Perhaps I am breaking the pattern...perhaps I'm just procrastinating doing the things I need to...perhaps this is good...perhaps this is the beginning of the end.

Regardless. I read a writing exercise the other day that said 'base a character on a horoscope', so naturally, I needed to find a horoscope that might be useful for this. So I've been looking at a few.

This was one horocope I found for me for today: Take charge of what's happening to you and join forces with people who want to make similar changes. The people you meet who are struggling to reach similar goals will become lifelong friends.

Here's another: You don't have to explain your actions to those that know you. Newcomers can be classified by how quickly they grasp what's really happening. You love being part of this club.

And another: Although up setting, changes in your domestic situation will be favorable. Take a look at the possibilities of starting a small part time business with friends or relatives. You should visit a friend or relative who hasn't been well.

I've gotta wonder about these - I realize their supposed to be generic, but I find little in them that matches my life. Friend or relative who hasn't been well? Right now I'm the most unwell person I know (at least that I'm aware of). Club? When did I get membership in a club? (was I drunk?) Newcomers? Don't believe I met anyone today who I didn't already know...and don't expect to meet anyone new in the next three hours before I go to sleep. People struggling to meet new goals who will be lifelong friends? Hmmm...I think I already knew that my colleagues would for the most part remain lifelong friends since I get along well with those who I regularly interact with.

And none of these horoscopes mention the fact that I have come into three unanticipated sources of money today: 1) tutoring a student (a connection from a colleague who's moving out of state), 2) a student loan - even though I've maxed out the provincial loan limit, and 3) half a year's CCTB, which I didn't expect to get since I've left the country.

Don't horoscopes usually make a big deal about trying to predict windfalls? Or did my karma slip off into some kind of Taurus- or Aries-zone without me detecting it?

Things to puzzle over.

Good news is they won't have to shoot me like a lame horse! Doc confirms that it looks to only be muscle and maybe a bit of torn tendon, but nothing serious like ligaments (which of course would involve surgery), so I will be up to par again soon. I am still a bit concerned about potential long term effects and whether I will need to change my participation in favorite activities, but PT should go a long way toward helping get me feeling normal again.

And as for my third encounter with the much vaunted American health care system? Hmm...four hours at a clinic, sharing a waiting room with grouchy people, yelling kids, and coughing, hacking wheezers... gee, doesn't seem much different than the system I left.

The difference is I pay $4000 a year for the priviledge!

Not to mention the 45 minutes on the phone and then another 45 in person with the clinic and the insurance company telling them my physician should be an internist, not a pediatrician (who they had me registered with as primary care physician!)

I'm sure there are situations where this system works better, but I have yet to experience them myself.

Got a lovely note from friend yesterday that started with, "I hope this note finds you well". Unfortunately, it doesn't, but the sentiment is still wonderful!

I am officially non-ambulatory and will probably be for a while by the way my leg is looking. Rats! You don't realize what you have till it's gone.

Don't know exactly what it is, just know my leg has let me down for the first time in my life. I'm alternately surprised, worried, and pissed off at it (and myself for getting into this situation). I'm trying not to imagine the worse case scenario that the doctor might give me tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Three coffees and I still feel barely awake. Being in my own classes till 8 at night, then teaching the next morning at 8 is just not enough time for me to feel awake. Particularly when three or more of those twelve hours in between are spent in transit.

I can certainly get as little sleep as I do on Thursday nights and feel with it, but there's something about being in class so late and then so early that taxes my brain. I can never just eat and go to bed when I get home - it takes hours just to wind down enough to sleep, and I think that's the problem. My brain is just too wired still when I get home.

There seems to be a pattern to my blogging: once on the weekend or monday, and a second time half way through the week. Leads me to ask, why? I think the answer falls somewhere within a realm of, 'i think of things to blog about on a regular basis, but when it comes to writing it out, it all seems to trivial and so then i don't do it'. Makes me wonder why I keep doing this...oh yeah, 'cause it's all about me! Feeds my ego.

