A Little Sunshine to Start the New Year

Thanks to Sarah and Claire for giving me the purpose to write a blog post in the form of a little “sunshine”. What does this mean, you ask? For those who haven’t seen it yet, there is an internet/blogging/Twitter meme going around and Sarah and Claire were kind enough to include me. Sarah explains what this meme is about perfectly in the following excerpt from her recent post:

Here is a description of this blogging, twitter-generated, meme-type task:

The Sunshine Award gives others an opportunity to learn about me as a blogger and then, in turn, I will send sunshine the way of 11 (or so) other fine bloggers for you to get to know! Although I know every one is busy at this time of year, I hope the bloggers I nominate will be able to share a few interesting things about themselves. They can then highlight bloggers that they have enjoyed following.

Here are the rules:

Acknowledge the nominating blogger. Share 11 random facts about yourself. Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you. List 11 bloggers. They should be bloggers you believe deserve some recognition! Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. (You cannot nominate the blogger who nominated you.)

Thank you Sarah for that perfect explanation! So, here’s my Sunshine Award info:

11 Random Facts about me:

  1. As a child, I lived and grew up in Kitsilano and the West End in downtown Vancouver.
  2. I spent almost the entire year from the time I was two to three years old in and out of oxygen tents in the pediatric ward of Vancouver General Hospital. Asthma wasn’t so controllable in the days before Ventolin and inhaled steroids. Back then you received a shot of adrenaline in the behind. Not fun when you’re two. I have vivid memories of my hospital stays during that time. Horrible.
  3. During my childhood, my mom and I spent many years scouring used book stores in Vancouver and Victoria looking for old editions of Nancy Drew novels and I have a fairly complete collection. It was special time spent with her searching for the books and also a shared passion to read them.
  4. I was on the pit crew for my husband and his best friend when they used to race our 1949 Willys pickup truck in Mud Bog Races. You should try changing 40″ plus tires caked in thick mud – character building 🙂
  5. My husband often says that he knows when dinner is done (if I’m cooking) by the sound of the smoke detector alarm going off. Sadly, this is true.
  6. My current/former pets include dogs, fish, cats, rats, a tarantula (inherited class pet) and a ball python.
  7. I haven’t been able to engage with non-fiction since completing my Masters Degree in 2011, yet I continue to purchase the latest education must-reads, which then sit on my book shelf looking pretty and unfortunately not interesting to me in the slightest.
  8. I like going camping. Real camping where there is no running water, no numbered campsites and no other humans anywhere near where I’m camped with my family.
  9. I like to spend time looking out windows, but there has to be some space beyond to look at. A window that is close to and faces a wall seems like a terrible waste.
  10. I like to bake. I grew up in a house that always had something home made sitting on the kitchen counter for the kids to enjoy and my kitchen often offers the same. It relaxes me too and I enjoy the creative aspects of taking a bunch of ingredients and transforming them into something completely new.
  11. I have never been on an airplane.

