NoIdWhToWriAb

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) stands tiptoe at my door.  It's a wild month of writing 50,000 words in 30 days and hoping at least
25,00025025 of them are good words.

Usually a plot idea strikes me or comes to me in a dream a couple of days before November 1st arrives.  This year?

Nada.

No ideas.

No dreams.

Nothing.

So I'm affectionately calling this year NoIdWhToWriAb.  Rolls right off the tongue, right?  It stands for No Idea What To Write About and I'm fully embracing the sheer terror of just sitting down at my computer come November 1st and starting to type, hoping that my fingers will transcribe an idea to my brain.

Questions are jostling around in my brain.  There's the big one.  What on earth am I going to write about?  Insert your suggestions here:

_________________________________________

Perhaps I could cobble together a novel sort of Mad Libs style wherein you give me stuff and I mash it all together into sentences that kind of make sense.

Will I finally be able to kill off a character this year?  Probably not.  I like them all too much.  Even the jerks.

Will I actually write the ending to the book within those 50,000 words?  Probably not.  Let's face it, there are times when somebody just has to die and I just can't seem to make it happen.  Thus I have an unhealthy stack of unfinished novels and undead characters.

Will I ever develop a taste for adverbs?  No.  Meaty verbs always clobber them and I like it that way.

With 1, 666 words a day vying for my time, will the laundry get done?  That's a good one.  Does it ever?  I may be venturing into an unhealthy definition of 'clean clothes'.

Will I beat my friend Ed?  Yes, my word count will make his word count weep.  Sure he's already got an idea and everything, but what I lack in ideas, I make up for in blind confidence.  Sorry, Ed, but you're going down.

And finally, what songs should I add to my writing playlist this year?  Tell me your favorites.  Maybe your song will be just the thing that inspires my magnum opus.  No pressure or anything.

To my fellow Wrimos, happy writing!  And yes, that shirt's clean enough.  Set down the laundry basket and pick up your pen.

10,000 Percent

Dear Little One,

You aren't easy to teach.

You're headstrong.

And opinionated.

And passionate.

And hilarious.

Nobody makes me laugh like you do.

I love you for all of those qualities.

Last week, when we were writing for the National Day on Writing, you gave me a peek at your softer side-a side you usually keep safely hidden.  We sat in the quiet of the library ruminating on this sentence stem:

I write because...

Other kids wrote about how fun writing is, how great it is to write with friends or how much joy they find in making up stories and writing the pictures.

Little one, your response brought tears to my eyes.

"I write because I like writing love notes to my big brother in the Navy.  He is 20 years old and I love him 10,000%!!!"

I hung all the responses in the hallway and when I showed your paper to your mom, she teared up and rested her head on my shoulder for a brief moment.

What I want to say to you, Little One, is that I love to teach writing because it births moments like that where love is spelled out so clearly in blocky first grade handwriting.

The other thing I want to say to you is that I hope you continue to be brave enough to give voice to that softer side of yourself, to let that meek voice speak as clearly as your voice that keeps me in stitches with laughter.  That still, small voice is just as important.

Loving you 10,000%,

Mrs. McCauley

Dear Lance Armstrong,

Dear Lance Armstrong,

You've been quoted recently saying you've had a bit of a rough week.  I'll say.  Don't worry, I'm not going to add to it.  Am I glad all the doping in the cycling world is coming to light?  Yes, yes I am.  I love the sport of cycling and I look forward to the day when I can love it for its purity.

I've read a lot of articles on you this week, Lance, and a singular thought keeps rising to the surface: Thank God I'm not famous.  I'm profoundly grateful I don't live a life where my mistakes are broadcast to the world, where the publicity of those mistakes negates any good I've done.

Whether you doped or not, whether you lied about it or not, whether or not you deserve your Tour de France wins or not-frankly I'm not interested in being the judge on any of those fronts.  Judgement doesn't birth healing.  Truth does.  I can't attest to what the truth is in any of those situations, but this is a truth I know: LiveStrong has helped many of my loved ones who have battled the beast of cancer.  For that I'll always be grateful.

It appears that you've hit bottom, although you said yourself last week that you've had worse days.  So perhaps this isn't rock bottom, but I think it may be close.  I like what Anne LaMott has to say about grace and mercy.  "Mercy is that we don't get what we deserve. Grace is that we get what we so don't deserve."  I wish you measures of mercy and grace this week because if I were in your shoes, mercy and grace are the things that would make me take a step in the right direction.  You've got a great opportunity to decide what's next in your life and, frankly, I hope you're looking up because watching you climb has always been exhilarating.