Though ostensibly it's supposed to be about you who read this, so you know what's going on in my life.

So, what is going on? you ask.

Ange had a good birthday - she seemed to enjoy herself. She had recently watched The Perfect Storm, so we went out to Gloucester for the day - nice town, and we had a good time being all together without at least one of us with our head in a book. She's happy to be reading the 5th Harry Potter now. (Her last literary endeavour - I just have to make a note of this - was The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde - impressive, ain't it?...meanwhile, her mom has joined a book group that will first read Coraline by Neil Gaiman, a YA book...a little backwards perhaps?) But she says she doesn't feel any older yet.

The others? Doing good - Dwayne's kicking ass in his class - top marks! Yes, that intelligent man is with me, thank you very much. Sandy's having problems with tendonitis in her legs, which makes cross-country running problematic, but she's also incredibly stubborn and won't give it up. And the endless hours of math review this summer seem to have paid off for Steph since her academics seem to be going better this year, at least so far.

Experienced my second encounter with the US health care system today.

Anyone who says the American system is better because you get better access to health care is only talking about people who have expensive - and thus comprehensive - medical insurance.

When we arrived last year, we discovered the children needed physicals before they would be admitted to the school - unfortunately this was something we couldn't really prepare for before leaving home, since we had no idea what town/city we'd end up in...so, I was stuck scrambling to get physicals. I located an office in Arlington, which is two towns away, who were taking new patients and were willing to take cash - I made the appointments and prepared to shell out a lot of money. Arlington is a very, very nice town -in fact, I wish I could afford to live there. Their library is a gorgeous, old, but very well maintained, classic kind of marble and stone edifice that's a delight to wander around in, and the rest of the town matches it.

It was a very nice office - helpful staff, understanding about our situation - in fact, when we got there, the receptionist indicated that they had billed the Canadian health care system (in other provinces) before for physicals, and they would try to bill half the cost back to Alberta Health. Yeah! Now the physicals would only cost $200! We went more than once, since we were squeezing the girls in one at a time on a tight timetable before school started, and each time, it was a pleasant experience (except of course for the payment).

This year, Sandy needed her physical updated for school sports, so I made appointments for all three again. This time we were on the plan offered through Dwayne's school. Although the individual coverage offered by both schools cost the same, my school offered spouse/dependent coverage at twice the rate of BU. So, naturally we're on his plan. We got bounced around a bit from health care center to health care center until they found a family provider who was taking new patients. She works in South Boston, a neighborhood I had heard much about, but had never entered before. Aside from getting lost trying to find the place (since it's right next to the Big Dig), I was glad it was daylight. Double-parked, finger waving drivers seem to congregate in this area, and I suspect that all the crazy drivers I've seen elsewhere, actually start out here at the beginning of their day - as if they were part of some kind of crazy dispatch system that assigned each one to a different sector to mess up traffic - "your assignment today is to go into east waltham and make u-turns in the middle of busy streets all day" or "cruise up and down memorial drive in cambridge at erratic speeds that are always at least 10 miles over or under the speed limit". [And yeah, its kinda neat that memorial drive runs along much of the charles on the north side - feels a bit like home.]

So, we finally find this place (and a place to park - I thanked god my car is old and worth very little right then), and although the building itself was nice, the reception staff exhibited the kind of guarded hostility that develops when you are used to dealing with unreasonable people...especially people who don't want to pay money. I know what that feeling is like, and it makes you less friendly, more suspect, and really detracts from the ability to make someone feel welcome in a place of business. I felt like the receptionist was feeling me out for my attitude when I first approached her and that I had to demonstrate that I was a nice person before she really started to work with me on getting the preliminaries done. On top of that, we spent almost an hour sorting out paperwork, making sure we were on the right plan, and making yet more phone calls to confirm that we did have coverage for the services we were about to receive.

Nothing like - here's my AHC card - here's my next of kin - the doctor will see you in a moment.