11 Answers for Sarah:

  1.   What is your middle name and why do you have it? My middle name is Leigh. I love it. I also have no idea why I have it, my mom isn’t around to ask the reasoning behind why she named me that, and nobody else seems to know the reason behind it either.
  2.   Who is your favourite female family member and why? That’s easy. My one and only sister is my favourite female family member. She’s actually one of my best friends in life, regardless of the fact that she is much younger than I am, and I love her to pieces.
  3.   What do you do that you wish you didn’t? Get up early to get to work on time. If my job started at 11:00 each day, I’d be a much happier and healthier person.
  4.   What is your secret addiction? or a confession you are willing to make. Hmm…what to share, what to share… I guess I have a simple but serious addiction to tea. My day is not complete with one cup of earl grey tea.
  5.   If you could do any other job what would it be? I fantasize about having a job that I leave behind each day when I go home – a job that isn’t so important that I go through life without the heavy burden of some sort of professional responsibility 24/7. That said, I did go to fashion school after high school and earned a Fashion Merchandising diploma. I still love the world of fashion and would love to work in the industry. I think that I’d like to be a librarian in a big, fancy college/university library. I could see myself being a solitary professor living the life of an academic. I would also like to write – that’s actually one of my plans after I retire – I have all sorts of plans for various novels/books/stories.
  6.  What is your favourite breakfast meal? I’m a cereal person. I have to have cereal in the morning. Something healthy, crunchy and gluten/nut free with a moderate amount of nice, cold milk.
  7.  What sport would you love to be good at? My first thought is  softball because I love the satisfying crack of the bat when it connects with the ball and it’s fun to play with a team.
  8.   Do you watch the Olympics on TV? Why or why not? Yes, or, if I’m working or away from home I ‘watch’ on Twitter. I like the Olympics because I am a proud Canadian and love cheering for Canada’s athletes plus I enjoy watching the amazing athleticism that some humans can achieve.
  9.  What is in your freezer right now? All sorts of food (bread, beef, chicken, frozen bananas, melting chocolate wafers, blueberries, french fries, apricots from my tree last year, tomatoes from my garden, etc.) because I have two always-hungry, growing boys. Bait because my husband loves fishing and there are many great places to fish around here. Ice packs because I have two always-active boys who often need to ice minor injuries from skateboarding, biking, running, trampoline-ing, wrestling, and whatever else they do to hurt themselves in a day.
  10.  What were you afraid of as a child? Being kidnapped, which, in retrospect, was possibly the result of reading Nancy Drew novels and other mystery stories all the time.
  11. What is your favourite colour? Why? I’ve never been able to choose only one colour as my favourite. My favourite colour shifts between greens, purples and blues so I guess I feel most comfortable with cool colours if you want to think along the lines of the colour wheel. More specifically, kelly green, emerald green, and a nice bright clean spring green. I also really like forest, dark and hunter as shown here. For purples I like both purple and violet equally but prefer the medium tones and darker shades over the lighter tints. Blue is my comfort colour – it’s throughout my house and I wear it all the time – and although I never wear it, blue and orange is my favourite colour combination.

11 Answers for Claire:

  1. What lead to you becoming an educator? That’s a long answer! The short version is that because my parents were teachers, I rebelled against what I wanted to do (teach) and went to fashion school. After three years in retail management making money for someone else selling clothes people didn’t need, I was frustrated and disillusioned as to my purpose in life. After a day of soul searching with my husband, I realized I really did want to be a teacher and work with children and I needed to swallow my pride and go back to school to do what I had always wanted to do.
  2. If you hadn’t become an educator, what would you have done instead? Please see #5 above for some thoughts on that!
  3. Are you concerned about student privacy and security with regards to cloud computing?  For example, do you have any reservations about students using Google Apps or other cloud based services?  I don’t trust Google. I admire them and love using many of their online products but I don’t trust them. I have big concerns about privacy and security in regards to cloud computing and everything online. There are too many people out there driven by greed and other selfish urges for me to trust that my data/my students data/my children’s data is safe.
  4. What was the first ‘real’ job that you had? My first real job was as a sales clerk at the Fields Store here in town. That was my Friday night/Saturday morning job for four years through high school.
  5. What is your current favourite book, movie and / or album? I watched Silver Linings Playbook this week and loved it! Wonderful actors, a great story, fantastic composition on the filming – very good movie!
  6. What did you always want to be when you grew up? I had a pretty strong desire to be a teacher, then a doctor, then a writer, and then a fashion designer, in that order.
  7. What is the strangest food that you’ve ever eaten? Cow tongue in Home Ec 11. It was horrid. I didn’t eat for a week afterwards. Blech!
  8. If you could sit down and talk with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why. My mom because I miss her. Simple.
  9. How far away do you live from where you grew up? I grew up in Vancouver until I was nine, so that’s about 400 kilometres away from here. But at the age of nine, my mom moved us here for her teaching career and I grew up about two kilometres from my current home.
  10. What is your favourite way to unplug and unwind? My every-other-day run. No headphones or music for me! Just the birds singing and the quiet of the rural roads in my town!
  11. Salty or sweet? Sweet!!

