What am I doing up at this computer at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning? You have had 8 hours sleep, says my body, what else do you want? I want to be decadent and spend my first Saturday since last June in bed until at least 9 a.m., but here I am. Yesterday morning I was wide awake at ten-to-four and finally got up at four. I don't like this! If it meant my body is ready, willing, and able to actually get moving at 4 a.m., it would be one thing...
It's this job. Trying to develop a new job without much direction is not new to me, but in the past, at least I had someone to look at forms and procedures I had developed and say "Go for it". This time, I have to wait for a committee of six people to approve whatever I do, and they aren't meeting on a regular enough basis to approve anything. And when they finally did meet this week, only half of them were there and they all had different ideas of what I'm supposed to be doing. So I wake up in the dark hours worrying about where to go next.
If I were another kind of person, I could just drift along right now and nobody would be the wiser. But I WANT TO DO THIS JOB AND DO IT RIGHT! It's a dilemma. The part I DO like is being in the southern office, with only an occasional foray into the north. I miss the folks in the north, but having a work "home", where all my things are, is a luxury for me. And I'm getting to know the southerners, and am able to provide cheery words of encouragement on a daily basis (something they haven't had for a long time).
The bright and shining spot for me is still the parent group. We now have been joined by a father and a grandmother. It has changed the discussions a little, but not much! The leaves I picked up last weekend were duly waxed by me, and we had fun playing with them. They each "observed" two they had chosen from the big pile, then we put them back into the pile and I scrambled them. And they all were able to find their special ones. That was the opening activity (after a few more pages of "Out of the Dust"), and then we went back to finishing up the books they were making. We spent about 1/2 hour near the end of the time, sorting, matching, categorizing, and generally playing with the leaves and then I said they could have some to glue on paper and cover with contact. They all hunted for "their" leaves, found them, added a few more, and then described their color, shape, odor, any memories or emotions the leaves evoked, on the back and put them into their journals. It was a great day.
The books, by-the-way, are coming along really well. A few of them have done more than one. The big motivation has been that I want to borrow them for the presentation in Puerto Rico. Since I asked that, they have been furiously working on them. A couple people have done them over because they wanted their printing to be better, or they found better illustrations. I have gone through two rolls of contact paper already. So I will have a great display to take with me.
The young father has really opened up in this coffee klatch of women. He was too shy to take part the first week. The second week, his girlfriend "made" him start a book. Once he began, (she helped him choose "one idea on each page", which is one of the rules of the books) he went gang-busters. He is writing about being on his aunt and uncle's farm in Florida when he was about ten. Last week, he brought in this wrinkled, tattered photo of his aunt and uncle, cousins, and himself. He was going to paste it into his book. I suggested we copy the photo instead, so the original could be returned to his mother. Our secretary scanned it onto a page, with our color scanner. It actually improved the photo.
I remarked about the fact that photos are such wonderful ways to remember happy days. "Especially if they're both dead," said the young father. This book has become so precious to him, and he's looking forward to reading it to his son. And that's what my job is really all about.
My early-morning-musings have helped me to sort through some feelings about my new job. If I had my "druthers", I would spend my time with my parent group, start a new one for grandmothers, and one for fathers, and then maybe one for the whole shebang...
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