Although our physician is nice and seems quite competent, the forty-five minute drive (god knows how long it would take on the T!) and neighborhood really detract from the overall experience, and I sincerely hope we never have to access emergency medical services in this city. I suppose if something serious ever happens, I might see the benefits of this system by being able to access health care quicker, but so far, I'm not impressed.

Ive been reading a lot this summer...ahhh, the bliss of reading something that I want to read! It's one of the reasons I'm in a doctoral program in English literature, and yet the irony is that I have so little time to read what I want to by the time I read all the things I have to read! But it's been a nice mix so far.

In fiction, I read A Door into Ocean which was first recommended to me by a friend who could not remember either the title or the author. After having run around to a number of people and places trying to find it, she managed to find the biblio on it and so I bought it to read. When I had first heard about it (back in the mid-nineties) it was out of print, so I was happy to find that it had been reissued. If you're a fan of LeGuin, this is a good one to read. I also read The Eye in the Door, which is the second in a series by Pat Barker. I read the first one last fall for a class, and I think the second one is even better. I know I'm going to keep my eyes open for the third and read it as soon as possible (which unfortunately probably won't happen till Christmas). I also read Timothy Findley's short story collection Dust to Dust; I need not say more, it is Findley in excellent form, as usual.

In non-fiction, after the Sagan, I read King's On Writing, which was interesting in that it was very clear to see how his writing and his philosophy of writing merge. It got me interested in reading other writer's writing about what they've done [maybe I should read Findley's too], to see how that matches their particular style. Dwayne had picked up the audio copy of it from the library for me, and I had tried to get through it and found it boring, but then my friend threw it at my during a visit and said, 'read this' and I'm glad I did give it a try again, 'cause I found it interesting AND useful. I guess I need to stick with print since that's the second time I've had problems getting into an audio book.

We toured the middle school at the beginning of the month, and one thing that struck me about the library was what seemed to be a disproportion between the number of televisions and the number of books on the bookshelves. The library was mid-sized, and there were plenty of shelves, but most of them were very bare. After reading this list of the most frequently challenged books (a.k.a. censored books), I wasn't surprised that there were so few books on the shelves! There are many books on this list that I know I read and enjoyed, many more that, having read them, I cannot imagine why someone might object to them [if they are so subversive, then wouldn't I remember the subversion, or is it supposed to be that subtle?], and many that were on reading lists when I was in elementary/junior high/high school.

There is one on the list, Flowers for Algernon, that I remember was pulled from our reading list by a Jehovah's Witness mother...but it was pulled after they had already been distributed to us, so of course I was doubly determined to read this book to find out what the fuss is about. In fact, after reading this list, I'm thinking I might be missing something by not having read some of those books!

There are quite a few people in the world that have far more time on their hands than I do... but they amuse me. This was one of the most pleasant error pages I've come across, especially when searching for WMD.

But I think this one feels more like the kind of thing I suspect happens to my computer when I'm not looking!

Struggling with the frustration of trying to clear up memory in my computer. It's one of the few things that I know to do when the damn thing stops working like it's supposed to and earlier this morning it stopped in the middle of a print job. Not just stopped printing, but the screen went utterly black and nothing worked at all - had to hard boot it to get it back, and now I'm nervous that something is seriously wrong, even though scans say everything is hunky-dory. [I wonder if that's how it's spelt? I think when it comes to not real words anything goes, so I won't sweat it]

I have the same attitude toward my car and my computer - both are highly useful tools. When they're working fine, I love them; when they're not, I experience both hatred and fear....hatred at their betrayal of my expectations, and fear caused both by the sense of the unknown and my limited knowledge of how they work (I know a few tricks, but they're tricks at best), and the fear that to get them working again is going to cost me mucho dineros.

Good weekend - pretty low key and laid back, but overall pretty good.

