Orford View Thoughts

Since my lst post many great things have happened in my life. I have a new job as a school principal, my sons are doing incredibly well in their lives.  By far the greatest satisfaction is knowing I've been able to make a difference for the young people I have mentored in my teaching life. It is great when they come back to visit and I hear that they are doing well in their lives. As Mark twain said, you can't let schooling get in the way of your education.... 20 years after you've taught a child they won't remember what you taught them, but they will remember how you made them feel. I am who I am because of my children and my students...they've taught me as much as I have taught them.. I've had so much satisfaction and there is no sign of this ending anytime soon.

Holy Crap.... I thought I was Dying....Over the Holidays I had recurring bouts of chills and fevers and this has persisted along with a chronic cough for the past 6 months.....the weird thing is that it seems to come and go......with no real pattern..until this holiday when I started to connect these symptoms with Hot Tub use.....Not only that other members of the family began to have mild bouts of the same symptoms........Go to: http://www.thoracic.org/sections/clinical-information/environmental-and-occupational/clinical-cases/pages/case5.html To read about it...... I've got some seerious Hot Tub Maintenance to do this week.... With the end result having the Hot Tub outside! Ciao

Last night I was sitting in Traffic. I had timed my departure to arrive home just in time to see the opening ceremonies of the Grey Cup. This was not to be…What was supposed to be a 3 hour trip become a 4 hour exercise in frustration. My just in time planning had been disrupted by fate, but it gave me time to think! We’d been up north to pay a flying visit to my in-laws. My father in-law, Bob, was just out of hospital after a bad fall off a roof and we’d missed his Birthday due to work commitments. As I sat there inching along towards the only Bridge that crosses the St. Lawrence, I began to reflect on how insanely busy life has become. I saw my Inlaws waving good-bye at the window….One with a walker the other with a cane and I wondered to my self where all the time had gone. Over supper the night before, we reminisced about the great times they had experienced when Bob was starting out up North in the Logging camps. The intense socialization that came from like minded and aged gr...

It’s 5:00am… The wind Is rattling the vent on the south wall…and I haven’t had enough sleep…Another night has come and gone and I’m one day closer to the end. In the mental fog of first consciousness….emotions hang freely unfettered by conscious manipulation. Pure raw feeling from the centre of the subconscious can be remotely observed by the refreshed mind before the list maker awakens and drowns out your essence with the demands of the daily world we trudge through. These raw and wondrous emotions are the core of our being and their early morning apparitions depend on the job our dream weavers have done sorting away the random strands of unattached energy that have been generated by our daily struggle to process the world around us…. I have total recall of these sub-conscious sentiments.. They call like the wolf howl across the frozen tundra to me…. They carry messages from beyond my own personal aura and connect me to my fellow human travellers…. As a child I remember greeting ea...

Life is just not a chain of unconnected events. Things happen for a reason and what appears to be random chance actually begins to look like a pattern if you reflect back over time. Summer Camp holds this place in my universe. Imagine a driftinf 18 year old...out of school, working in a mill and basically living from one party to another. This person was me in 1976. I was full of big ideas but with absolutely no focussing mechanism and no mentors to help me channel the "potential" everyone was continuously throwing in my face. Camp Wilvaken had been a place that my mum had worked at as the "shopping" person and as an 8 year old I had spent a few uncomfortable days there trying to fit in as an outsider in a boarding camp. As fate would have it Mum had been asked to pitch in again and as an aside the Camp director mentioned that they needed a cousellor as a last minute replacement. It was financial suicide really as I was planning to return to school but...I`ve ...

Working for a living or living to work.....There is a fine line between the two...I've always been one to baost that Iwas my own man....independent.. did things my way....but as I age into that wonderful phase where just my life experieince commands respect from my younger collegues, I'm in a quandry. I'll tell you why... Recently I put my name forward for a position of increased responsibility. This required that I be intervired by the senior management personnel of the organization I work for. The experieince was positive and I achieved my goal of updating my professional profile. So I should have been pleased about this.... Yet somewhere inside...The experience began to affect my emotional balance....and the fact that I let it idicates that there is some underlying insecurity in me. Actually, it probably exists in all of us becasue any time you lay yourself out therere on the carpet, ego is involved and no matter how independent we all pretend to be, we seek valid...