Homeless

I recently read J. J. Brown’s blog post about her debt reduction experiment.  Last December I participated in the #reverb10 blogging challenge and one of the goals I chose for 2011 was dealing with debt.  Definitely the hardest goal I chose, it’s also the one I’ve successfully ignored for the last 4 months.  I can pay my bills and buy necessities but rarely have money for those unexpected expenses like broken cars and leaky roofs.  As I get older and my children become independent, I wonder if I’ll just be working to finance all the things in my life?

Brown’s largest expense after necessities and education is books. My house is filled with books and about two years ago, I put a moratorium on book purchases.  I love the library including that popular contact sport, library book sales, and have found a number of incredible books in local thrift stores.  Around the same time, I cut down quite a bit on clothing purchases because really, at my age, comfort is key and who’s noticing anyway?  My biggest chunk of cash after mortgage, food, and utilities goes to my cell phone carrier.  With 3 smart phones in the family, 2 owned by teenagers, that’s more necessary than discretionary spending.  So where is all my money going?

Let’s return to Brown’s blog post for a minute.  Her experiment was quite simple: when she’s tempted to make a purchase, she imagines herself homeless and “carrying that particular item down the street”.  I immediately saw my homeless self wandering down Route 35 in my must have Paula Deen onion goggles.  In my arms, I’m carrying my out of date iMac, in my pocket my iPhone with speakers (love podcasts), in my bag my painfully old netbook, too small external hard drive, tablet, and miscellaneous powercords, mice, and keyboards. I’d also have a dog on a leash, a cranky old cat in a carrier, and a gecko in a fishbowl balanced on my head.  Behind me I drag my new Rachel Ray saute pan, complete set of Fiestaware including pitcher, gravy boat and glassware, knife set, notebook full of recipes, a lot of beans, produce, and huge container of cumin.  I’m on my way home to my luxury apartment inside my broke down VW Bug.

Let’s not forget the two children trailing behind me.  The teenage boy sports his drum set, iPhone, and old Little Tykes wagon piled high with cereal, milk, and pop tarts.  The princess is busy texting on her Blackberry complaining about how no one offers to help her drag her 7 huge suitcases of clothes down the street while she struggles with her laptop bag.

Talk about first world problems!  My job may have it’s ups and downs, but I have a job and can support my family.  The rising price of gasoline is daunting and will force me to wonder how I’ll keep two cars on the road this summer but somehow it’ll happen.  Maybe I have to spend my vacation learning all about home improvement since sadly I can’t afford to pay others to do it, but I can afford paint and plywood.

So as I sit here paying my bills on my almost 3 year old iMac, I realize that I don’t really need a debt reduction experiment.  I just need to take the time to appreciate all that I have, reflect on where I’d like to be in the future not from a financial standpoint but in terms of what will bring me happiness, and recognize that the 3 year old iMac works just fine …

or maybe this is just one big rationalization as to why I gave up chasing the money and became a teacher.

Blender

This post is not an ode to my immersion blender, probably the best little appliance ever (thanks Sarah and Joe), although I do recommend it if you don’t currently own one.  However, as part of reverb10 last December, I came up with 10 goals for 2011. One of them, and probably the most difficult, was learning (and then teaching) blender.

If you read this blog on a regular basis, you might remember that if I could be any character in a book or film I would be Trinity from The Matrix. Faced with teaching a new program unlike any she’d used before to 10 high school boys and one very talented girl, she would’ve asked Tank for a disk and uploaded all of the instructions into her brain in about 30 seconds.

Sadly, I am not Trinity.

Over a year ago, I sat down with a former student and worked through our current textbook Introduction to Character Animation using Blender (more on that in a minute).  This is the first class I’ve ever used a textbook with, and I chose to do so because Blender’s user interface is such a change from the Adobe Creative Suite GUI my students and I are used to.  We memorized hot keys and got comfortable using basic shapes to create simple characters in multiple views.  After that eight week experiment, I thought myself ready to teach this free software to a group of upperclassman.