It was Dwayne's birthday yesterday, so I took him out to the local comedy club on Saturday night. We thoroughly enjoyed the comedians, who focused much of their acts on the peculiarities of Bostonians...and as a recent emigree, I found their comments highly amusing. I also learnt that I need to find where the cheap places to park downtown are located! Ouch!

We had a good afternoon yesterday, taking the kids to the local park and throwing the frisbee around. It was really nice, something we don't do very often, and for that reason, I found it special. Last weekend when it was raining the whole time, we played TriBond, which was also something we don't do very often, and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit then too (except for Sandy who was desperate by the end of the game with telephone-withdrawal symptoms!)

All this family time got me thinking about the old quality vs. quantity debate...and frankly, debating whether quality or quantity time is better for your kids is a bit like arguing the old nature vs. nurture argument - are good people/bad people/psychopaths born or created? In the nature vs. nurture debate, it's pretty hard to come down on only one side, since there are studies that prove both sides influence the kinds of adults we grow up to become. But in the quality vs. quantity time argument, the debate seems to be a moot point since kids seem to need both. They need their parents to be there when they need them (quantity time) and to leave them alone to grow up and provide those memorable times when everyone gets together, outside the usual routine, and enjoys just being together - no chores, no lectures, no guiding, no counselling, just enjoying being together.

That's the kind of weekend we had.

Consumerism is a life-sucking state of being. I've spent too much time in stores lately between purchasing things we need for the new place, things that need to be repaired, birthdays, back-to-school, and my own book buying.

Most retail outlets just suck the life out of you. Looking at others in the store, do you ever see any joy? No. Mostly you just see vacant expressions, and if you do get an acual expression it's usually a frown, or a worried look. Where is the joy of entertainment - the heartfelt laughter or delight in a good book or movie? Where is the joy of accomplishment in the athlete who has met a self-imposed challenge, won the game, beat their previous record? Where is the intense satisfaction of talking with a good friend?

I'm disliking shopping more and more the older I get...soon I'll be Scrooge all year round!

The girls start school in two more days (and I don't start for another week - yeah!) - Angie moves from elementary to middle school (6-8), so she gets to change schools, even though we were careful to stay in the same area when we moved so they would'nt have to move from one system to another - each town here has its own system, even if that consists of only four schools total. We attended the middle school orientation tonight, and I realized that the beginning of this year stands in sharp contrast to the previous year, at least for me.

Last September, when the girls first went to school, I felt very dissociated from what they were doing - not only was I panicking over the 'homework' that I had in preparing to teach on my own for the very first time, I was unsure about how long we would stay here, uncertain about the quality of education they might be receiving, and frankly, a little self-absorbed in my own difficulty adjusting to the move. I still regret that I managed to lose touch with one friend during that awful time, and have not been able to make contact again. It's not a part of my life I'd like to relive, though if I ever decide to write about someone who loses grip with reality, I think I came close enough that I could see over that edge and would be able to fairly realistically describe it.

[self-edit] I don't want to psychobabble though.

I think I'm kicking myself right now because I feel like I'm stalling out on creating a new syllabus for this year. You'd think that gaining three weeks in changing from quarters last year to semesters this year would be easy, but accommodating the extra work that they want to incorporate into the curriculum will be difficult. The biggest foul-up is the fact that I lose two classes only a couple of weeks apart for Veteran's day (Rememberance Day) and Thanksgiving (last week of November) - and they're near the end of the term. (Columbus day in October falls on the same weekend as Canadian Thanksgiving).

I'm also not looking forward to my own classes - there's not much that interests me that's being offered this term - and next term, there's too much! Ergh! I'll have to do most of my work independently - that's one thing I've had difficulty adjusting to here in this program - I'm really on my own as far as most of my work goes - there's very little guidance regarding my own studies, or even help with adjusting my teaching schedule to the new semester system. Just makes it harder. A friend of mine told me today: "A calm sea does not a good sailor make". Which is true. Which means I'm gonna be a kick ass sailor by the time this is all over!