Everything is covered with a layer of 8 inches of snow. The world is beautiful, even though the skies are grey. There is a particular calm after a snowstorm that I love.
Yesterday was a day of completion, or semi–completion. I have completed two of the four sets of teaching notes for our leadership program. The Ghana team is setting out on its coaching rounds and will sound prepare for workshop two. Now we are ready to support them; a cascade down of teams helping each other succeed. It is a nice formula and I think it works.
In the afternoon I logged on to an OBTS Webinar where Peter Vaill and David Fearon talked about their teacher-student relationship some thirty years ago. It was a conversation about the profession in that time of history, when experiential learning in the classroom, especially the academic classroom was looked down on with great disdain and seen as a waste of one’s tuition money (they are laughing and playin in the classroom, can you imagine?! The job of the professor was to lecture and dispense wisdom, not engage with the students in learning, godforbid. We have come a long way and the community of people who teach that way is growing in leaps and bounds. The set up of a Webinar is fairly passive, as presenters mostly talk and participants mostly listen and occasionally post a question on a common chat board. The neat thing is that you can chat with individuals in the audience, wherever they sit. I discovered someone I had not seen for a long time and we chatted while the Profs were speaking without anyone noticing. You can also occasionally answer an email, or all the time if you find the lecture boring, which it wasn’t. I love these periodic webinars. I love seeing who is listening alongside with me and it does make me think in bigger ways. Next week I will be working with professors in Arusha about just this kind of stuff.
After the webinar I realized that a snow storm was building up outside and an email alerted me to its severity when our HR director alerted us all that MSH was closing its doors in the middle of the day. I remembered the commute from hell in December. I was glad my departure for Tanzania was postponed form Friday to Saturday. I would probably have been stranded at Logan.
I never made it outdoors, not even to pick up the newspaper. While I spent the day sittiing in front of my computer, Sita spent the day making bread. She made one after another in the bread machine that had been sitting unused and unobserved in a cabinet. She started with plain Dutch brown whole wheat bread and then got bolder, under protest from Jim. Each loaf of bread came out nicer than the previous one. The last loaf was made with rosemary, thyme, and orange juice I believe. Of course we had to try each new loaf as it emerged hot from the machine. Now we have a plastic bag full of half eaten loaves. It looks a little bit like the bags we carried as children, when we went to see the deer, donkeys and ducks in our local petting zoo in Groenendaal.
We had a Dutch dinner (andijvie stampot) which is a perfect comfort food to eat during a snowstorm. It consists of mashed potatoes, cut up curly leaf lettuce and crisped bacon. The best part n the making of this dish is the pouring of the hot bacn fat over the mashed potatoes and lettuce. Not a low cal meal, there is also sausage that goes with it, at least in our American interpretation. Jim likes havng multipe types of meat in his meal; sausage and bacon.This is good for people who bike all the time, but not necessarily for couch potatoes, which some in this household have become; more about this later.
We had hoped to watch the new Dutch movie that my brother Willem sent me (Alles is Liefde) but our equipment won’t take a Pal DVD so that requires some investigation. Instead we called Tessa and put her on the speaker phone. The phone conversation turned into a graphic design consultation session with the other graphic designers in the room, while Jim and I eventually peeled off, doing dishes (Jim) and packing (me)
Later in the evening we all settled in front of our tiny TV. Sita practically lives on the coach with her workspace on her knee. She watches movies while she builds websites and earns money. She has always been able to combine work and pleasure, smart girl she is. Jim works on sharpening his Sudoku skills, also on a computer, also watching a movie. Sita and Jim watch movies that are much too violent for my liking. She has a high tolerance for awful scenes. I already knew this when she was 10 and reading R.L. Stine horror books from the library, where we parked her after school until mom got home. It is only later that we understood this to be her revenge for this daily affront. More revenge came on her 11th birthday party. She insisted on watching some god-awful Freddie the something movie and we of course didn’t want too upset our little princess, especially not on her birthday. Sita and one brave little girl watched the entire movie in her bedroom, while all the other invitees emerged one by one from her room, seeking safety and comfort from me, scared out of their minds and shivering in their thin cotton nighties. As a big mother hen I watched over them until the movie was over and they could resume their sleepover part.
Later in the evening we all watched Tom Hanks in the Money Pit, a film we last saw some 20 years ago when we were brand-new homeowners and could relate to the money pit idea on a gut level. It was still very funny, maybe even funnier, after all these years. It was probably also educational for Sita and Jim, as aspiring homeowners.
Now I need to go back to my packing and checking things of my to do list. There is nothing like going on a trip to make progress on long to-do lists.
Sylvia's Journal 
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