Indelible Adventures

By the sounds of the title of this week’s blog you’d imagine that I have been bestowed with a wonderful gift or better still that I had provided an amazing gift for someone close to me.    I’ll let you be the judge on that one. This story begins at the end of University, January 1980 (inside voice please!) to be precise I'd recently graduated and although the ceremony wasn't until April we were considered eligible and qualified to begin teaching.   The complicating factor to all this was that all of the teaching jobs were managed centrally via a single state education department who made all public school teacher appointments.   New teachers were assigned based on when existing teachers either resigned or retired and for whatever reason at the time there was few of either, hence the glut of trained teachers in Australia during the early 1980's. Casablanca - the Classic In essence your name went onto the central appointment list, your positi...

Okay is it me or has this year gone exceptionally fast?  It definitely feels like time is speeding up.  We’re already in early November but didn’t summer just end…like a couple of weeks ago?    When I looked out my front window earlier today the leaves are almost entirely gone from the trees but now form a leafy yellow sea across my our collective lawns and provide a thick covering across the road.  Clearly the good thing is that I live on a lovely tree lined street for much of the year, but come the fall it turns into a wasteland of wet and rotting leaves. Sweet! Tis' that time of year I suppose... I think it’s the smell of the rotting leaves that transports me back to my childhood so easily and the images of me spent running through the endless piles of leaves that covered the football oval during our training sessions.  Although in Australia the autumn is in March and April given that it’s the Southern Hemisphere…strange now to imagine the season...

After moving continents and finding myself in Canada it was a bit of a lonely existence considering that my family was all in Australia.  It all started when Zach was a baby; actually to be honest we have to go back even further than that to when I first arrived here.   Strangely my relationship with my family in Australia has always been a little tenuous, and moving across the globe did little to change that dynamic.  However, given that I had instigated such a drastic move its hard to feel sorry for me or my situation, after all if I wanted to visit them I know where they live...right? Somehow this time of year always make me think of home and the hot, Australian summer just getting underway a little more than normal.  Strangely its more than that though, it’s a deep feeling of longing to be amongst my family, although now it would only be with my brothers, sister, nieces and nephews because without mum or dad I feel a little rudderless around this time of year...

This past week I hit the stage for my first Improv performance…    As you know I’ve been attending Improv classes since May and currently completing level C, in fact next week is my final class at this level.   I’ll miss it, no I think I'll miss my classmates most of all as we've really bonded. Improv rocks! There is always a little angst amongst the group as to whose moving on to the next level and who is going to take a break.   I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been with four of my classmates since we began way back in May, which isn’t bad for a class of 13.   With the final week looming there are a number of my classmates that are still undecided as to whether they’re going to come back for level D. For me it hasn’t been a hard decision to continue as I’ve been hooked on Improv since my first class, well that isn’t entirely true…perhaps I should have been more specific.   Even though my first two instructors were good the classes during t...