Snow falling
a white world
Pure motives
clean character
Love calling
to warm bed
longing
laughing
falling.
.
.
(This is my 1300th blog post! Hurrah!)
quote-John Green on love March 1, 2014
I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
~John Green The Fault in our Stars p. 75
I’m completely with John on this one. I know that most people don’t have that experience, but should is an optimistic word. Loyalty to someone is a beautiful thing. It’s powerful when it’s reciprocated.
poem- bird bouquet February 26, 2014
Usually too territorial to rest together,
twenty Red winged blackbirds,
tremble upon the tips.
One bush, in early spring,
a yellow, red and black bird bouquet.
.
.
Such a strange sight as I was driving home from Vernon last weekend! And hey! Red winged blackbirds are the first sign of spring! YAY!
poem-learning to listen February 25, 2014
A roomful
of opinions
opinions
opinions
everyone shouting
no one hears.
I think!
I believe!
I!
I!
I!
Wait!
Sit.
Listen.
Ask a question.
Listen to the answer.
Really listen.
Hear.
Think.
Learn.
Grow.
.
.
.
Another poem for the very inspiring Robin with whom I teach. So honoured to work in a school full of such amazing masters. So wonderful to watch kids learn how diverse our world is, how full of shades of grey, how their opinions aren’t the only ones in the world. 🙂
quote- John Green on swings February 24, 2014
Another quote from John Green’s The Fault in our Stars. An ad for Craigslist:
Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home
One swing set, well structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It’s all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around. (p. 124)
poem-Newton’s first law of writing
It’s not about writer’s block
It’s about writer’s inertia
An object at rest, stays at rest;
A writer not writing, remains not writing.
Something must get it moving.
An object in motion, stays in motion;
A writer writing, remains writing,
Unless an outside force acts upon it.
Seek the energy to start the motion
And stay in motion
So the book gets written.
.
.
Diana Gabaldon once said that she tries to write every day, because if she doesn’t, an inertia develops and it’s hard to get to it. I have found this true! Since the frenzy of drafting two novels in November, it’s been hard to do more than outline recently. I know that if I just get into the rhythm of the writing, it will propel itself, but the novel writing rhythm is proving elusive these days. I’ve been having no trouble keeping up the blog though, providing a poem for your daily reading. That’s better than nothing!
quote- from The Fault in Our Stars February 23, 2014
Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are the books…which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
(John Green, The Fault In Our Stars p. 33)
Obviously for me Outlander is the book series that fills me with evangelical zeal. I’ve been trying to think what the special and rare book is for me, that I’d not want to share with anyone. I can’t think of one. Then again, I’m not a very private person, and as a librarian, I’m kind of into the whole sharing books, though I try to match the book to the right person, of course. How about you? Do you have a rare and special book that you hold close to your heart?
PS. If you haven’t read the amazing book I’m quoting from above, you really should check it out. I think it was one of the best books I’ve read in the last year (and I read over a hundred books in the last year).
poem-reading at the Cracked Pot February 22, 2014
At The Cracked Pot
three crack pots,
(story pouring
word winders)
read.
Audience fights
coffee makers,
straining ears
to hear,
relaxes with smiles
at trials below amid the coal,
at parking problems,
at teen trouble.
The writers who read have only words
with which to weave a moment
to give a gift, to share
with those gracious ears
filling the chairs.
.
.
Allusion to The Cracked Pot Coffee Emporium in Vernon, which hosted writers Patricia Donahue, Howard Brown, and me this afternoon. A packed house strained their ears, and it was a lovely time!
Shawn L. Bird 
analysis- Olympic per capita medal count February 28, 2014
To my mind, the real winners of the Sochi Olympics were Norway, Slovenia, and Austria.
Why?
According to the “official data” The Sochi Olympic winners were Russia first with 33 medals, Norway second with 26, and Canada third with 25. Twenty-six nations medalled. While I’m delighted that Canada did so well, I got pondering what the results would be like if we looked at medals per capita for each country.
How can 8 medals from a population of 127 million (Japan) or 60 million (Italy) be compared with 8 medals from a population of just 2 million? (Slovenia). I don’t think they can. So I did the math.
I found population data on Wikipedia and divided it by the medals earned to determine the numbers of medals earned per capita. Sadly, my method drops Canada to tenth and Russia to fourteenth place, but it’s a method that is more fair.
Here are the results. The per capita number shows how many people in the nation there are for each medal (gold, silver, or bronze) at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.
country population medals per capita
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