Kind regards,

Alicia

Thankful Thursday #79

This week I'm thankful for...

• cherry flavored soda
• Siri
• cheeseburgers on pretzel buns
• pumpkin shaped candy corn
• walks with Jack the dog
• my husband, who holds me until I fall asleep
• The Writing Project
• the fact that in one more day I will no longer be master teacher to a student teacher.  Seriously, I shouldn't mentor anyone.  Ever. Again.
• my teacher friends who have taken a sworn oath to repeatedly punch me in the neck if I ever take on another student teacher
• pink carnations from my little ones on Think Pink Day
• writing with my little ones who constantly surprise me with their wordplay

Thankful Thursday #78

image courtesy of thetomkatstudio.com

This week I'm thankful for...

• the sounds of train whistles echoing up from the canyon
• Library Day
• parent volunteers
• walks with friends
• my husband's arms
• unexpected cash
• thank you notes
• the men who continue to hammer and drill and make a clatter outside my classroom every day trying to get my air conditioner to work
• the colorful words aforementioned clattering men shout outside my door when their attempts fail.  I can count that as vocabulary instruction minutes, right?  Right???

Thankful Thursday #77

Image courtesy of sweetcarolineblog.com

This week I'm thankful for...

• my husband who tells me I'm smart.  Since he's genius level smart, I absolutely swoon when he tells me I'm smart, too.
• my student teacher who climbed in the A/C closet every morning for two weeks and battled spider webs to manually turn on our classroom air conditioner
• the little one who beaded me a keychain with my name on it.  My last name is long, so it was quite the gift.
• my little ones, even the one who pulled the fire alarm.  Maybe especially him.
• my parent volunteers
• the families who donated extra money to make sure everyone in our class can go on field trips
• the return of Parenthood.  I just love that show.
• So You Think You Can Dance.  I know for a fact that I can't dance and I'm left in awe each time I watch an episode.
• my Ugandan sons
• frozen yogurt
• the opportunity to help my friend buy her very first computer
• days spent helping That Laura decorate her living room
• the firefighters who worked tirelessly these last few weeks to save homes and forests
• my friends at Writers Forum

The Great Machine Strike

Hello, dear ones.  It's good to be back with you.  I know you all have lives and other bloggers you love, so you may not have missed me, but I missed you.  I love writing to you and thinking of you looking at your screen while I'm looking at mine.  I've got so much to write about, but first let me explain why I haven't been around the old Pedals and Pencils neck of the woods.

The machines have been against me.

*I'm far less embarrassed by that reference than I should be.  I watched it when I was sick at home once, k?

Not in a Transformers Dark Side of the Moon* sort of against me.  There aren't huge talking robot cars breaking into my house or anything.

It all began when the air conditioner at the school broke.  My classroom A/C worked just fine mind you.  But when the men in coveralls came to fix the school-wide A/C, mine stopped working.  Stopped working as in it was eighty-eight-lord-have-mercy-degress inside my classroom.  Dear ones, let me tell you that there isn't a tougher crowd than 30 five and six-year olds who are too hot to move and/or think.  Due to the smoke from the fires blazing around us, we couldn't even open a door or crack a window.
TeachingSweating profusely for upwards of 10 hours a day and then driving home in a cauldron of smoke made me contemplate 2 things:

1. How hot can hell really be?


2. Am I in hell right now?

Truth be told, it also made me long for my days in Uganda writing with my sons and daughters in their beautiful open air classrooms that don't need pesky things like air conditioners or for that matter, electricity.  It made me long to sit under the trees with them, looking out over the bush while they entranced me with their stories.

Once word got out that one of my machines had gone rogue, the others followed suit.  My router went on the fritz, taking my internet access and printer with it.  No amount of cajoling could bring the router back to life.  Believe me I tried.  I tried to fix it with the help of customer service agents from all over the world.  I was on the phone with customer service for 5 unholy hours which led to me saying very bad words and entertaining thoughts of taking the business end of a screwdriver to my router, which I may or may not have done while having a full on fit in my garage.

So while I would have loved to write about said ridiculous fit in detail here, the last thing I wanted to do after sweating through my clothes all day was vagabond myself out to free WiFi spots.  The only thing I wanted to do was come home and take an icy shower.  Trust me, sparing the public of my presence during those days was really an act of community service because let me tell you, the funk rising out of my skin was so strong it sometimes brought tears to my eyes when I happened to catch an errant whiff of myself.  There aren't deodorants strong enough for that people, there just aren't.

