a formidable time.

I haven't posted in a long while. "But Joel, why?" you may ask.

I was very, very busy.

It started like this. My work on the house piled and piled. We sold it, but then I had to move everything, everything out and re-arrange it at Grandpa's. While doing that I was still working full time. Which was slowly but surely making fantastic progress but never really becoming less stressful.

Living at Grandpa's was more stressful. By the end of the summer I felt like I could barely speak to Mom without her asking me to do something, which made me edgy and tense all the time. Mom and I ended up having a fight one day and both realized that the other was just as stressed, and that eased things a bit. Unfortunately that was just in time for me to move back here.

That's right, I'm back in the illustrious Toronto. I Hate this Freaking City. Or rather, I hate all the parts of it I know. The campus is big and faceless, downtown is even more so. The smog has been making me sick, and I feel like I have only one class worth going to.

Oh but that one class is wicked good, stellar. However...

I dearly miss work. There's something about working with kids. It's fairly thankless work, but it's extremely rewarding and outlandishly social. I could ramble for hours about the fun things at work, about which kid did what and why it was so funny.

Here? Here I have a hard time even meeting up with my friends because we're all so busy. I don't see my family, and I rarely get to go out because going to the movies alone is oddly dissatisfying.

Today though, I spent hundreds of dollars on photo supplies. I purchased HIE, 1600 across, two types of 11x14 paper, Polaroid 600 and then got groceries!

That cheered me up a bit. I am however a bit annoyed that I couldn't find EIR. Which is colour infrared film. How wicked is THAT? Everybody in the city is out. It's 20$ a roll. The internet shall get some for me though, I'm planning on scouring eBay.

Oh and in the summer I tried to buy a laptop on eBay which was never shipped and now I'm finding out how to get my money back. Hurray for adventures I never wanted to have. I did however find one that was extremely similar at Tigerdirect.ca. I've used them before, it's a very good place to buy comp stuff. So while I'm waiting for that money to come back, I decided having a laptop for class was a good idea so got this one.

Did I mention I made a bit more money this summer than usual? That's why I can afford it. Hurray for work!

Here's a pic from when we took the kids to the zoo. This guy wasn't quite as cute as the kids were.

Busy.

I've been busy. But now the house is sold. Which is good. we got 156k for it, unconditional. Pretty sweet deal. Now I have 3 weeks to get all the furniture and all my possessions out of it. Hurray.

So that's been my evenings and weekends. To the point where I do that, then go to bed. The place looks great, hence why it sold for more than we were asking.

I have done other things, I got that lump on my shoulder sliced off. That was kinda fun actually. Well, I have the whole needle phobia, so when he did the freezing I went right into shock, but that was ok, 'cus I kept myself from passing out. Sweet! Afterwards he showed it to me, and what all the lil fiddly bits were. I thought it was pretty damn cool, I wish I had taken a picture. Now I have three stitches, I did take a picture of that, but I'm too nice to post it.

Well, actually I have cooler pics. Which is better. More about that later.

Work, my other time hog, has been interesting. I've been making great strides with the boy I'm working with. I have it to the point where we have days where he's "normal". He gets angry, but controls himself, and integrates with the other children without needing me to run interference the whole time. There's also times where he'll get furious and spit in my face, or throw things, etc. We're having less and less of those times. I'm happy about that because I hate them. The genial moment I had was when I realised that a full day is too much for him, so I split the day in half, he gets a reward to work for in each half, and each half is totally independent, so if he has a violently unhappy morning, it's forgotten at lunch and he can start over. It's been working.

But.

I have an idiot co-worker. freaking stupid girl. I explained to her about how I've been using the computer as his reward. He loves computer games. So, since I always have access to it, and he always wants to play it, that's what we do. He gets two turns, one for each half of the day. It's his goal, his reason to calm down and follow rules.

She's a total bitch to him. Like, full on mean. She hates him, and sabotages him. Take snack time for example, I usually have to convince him to have snack, not the end of the world in itself, but still. He's often about five minutes late. She keeps sitting another child in his spot because the table is cramped. This makes him angry. I would be too, in his position. But emotions have momentum, so he'll stay angry for a while.

Early morning is the worst though. He likes to play on the comp before I arrive. Which makes sense, he's bored. He is days away from being moved to an older group, so most of the toys that are out for him are just too young. This girl however, instead of calmly coaxing him away when his turn is over, just yells. Yells at him. "Your turn is over!" "Get off now or no more computer!" "That's it you're DONE." She doesn't say for how long either, just "done". So obviously he's pissed. I would be too, I don't like being yelled at either.

The big problem here is I've talked to her about how I'm working it, why the computer isn't "done" for him.

I'm going to talk to the supervisor.

And then there's photography. Ahh photo, the sometimes-refuge. I have had so little time for it, it hurts. But I have been getting ideas for projects. I have x-rays that I'm going to use for one, and some amazing pics of clouds for another. I can't even describe how amazing the clouds are. I'll just have to show you. Manitoba has the most gorgeous skies you can imagine. I can't make this stuff up.

Busy as can bee.

I haven't posted for awhile. I've been extremely busy. In the last while I've:

- Emptied the house of my Mother's, Sister's stuff and half our furniture and general possessions.
- Changed a sink
- Replaced a broken pipe
- Painted my Sister's room
- Painted the bathroom
- Painted the basement floor (after taking everything out)
- Gone to the dump
- Hung drywall
- Disposed of a 30 year old fridge
- Cleaned just about every room in the house

While I was at that, other people came and helped, by cleaning, cutting the lawn, extending the gravel on our driveway, filling the low spots in the yard, painting the screen door, packing, shipping boxes to my grandpa's, and hanging out enough to keep me sane.

