Tagged with china …

13.04.14 [Sunday]
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campbell river, sports, travel

time and work

Yesterday I watched a documentary about the Chinese artist/dissident Ai Weiwei. The scenes where he was in Chengdu made me miss China. Not that I was especially happy when I was living in China, but visiting China after my term was done? I loved it.

Maybe I just miss being on vacation. I know from Australia that working five days a week wears me down. After easter I was joking with some of my coworkers about how I could get used to that 3-day work week/4-day weekend cycle. But it wasn’t a joke exactly. I totally wish my job was a (predictable) part time one. Especially here in Campbell River where I do not need to be working as much as I do to pay my rent (as opposed to Vancouver or Sydney).

I mean, I like making enough money I don’t have to put off buying groceries till my paycheque comes in. I don’t want to make less per hour, just work less. Socking money away in a bank account is something I’ll appreciate eventually (when Aileen and I hit the trans-siberian for example), but for now it’s not exactly providing a huge amount of pleasure for me the way lazy long weekends do.

But I have vacation time coming, and I’m taking it in San Francisco. The Jays are playing two games against the Giants the first week of June and I’ll be there. I bought tickets yesterday and had to fight very hard to not spend hundreds of dollars on each one.

I got one seat behind the plate-ish along the home-3rd base line (which is my favourite place to watch a ballgame from even if it is thirty rows further up from where I’d get them at a Goldeyes game), and the other by the Giants bullpen lined up along the 2nd-3rd basepath. I’m hoping Lawrie’s back with the big club and isn’t injured so I can watch him do his thing fairly closely. It’s too bad about Reyes’ ankle injury.

Sometimes I think about my time here in Campbell River being something like my time in Wanzhou. When I do that it feels more manageable. I mean, I couldn’t possibly go to San Francisco for a week or Vancouver for a weekend from Wanzhou. And I made it through those years all right. But I worked a lot less as a mediocre teacher.

Sigh.

That’s my infrequent update on what is happening in my non-reading life. (For my reading life, as always check Librarianaut)

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13.01.24 [Thursday]
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books, campbell river, comics, library, teaching, travel, vancouver

hanging up a coat in an empty town on literacy day

The other day I wore my Tibetan coat inside the library and was told I looked very urban. Which was funny because I was only wearing the coat inside because I was waiting to go up to Sayward with my boss to see the branch there, which is very rural.

Sayward is about an hour north of Campbell River, and it is a tiny place. It was a foggy drive so I wasn’t able to see as much of the countryside as I would have liked, but there were mountains that appeared when the fog had gaps. And mossy forests that I saw one deer/elk trying to escape the highway into.

But the town itself doesn’t even have a grocery store. If people want more than general store milk and eggs they’ve got to drive an hour down to Campbell River. That seems crazy to me. It seemed crazy to a non-librarian friend of mine that the library branch was in a strip mall, but I had no strong feeling about that.

I’ve had a bit of a tense week because today was Family Literacy Day and it was the first event I’d done to sort of integrate with other community development projects in town. That one of the literacy coordinators was there to help made me that much more aware that I didn’t really take classes in early literacy type things at school. I feel fine doing storytimes and stuff, but really focusing on what kinds of words they’re learning gets a bit wonky for me. My sleep this week was interrupted with lots of inadequacy thoughts I remember from teaching in China. I definitely see myself as a librarian not an “educator” or “literacy expert” though I guess if I keep doing this kind of thing I’ll learn.

But it all worked out. We read some stories, I talked about community and we made “comics.” Nobody decried my event as being terrible and built a rail line to run me out of town on. Now I can relax secure in what I’m doing until my gaming for kids events start up.

On Saturday I’m heading into Vancouver, where one of my awesome librarian colleagues is visiting from Calgary. It means I miss our library’s post-holiday potluck party here, but it’s been almost 3 months since I was in the Lower Mainland. ‘Tis time.

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12.04.06 [Friday]
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school, travel, vancouver

opening week

My mom is off to France, heck, she might even be there soon, and I am done school for the term. Many of my classmates are now done school for good, which is a little weird. Weird that we don’t all finish together, I mean. I don’t have the great cathartic sighs of relief, since I’ve still got two and a third classes over the next four months. Plus doing interviews for a book we’re working on.

The good thing is that remaining a student leaves me able to work in Graduate Research Assistant positions over the next few months. I’ll hopefully be doing a bunch of video production work for one of my profs, and right now I’m doing a whack of content management stuff for SLAIS’ new MA in Children’s Literature website (which isn’t up yet).

The wonderful bit about this kind of work is that I can do it on my own with a baseball game on. The Jays have new uniforms and hey, maybe this is the year they’ll play meaningful September ball. I enjoyed the hell out of their first victory of the season yesterday, but really, I just like watching games.

I was looking at my history of being here in Vancouver and I noticed that this month till the summer classes begin is my first time I’ve really spent in Vancouver without school going on. I ran off to China and Australia at the ends of my previous semesters, so I’m going to have to remember that there isn’t any meeting with people in my classes that will just happen because I’m sitting in a chair near somewhere they are going. If I’m going to see my friends I have to contact them. Which will be difficult but I’ll do my best. It’s a time for hope.

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11.03.13 [Sunday]
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australia, comics, library, school, whining, writing

brain-weight

I am always completely amazed at how much better I feel when I have written. Today I finished off the first draft of a cataloguing paper (about the challenges of cataloguing webcomics) and while it’s nothing crazy impressive, I learned some shit and have some stuff written about what I learned. And my mood? So much better than it was yesterday, or all last week when I hadn’t written anything on this and was just dreading it.

A while back I was trying to figure out why I was so much less motivated this term with a month left than last term. And the answer was completely to do with the whole leaving for China the day after classes were over. I needed to get everything out of the way so I did. This term there’s cool stuff happening after classes are done (going to Vermont and then to Australia), but nothing I need to push myself right now for. And no Holly waiting for me right on the other side. (She’ll be coming to Oz in July.)

But today I feel good. I wrote a post for Closed Stacks (another library blog I’m contributing to) and a book review. I’ve got business cards in the mail. Tonight I’m going to do some real writing. Oh, and Reyn’s a dad (I saw it on his sister’s Facebook), so congratulations.

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