End of Term

School is done! And in short order I will have my MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, which will then mean I can... ummm...

Now I have to polish the manuscripts and get them out there, along with the 3-Day Novel manuscript. But first on the agenda is finding paying work. This is critical, since I have a mortgage and my tuition is clogging up the credit card.

School is almost done! All I have to do is grade the exams for Project Lead, mark the remaining papers for Distilled Prose, and then I can... ummm... look for gainful employment?

Mozart coming up in a month with the Bow Valley Chorus in Calgary and Canmore. With any luck, this will make up for having to miss the St. John Passion. And I'm also hoping Pro Coro Canada can find a way to record the Allan Bevan piece over the next year.

The Finesse bottles are cropping up in our backyard - more reliable than the crocuses. And the gaggle of the homeless that hang out in the empty lot are back. The spring winds are blowing a daily load of garbage in. Tonight we bought all the bags of topsoil left at Save-On so we can dig out part of the backyard and see if we can't get something decent growing there. Right now it's a mat of early weeds, with the chamomile already budding.

Looks like the giant sequoia didn't make it. I took a chance on it, burying the young tree's pot in the spot where I dug up the dead magnolia last fall. I don't seem to have much luck with trees. Not an arborist. I knew the sequoia might not make it, but I was tired of babying it. If I try again, I think I'll plant the tree in the river valley in a spot where it might have a fighting chance.

Tonight there was a panel on homelessness at City Hall. Several speakers, varying degrees of passion and clarity. Candas Dorsey got up and made some points about concrete ways in which the problem could be addressed while empowering the homeless. Many people have made housing their profession, and they have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. It is a foreign concept to allow poor people to have control over their own housing options!