Left to do? Organize the entire house so it looks pretty and clean everything again. Since I've been working full time, basically I've been working all day, working here all evening, passing out, and doing it again.

In other news, I've been to the physio for my shoulders and seen an optician. Physio was fun, I had a student who had to keep asking for help because my body is cool. "Oh weird! How are you doing that? What IS that tendon? Oh wow! Doesn't that hurt? How far can you go?" it was really amusing.

She asked me to raise my arms as high over my head as they'd go, straight up. I asked "As high as they'll go, or as far as they'll go?"

The optician was fun too. "How long since you've had a checkup?" "Humm.. eight years, I think." "EIGHT? you should've had four in that time!" "Oh well, my eyes haven't really changed." So they did a glaucoma test, my dad is a diabetic etc. Those tests are uncomfortable. Then they did other tests, looked at my lenses and retinas. End of the day? My peepers are perfectly fine, and my prescription has changed by....

0.25 in my right eye. That's it. See? I was right, I didn't really need a checkup.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I did the photo for Brent's play "One Last Thing" which will be in the fringe fest. Looks good actually.

Forecasts.

I've been looking towards my immediate future, next few months, next summer and distant future.

It's sorta bleak actually. Hahhahaa. That's not entirely true, there's a lot of difficulties on the horizon, but I have good friends and at the end of the day there's a lot of great stuff that I can look forward to.

Like meeting somebody and falling head over heels like an idiot. Like being a parent someday. Like having a career and making delightful art. Like having my own home and my own car.

But those are abstracts. I've been looking at probabilities and certainties.

Like the next lil while. I know I'll be working with my very angry, bored, upset, sad, lonely and especially aggressive friend at work. Anger is how he deals with his strong emotions. I found out his parents are recently separated and he's five. He's got a lot of strong emotions. This week is especially trying as both parents are out of town. He's in the wrong age group at the daycare so he's bored most of the time, thus acts out more. He's been upset by all the changes around him and he's lonely because he's seeing both his parents less. I get to deal with all this and try to help him manage his emotions. It is stressful.

What's really getting me is I was expecting to be running a school aged room all summer. Not running interference with a violently aggressive preschooler. The way it looks now I'd give myself a 50/50 chance of being with Mr.Angry all summer.

I don't know that it's a wise position for me. He becomes very possessive of me and my attention and already acts out in order to keep it. He knows that I have to respond when he becomes violent (towards himself or others). I think that after we've worked out enough strategies to help him cope, that I should be taken off the case so he can learn to deal with somebody he can share. I expect to be the largest hurdle in his progress. I say that because as soon as I put him with a group of older kids, his behavior becomes completely manageable. He's scheduled to be in the older group full time in about a month.

I have no idea what I'm doing next summer though.

Gary and I had said we would go to Europe, but I don't know if I'll have the funds. I hope I do. But I also would like to help Mom get out of Grandpa's house. We'll see what I can do. Being poor(ish) is lame.

That and I went to a doctor today.

Turns out I have benign hypermobility syndrome. Basically it means that I have exceedingly loose joints, but no other diseases that relate to it. The doc said that he thinks my cartilage just didn't fully form.

I will almost certainly never have arthritis. My joints have a distinct lack of pressure in them. Actually he said that I don't have to worry about it for most of my joints, at all.

Except.... my shoulders.

Apparently the joints will likely degenerate until they cannot hold the arms in at all and will dislocate dangerously. Eventually they could destroy the nerves and arteries which are right in beside the joint itself. If that happens I'll lose use of my arms. Unless I get surgery to manually tighten the joints.

Scary stuff. It's still sinking in.

But he said that if I start doing physio now I should have up to 25 years before I'll need to go under the knife. I'm betting that if I try hard enough I can make my arms strong enough that I won't need it at all. We'll see. I'm still young enough to dream that I could be invincible. Ahahahaaa.

Hey at least only my shoulders are in danger, hurray for lots of other joints that are nice and supple!

Here's a pic that I think happily sums up the optimistic view of the future that I generally hold. It's from my friend's wedding, you can just see her beaming with delight at her new husband. How wonderfully sweet and charming. I envy them.

Who'd have thought.

Today I had an observer come in to watch me work with my lil tyke. She was watching to see how the interactions went and see what he did behavior wise, as well as see what I do. She wanted to find areas we could improve on and to give advice for working out the behavioral issues.

Basically she said that he and I get along extremely well and that I'm doing just about everything as I should be. She gave me some advice for steps to start taking to get him accepting the group setting better and some strategies for dealing with his ... "outbursts."

So that felt really good. Very good actually, it's good to know that I'm working in the right direction with him. He's got it rough enough without another stumbling block in his way.

So aside from work, at home I'm busy as all hell trying to keep things under control to get this move and sell done.

I Hate Moving.

A Lot.

But I'm doing it for Mom. We got a bunch of the electronics down in the basement sorted out. We had four gaming consoles in there! Awesome! And now I can't use them! No original Ninja Gaiden for me! That's ok. I'm just trying not to freak out over how much work there is. It's really annoying, I just got home and I haven't even seen all my friends yet and she's delegating all my free time to chores. But it does need to be done.