Class approved … then I didn’t look at Blender for a year.  Forgot everything.

Luckily (well in this instance), our snow overlords returned after Christmas so I had great amounts of time to work through the textbook again.  My lady’s head sported multiple tumors and Captain Blender’s pecs had, like many aging superheros, sunk closer to his waist that optimum when fighting crime.  However, I once again believed I knew how to use Blender even if I didn’t have the artistic talent to create a decent character.  After all, I’m the middle-aged computer science instructor not the perky visual communications teacher!

A month went by, new semester starts, I introduced Blender, the kids start mesh modeling the lady’s head … and once again all those hot keys, workarounds, and solutions to problems not addressed by the book were no longer in my head.  I realized Blender was going to be even harder to master than Illustrator!

So now I’m working along with the kids on my third version of Captain Blender.  In the last few days, I finally feel not only comfortable but actual enjoy creating a 3D model in this program.  I recently overheard another teacher say something to the effect that it’s hard for a person to teach a subject they are just learning.  I strongly disagree; teaching Blender while once again working through the tutorials in the book has finally put all the techniques unique to this type of design in my head for good (although I have written copious notes about all of our experiences in my book).

[We interrupt this blog post to address a thought some of you may have at this point. You're thinking, "how can you be teaching something you don't know thoroughly and completely?"  Technology is not math, or Spanish, or History.  Academic disciplines change very little over decades if not centuries, yet the technology I want and am expected to teach in 2011 was barely a dream 8 years ago when I came to this profession. Technology teachers are the true lifetime learners; we learn the "new new thing" at least once a year if not more, and don't go thinking we get paid to do that - we learn on our own time after teaching all day, grading projects, and dealing with our own families.  Academic disciplines have their own issues, but comparing their content to mine is like comparing apples to, well PCs.]

Now a word about that book.  It was the only one I could find that specifically addressed character animation using Blender back when I had to recommend a textbook for this course.  I think all of the students would agree, it has significant shortcomings.  My belief is that the author is very adept at Blender and never gave the book to a beginner to test whether or not his instructions were interpreted in the manner intended.  As my Java students learned the hard way, the most important part of any process is testing!  The author neglects to document numerous steps and many that he does indicate are so brief we spend at least 10 minutes trying to figure out exactly what he means.  At times, he gives up and just tells the reader to follow the pictures yet the pictures either don’t indicate what you are supposed to do or, in one case, are the wrong picture altogether!

Frankly, I think I might just write my own book after this experience.  Works out well since writing is another one of my reverb10 goals for 2011, and I’ve already been asked to teach a summer camp in Blender, so there are my test subjects!!

Knitting

As part of #reverb10, I made a list of goals I want to accomplish in 2011.  One goal I set for myself is to be more creative.  Learning to knit is a skill I’ve wanted to acquire for decades but never really had the chance until now.  @amandazukofski, one of my web design students last year, hosted a workshop last week as part of the National Art Honor Society series at our school.  Teaching teachers is not an easy task, but Amanda was up to the challenge!  The video below explains why knitting holds a special place in my life and shows what fun can be had learning a new skill.

Goal 2: Creativity

As part of the #reverb10 challenge in December, I set 10 goals for myself in 2011. Over the next few weeks I will post about each goal, how I chose it, and what I hope to achieve.

I am not a creative person.  No really, I’m not.  At least not in the way I think of as creative.  I like to write, even got a degree in Creative Writing, but I’m so much better at writing about real life than fiction.  I tried fine art when I was younger, even went to a Saturday art program during middle school at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, but I knew I wasn’t an “artist”, I just liked to draw.  Got hired to teach Java Programming and, oh both the way, Web Design too, and had no idea what that was all about – I wrote code!  Which is very creative in it’s own right but again, not what I think of as traditional art.

Over the past 8 years, I’ve learned a lot from students and teachers about art and design.  In 2011, I want to tackle a few projects, some I’ve wanted to do for a long time, others new to me this year.  The short Flash animation below explains it all!  Credit where credit is due… I discovered The Creative Entrepreneur by @LisaSonoraBeam through the odyssey of #reberb10 last month.