After the A/C, router and printer went on strike, my classroom projector and camera followed suit.  I swear it's because they were melting in the heat.  My classroom A/C has now been out for 2 weeks.  Luckily for me I have a student teacher who climbs into the spiderwebby A/C closet every day and manually starts the thing up.  What better way for him to get a glimpse of the realities of teaching that to do that every morning, right?  Unfortunately once it's on, it will not be stopped, so we've moved from the sweltering fires of Mordor to the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

But today, dear ones, is a turning point in The Great Machine Strike.  Perhaps they saw the damage I can do with a single screwdriver.  Perhaps their little metal innards were scarred by a full-grown woman melting down in all senses of the word.  Today two men in coveralls came and banged on things in the A/C closet outside of my classroom so I'm hopeful that tomorrow it will be humming away again.  Also a man with a jangling tool belt came and did things to the projector and it's all bright and happy again.  I bought a new router that is speedy and quick and smiles at me with a pretty blue light.

The last hold out is the printer, but I think it knows I mean business because it's beginning to perk back up and make clicking sounds and flash cheerful blinking lights at me like it wants to be friends again.  Just in case it needs a little more convincing, I left the screwdriver out in plain sight.

Image courtesy of flatheadscrewdriver.net

Thankful Thursday #76

image courtesy of frugalzealot.blogspot.com

This week I'm thankful for...

• a new school year
• my student teacher
• double stick tape
• freshly sharpened pencils
• the sound of my husband's voice as I drift off to sleep
• parents who are already offering to volunteer in class and/or take tasks home to complete
• the firefighters working so diligently to put out the fires burning all around me
• my Ugandan children

Ripe

Hello, dear friends.  Lord have mercy, it's been a long time since I've been here with you and I've missed you.  The past few weeks have been filled with funerals, weddings and the beautiful frenzy known as Back to School.

Good, good things are happening and I'm dying to write about them and also to write more about my beloved Ugandan children.

But the thing that's on my mind tonight as I stand tip-toe on the doorstep of a new school year is how ripe with possibility the new year always feels.

image courtesy of quick-growing-trees.com

Have you ever eaten a peach straight from the tree?  Yes?  Then you know the sensation of the flesh bursting with juice as it runs in warm rivulets down your chin, dripping onto your shirt.  That's the kind of ripe I'm talking about, the kind of ripe that only comes after months of effort from the loins of trees, the kind of ripe that gets all over you.  The kind of ripe that is blissfully messy.

Year after year I find myself rippling with excitement on the eve of the first day of school.  I barely sleep and I'm all a-twitter the morning of the first day.  I never know what the first day might hold.  I could be peed on.  It's happened before.  I could be puked on.  Also happened.  My shoulder could be damp with tears.  It's happened, courtesy of students and parents.  I could also receive drawings and love notes scratched out in blocky phonics.  It happens every year.  I could get hugged so many times that my arms ache.  That happens every year, too.  It's a blissfully messy day.

Tomorrow when my little ones settle on the carpet and look up at me with beaming, hopeful faces, I'll be thinking of ripe peaches.  When I eat a peach, I don't care about the mess or the stains on my shirt, I only care about the sweetness of the peach.  Tomorrow may hold some surprises-the first day always does-but what I know for sure is that the day will be ripe with sweetness.

Why I Write

October 20th is the National Day on Writing. It seems a long way off, but as I prepare my classroom for a new group of young writers, there are two questions on my mind.  Why do I write?  And why do my students write?  On October 20th, writers, educators, students and all kinds of other people across the nation will answer one very simple and simultaneously complex question:

Why do I write?

Here's my answer.

• I write because words are like air, if I don't inhale and exhale them, I will die.
• It's fun.
• I love to laugh at myself and make others laugh along with me.
• I have the memory of a goldfish-writing helps me hold onto memories I don't want to lose.
• Some stories are too painful to say out loud, but those stories find respite on pure white pages.
• I like the way words feel in my mouth.
• When writing, I can revise as many times as I want. When I talk, the words are just out there and can't be polished once they're free of my lips.
• Writing helps me make sense of things.
• Life is full of great stories waiting to be written.

Your turn.  Be daring and brave and tell what it is that compels you to write.