Now the tagging part (or not so much tagging as sharing the sunshine while I break the chain):

This is the part where I break the rules and break the chain. When I was looking for people to tag last night, most of the people I wanted to tag have already done their homework and completed fantastic sunshine posts! You are all very diligent people. Instead of tagging these people, I’m acknowledging them as very important to my PLN, people I’d love to meet and spend time talking with or people I have met that I’d like to learn more from in the future.

Check out the sunshine homework posts already done by some of these amazing people. Or check out their blog. Or follow them on Twitter. Connect somehow because they’re good people:

  1. Dean Shareski
  2. Michelle Baldwin
  3. Chris Kennedy
  4. Tia Henriksen
  5. Sarah Soltau-Heller
  6. Chris Wejr
  7. David Truss
  8. Claire Thompson
  9. Brooke Haller
  10. Iram Khan
  11. Cori Saas

Now that I’ve broken the chain, I should add that if you do want to continue and post the answers to my questions, I’ve come up with, for the most part, simple choice-type, random questions. Feel free to explain your choices, or not!

  1. If you could choose would you prefer to live in a city or a small town?
  2. If you had the space, would you plant a flower garden or vegetable garden?
  3. Would you rather drive a sleek, fast European sports car (one example – Ferrari) or a sleek, fast classic car (one example – Corvette stingray)?
  4. Do you prefer cats, dogs or neither?
  5. Are you a night owl or an early bird?
  6. What’s easier for you – writing using paper and pen or writing using word processing?
  7. Have you ever climbed a tree or had a tree fort?
  8. What is your favourite season?
  9. What was the first or best concert you’ve ever attended?
  10. Would you prefer to attend a backyard barbeque or go to a fancy restaurant?
  11. When was the last time you drew something?

That’s it! If you do decide to answer my questions and continue to spread the sunshine, here’s a summary of the homework assignment:

  1. Acknowledge the nominating blogger.
  2. Share 11 random facts about yourself.
  3. Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
  4. List 11 bloggers. Choose to:
  5.     a) Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer, and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. Don’t nominate a blogger who has nominated you, or,

b) Break the chain like I did and end it however you like.
That’s it! Thanks again to Sarah and Claire for giving me a reason to blog and get my head back into ‘work’ mode as the end of winter break draws near!

4 thoughts on “A Little Sunshine to Start the New Year

  1. Love it, Errin! Thanks for sharing with us! I’ll answer your 11 Q’s here. 🙂

    1. City. I’ve lived in a small town before and wasn’t a fan. Sometimes, I like to just “disappear,” and you can’t do that when everyone knows who you are.

    2. Probably flower garden.

    3. European sports car. Definitely! (maybe bc I’ve already driven a Corvette?)

    4. DOGS. I’m allergic to cats.

    5. I’m a night owl. Now if we could just find a school that starts at noon and goes to 7pm. 😉

    6. Word processing – I get hand cramps from writing, and my typing is pretty speedy.

    7. Both. My parents used to joke that I was part monkey, because I spent so much time in trees. Built a fort with grandparents’ neighbor kids, too.

    8. Winter is my favorite season. Autumn is a very close second. I would much rather be cold than hot!

    9. Best concert ever was the Avett Bros at Red Rocks last summer. My first concert was Sonny & Cher when I was 2, and I LOVED them!

    10. Probably the fancy restaurant. I like backyard BBQ, too, but they usually happen in summer when it’s too hot. (see #8)

    11. Yesterday. I doodle a lot.

    Thanks… these were fun questions!

    • Thanks for sharing your answers here! And for taking the time to do this again just for me. I agree, definitely fun. I’m glad whoever started it up decided to get this going. Let me know when you get to BC 🙂

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