Goal 1: Yoga

As part of the #reverb10 challenge in December, I set 10 goals for myself in 2011. Over the next few weeks I will post about each goal, how I chose it, and what I hope to achieve.

I started doing yoga out of anger.

About 6 years ago, I had 2 kids in middle school, taught full-time, and attended graduate school in the evenings working towards my Masters.  My family lives in other parts of the country, so I’d created a support system comprised of friends. Sadly, at that time I discovered I’d placed my trust in some of the wrong people and realized a close friend was anything but (the term frenemy was never more aptly applied). My stress level was through the roof, I ate at odd times and never anything healthy, and weighed more than I’m still willing to admit.

That had to change.

Twenty years before, Jane Fonda introduced me to exercise. In high school, I always had a “note” for gym, weighed myself every morning, and believed in the phrase “your I.Q. should be 3 digits, not your weight” (I know). Granted, I’m 5 feet tall, so my appropriate weight isn’t all that much, but 90 lbs achieved by drinking a lot of coffee and eating very little was in no way healthy.

After I left college and moved to San Diego, I discovered food in a big way.  Offices breed food, and my first office job introduced me to office birthdays, office lunch hours, office happy hours with complementary buffets … and I liked food way more than it liked me.  So when we bought our very first VCR from Curtis Mathis, I went right out and got a copy of Jane Fonda’s Workout. I lost weight, had lots of energy, and felt better than I think I’d felt in my lifetime.  I added more Jane Fonda videos to my collection, and she helped me work off the weight of two pregnancies and one divorce.

With Jane, I felt the burn in my own time and space … with no snide gym bunnies sneering at my less than perfect moves.

No matter how many videos I’ve bought over the years, I always return to Jane. Six years ago, when I needed to channel that anger into something positive so I could deal with all the other issues in my life, I thought of Jane.  At that point, aerobics intimidated me though; I envisioned my kids coming home from school to find their aging, unfit Mom in cardiac arrest in the living room.  Looking around at other options, the rising popularity of yoga intrigued me … and guess what?  Jane had a yoga video!

I did yoga along with Jane every day until I mastered her moves which didn’t take long because she was obviously not a yoga practitioner.  (The hilarity of the fake braid she kept flipping out of her face did make the pain of those initial practice sessions more bearable though.)  After that, I bought Gaiam’s series of DVDs and even invested in a few by Shiva Rea.  I explored the spiritual side of yoga, and my practice became the high point of each day.  Less stressed, more energized, fresh from therapy, I thanked God every day for the catalyst that was my yoga practice.

Flash forward two years, and a very good friend at work referred to me as “our own Madonna” (warning number 1) and another peer yelled at me from across the cafeteria to “eat something” (warning number 2).  Oh, and I bought a dress that was size 0.  Doesn’t that size mean you don’t exist?

I can be a little excessive.

I took a second job not soon after that, then a third and when I had free time, sleep, not yoga, was at the top of my list.  At one point, I hurt my wrist during a yoga session and that ended any interest in continuing.  For the past 18 months, I haven’t done one yoga pose, I’ve gained, let’s just say, too much extra weight, and spiritual became a trip to health food store.  I did become vegan and was able to dig myself out of the snowpacolpyse last week, but I realized while blogging for #reverb10, it was time to return to yoga.

So I did.  On my birthday this passed Monday I celebrated not with friends and food, but a streaming yoga video by Hemalayaa.  I discovered her videos back in my last exercise odyssey, and she has one entitled “Yoga for Everyone”.  Just what I need to get this middle-aged body and mind back into yoga and on track both physically and spiritually.  The first practice wasn’t quite as painful as I expected, and I do feel much better after the workout.  I’m also reminded of how much I love ending my day with yoga.  Up at 5:30 a.m., teaching at 7:30 a.m., most weekdays leaving school to teach at the studio or tutor in Freehold, the pace of the yoga practice forces me to take a moment for myself.

My first goal for 2011: Slow down and practice yoga!