Ducklings (and #300)

My friend Paula asked me if I'd started to establish community out here. Not really, unless you count my shouting "SHUT UP" at the ceaselessly yapping dog behind me yesterday as a way of connecting to the neighbours. I do feel like I have enough people in the region to be able to scare up someone to do something with if my need to be alone wanes, but for the moment, the combination of recovering from such a busy time and the amount of connectivity I have via phone/wifi pretty much fills all of the space I have right now.

I'm trying to make sense of all of the different strands of work, and in some ways, it feels like I am really living two or three lives, even more than when I was doing my phd and working. A pile of Toronto-based client work, an enormous amount of energy right now in the CMM sphere, and then this untended BC-based project. Emails slurping in constantly, with new leaps in the conversation before even I -- multitasking queen of the universe -- can tend to them.

I had an experience about 12 years ago that's kind of a metaphor for how I feel about my work these days... I had gone to Regina for a work meeting, and I had a long stretch of empty time before my flight left. There is not really a whole lot to do in Regina on a spring day ("you could go to the Mountie museum," suggested the visitor person), so I chose to go walk around the provincial legislature building. (Experiencing it geekily as a shrine to Tommy Douglas).

So there I was, walking around the sparkling white leg building, through winding roads with little lakes and trees, and I came across this little family of squawking ducklings. They'd run out of this lake/pond and hopped down a fairly high curb, and couldn't get back up. They kept hurtling themselves against it but couldn't hop up, couldn't get back to the water.

So of course I decided I needed to help. I scootched down to try to pick one of them up... and he slithered away. Hand clench -- slither. Clutch - slither. The little ducklings were hopping all around, squawking, as I repeatedly tried to grab them and found the edge of feathers and then empty air.

I was starting to get frustrated and worried (and I looked like a crazy person, hopping all around), and another woman walked up. She instantly assessed what I was trying to do, bent down and scooped up five of them at once.

:-|

I fluttered around behind her, finally caught one more, and we returned them to the pond and their oblivious mother.

Yesterday, I felt like the competent duckling-grabber... today, not so much.

(And PS -- this is blog post #300... possibly the most consistent thing I've ever done, writing-wise. And now that I don't have someone in my immediate life to process my days with, sometimes a really useful place to work out what I'm trying to do. Waving at my few consistent readers -- appreciate all of you ;-)).