Reality, mine and other's.

Ok, I am going to have to grow up now and stop whining about blogger. I was settling in to do my latest post, with a now compliant system, and wandered through the bloglines...there were a couple of delightful new posts, for instance Nomad has a most welcome new post up. It is great to hear from her as she emerges from her move. Simultaneously though, as I was about to embark on a light-hearted romp through my day, because that is what I was lucky enough to have, I read Beth's latest post revealing some of the struggles that she is handling at this time. Beth here is also, to say the least, struggling.

Then I went to this blog. I have mentioned her before...she is a Palestinian woman and journalist and mother living in Gaza, and as we write and read this, she has been locked down by two solid days of gun and mortar fire with her three or four year old son.

While we were sailing there were times that we had to help the children cope with frightening and dangerous situations that we could not change...the three biggies that come to mind are thunderstorms...more accurately lightning while sitting in a sailboat, tornadoes, and potentially dangerous crossings, whether they are the Gulf Stream or a particularily committed pass. It is not fun. It asks all of you to draw on reserves that you would really not like to go to, and weather at least is neither malevolent nor personal.

I am finding myself feeling bound and uncertain. My experiences, which I had planned to transmit here are so different from what I have read this evening that it feels like tap-dancing during a crisis; what I have read has affected me. Where do I go from here...can I make a coherent piece that encompasses both truths. My real lived life that I share here on this blog with my family and friends, both old, and new on-line, and the sorrow I feel from what I have read of others....

Here's my reality.

Barca just scored in the finals. There is mass cheering in the bar across the street, I can hear it with all the windows closed. The guys downstairs have the TV on and I can hear the cheering. There are fireworks going off in the town as I type. Real life. I do feel horrendous about what is happening in Gaza, and I think that whatever your politics, you cannot help but feel for anyone anywhere who is trying to negotiate your son or daughter's childhood with as little fear and as much normalcy as possible while sitting shut off trapped in your home by mortar fire and chaos.

Here Barca scored and the folks here are thrilled. Both are real and both have a valid reason to appear. I by nature, and in nature, instantly look for the beauty around me to counter the ugliness. Balance balance balance.

We had a wild boar come down out of the mountains this last weekend. We heard it from a man in town. A mama wild boar wandered down from the mountain with three babies. She came down to the fringes of town and my Catalan/English buddy and her dog saw her. My buddy left as fast as she could since these animals can be quite dangerous. In fact, sadly two dogs decided to try to mess with the babies. One dog is dead and the other is still at the vets.

I find it fascinating that they still live up there, and faintly alarming. Though after hiking in bear country, I am a little more inured.

One of the fashions here that I find most difficult to understand is on guys, it is kind of like the uber-mullet. Very very short top and sides, and then the entire back of the head, not just the fringe at the bottom, is quite long and usually dreaded. It is U.G.L.Y. This post of course dooms me to a long stream of boyfriends spoting this do that my girls will bring home for years and years when the time comes. *sigh* They will all have droopy ass pants too with their underwear, nay, their entire butts showing. Do you realise that guys have to use Neat_tm to wear that style? Yup, guys are going out and using Neat on their pubes. If that isn't too much information, I don't know what is.

I said I would post more about the tunnels in the hills. I am sorry to say that I have failed you here. I simply forgot to ask at work today. Clear slipped my mind. Oooh, they are cheering again, and it seems that I didn't take a picture of one of the other tunnels that I thought I had, I will go either tomorrow or the day after and have a look, maybe even use the flash on the camera, and get a shot inside.

Teaching went exceptionally well today. It is nice to have days like this that make you feel like you are actually capable. There are days when I doubt it. I had to teach the, what the heck was it, present perfect continuous? The one that goes...I have been teaching this evening...that Subject + have + been + verb-as-a-gerund-with-the-ing job..."I have been confusing you." That one.

Anyway, I actually pulled it off. The kids, and teens and students and I in all my classes all had a good time, and I think they learned a bunch, and I did too. They are a neat group of kids.

We had a lovely day. Eldest went up in the mountains for the day with her class, they painted, and I haven't heard what else because I had to work, and youngest just had a basically good day. The man is getting ahead of the to do list at work, and is feeling good about that. My god mother flew to Paris for a week, which we were all sad about, but she is coming back at the end for another 10 days. The kids and I are all having a lot of fun with her, and we haven't even left the village.

I have endeavoured to pick up the paint brush again, there have been times in my life where I had a little facility with it, so I have begun the underpainting of a watercolour of the hills that surround us. I can do sky and sea pretty well, having spent quite a lot of time looking at them, studying them for my well being and the well being of my family, and generally being wildly in love with the sea and the sky for, oh, years. Mountains and forests, while not exactly a novelty, have not up until now been the focus of my observations, so I am starting out. I would like to beautifully paint one tree before I'm done. One tree, executed well, and I will be pleased.






These photos are three stages of a sketch/underpainting/experiment so please do not feel obliged to comment one way or another. They have a very long way to go, and may well end up in the bin. But that's one of the things I was working on today.

Best wishes and hopes and caring thoughts go out to all of you who are facing adversity with all the courage and strength you can muster. Wish I could send you more.