classroom and in my community and beyond... but as my dear partner and I often remind each other, "one step at a time".  Now I am also reminded that as we take those single small but oh-so-important steps, we need to heed the call.  The needs may abundant, but each of us is not called to solve all of them; listening carefully and acting with discernment can help us to use our individual and collective talents to impact positive change in the most effective manner possible.

My goal this week is to listen (BIG goal, for those of you who know me!!!!  If you are one who prays, please do so in abundance for me this week, I urge you!), so that I can discern the needs I am called to help with and learn about during my short sojourn on this planet.

I was directed by my student teacher to a blog about a family who is cycling with their children for the year.   Pedal Powered Family hopes to travel 20 000 km across Canada and the US this year, starting and ending in Hamilton, Ontario!

A recent entry talks about the questions of strangers the family meets on the road, strangers who are particularly interested in how the two kids (both under 5 years of age) are adapting to life on the road.

"We want their comfort zone to be wide, and include the world and every culture and person in it",

                                                     writes one parent in the Jan 23 blog entry. 

Inspired by our recently begun Science unit on plants, I looked up some works by Georgia O’Keefe and slapped together a short ppt for the students. 

As a preamble, I had them experiment a bit with shading, using crayons and coloured pencils.  I handed out scraps of textured paper, and had the students choose one colour with which to practise rubbing hard or lightly to try out different effects.  I then had them look up Georgia O’Keeffe and note 2-3 facts, which we shared the next day as part of the ppt.

Inevitably, someone came up with “she liked to draw flowers”, and this launched us into the rest of the ppt, and an examination of O’Keeffe’s work, during which I pointed out various treatments using shading.  The students, having recently used similar techniques, were amazed, and exclaimed “Whoa!” and “Dramatic!” in response to several of the works I showed.

My final slide was a compilation of a few of the previous pieces, with the title, “Now YOU try…”  This was accompanied by my verbal invitation to select a page of varying size to draw some sort of flower onto, then use crayon or coloured pencil to shade it in.

Some results are below…

My mother’s wooden salad bowl, a Goodwill find (back in the days when Goodwill was called – wait for it – “Crippled Civilian”, NO KIDDING!!!!), recently cracked beyond repair.  Unable, somehow, to throw it out, I stuck it on the shelf in a bottom cabinet in our kitchen.  Serendipitously, we recently found another, similar wooden salad bowl at our local Goodwill store, and it is now our main serving bowl of choice for all manner of creative concoctions, from beet-celery salad to mango with toasted almond slivers .

But this evening, this evening at dinner, it was my mother’s old, cracked salad bowl that sat on the dining room table at dinner time, its sprung wood piece now so severely hanging off the edge that filling the bowl to the top is no longer a wise choice for fear of losing half one’s salad!

A flavoursome, fresh green salad stood at attention inside the bowl, waiting to be gobbled down alongside a delicious coconut curry.  Amidst the lettuce were hidden succulent chunks of grapefruit and litchi.  Sprinkled on top of this tasty concoction was a mix of toasted sesame seeds and sliced almonds.

I smiled to myself after I sat down to dinner… my mother, an avid fan of fresh and interesting dishes, would definitely have approved of the contents of her battered old Goodwill treasure!

I am rediscovering my relationship with my iPhone.

After my laptop was stolen at the beginning of the summer, and I got a new computer, I was afraid to sync my iPhone.  Being sometimes prone to luddite-esque tendencies, my big transformation from CDs to MP3 (iPod) several years ago resulted in my music library being split between several locations, including one external drive!  So I was afraid to plug in my up-to-date iPhone into a new computer and lose everything.  Consequently, I had been walking