Lives in Periphery
A new serial novel by EleCivil
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Manufacturing plants opened up on the outskirts – little metal pockmarks against the amber waves of grain. They didn’t last. Now, there were abandoned factories and junk heaps just sitting around. Chunks of broken machines rusted into the gravel lots in front of condemned buildings. He had always been drawn to them; the abandoned machines and the ruins of a failed empire. This one was fairly close to sch
G'day,
Forecasts for Adelaide include gale force winds of 100 kph (64 mph) or more, and continuing intermittently for the next week.
It's not unusual for this time of the year but I thought I should warn y'all in case you thought we were enjoying the blow job.
I should be here more often but my career ( what a weird thing to come from my mouth ) has me full up the last year. As it is, in a weeks time, I'll be leaving San Francisco to open the second restaurant in what I hope is the start of a national brand.
And though I'm not the owner or investor ( yet ) I am quickly moving up in the new company.
Can you believe they put me in charge of a multi-million dollar restaurant? And a celebrity Chef too boot.
How my life has changed in the last five ye
In time I may get around to describing how we have overcome the horrors of the last 4 years. Suffice it to say, for now, that my lover and I have been able to reduce our mortgage repayments to next to nothing by subdividing the land on which our house stands. We keep our house and have a smaller mortgage and back yard to look after. Hooray!
If I said that we had to survive on the smell of an oily rag with no surplus for the niceties of life, let alone the occasional treat, I would not be lying
As many of you know, I am a foster parent. David and I have taken in kids that need help and try to make a difference in their lives. Below is a blog entry, Julian I, that I had made on AD back in June of last year. This is to help you know about Julian, a troubled kid. Following that is my blog entry as of today, Julian II.
Julian I (June 6, 2012)
I've always tried to keep you all up to date with what is happening with our foster boys, but Julian has been difficult so I have held off until I
My first year teaching, I taught 4th graders. I then followed them to 5th grade, then 6th.
These same kids are now 7th graders. I'm not in the classroom anymore - most of my day is spent riding a desk - but I still make time to visit that class.
Today, I noticed that about half of them were wearing mismatched socks. You can easilly tell that these particular kids have been mine for 3 years straight.
I was wearing mismatched socks as well. When the higher-ups questioned me about it, I said tha
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School's back in session!
This will be my first year as an administrator. Who's the boss? I'm the boss! Hahahaha! I'm going to make all the teachers wear mismatched socks and learn to juggle! I'm gonna kick down classroom doors and attack classes with Silly String! My reign of zany, zany terror begins now!
...Okay, not really. But I did just spend the past coup
Do I need to tell you what I am going to do with this, even though it means I will become destitute...again?
Y ‘Management’?
What exactly is the problem with the current generation of management? They go out of their way to call in experienced staff and then seemingly setting them up to belittle them, and their experience. Having now lived with this new management style in a number of different situations, I am absolutely fed up with management's incompetence and disrespect.
It seems like man
Quote from a previous blog about my avatar pic:
The experience of unveiling this for critique was a little unsettling. I didn't expect people to have much of an opinion on the subject, since nobody in class was transgendered or queer as far as I knew. And I had no idea if the propaganda and my own beliefs would be confused as the same. Anyway there it is. Technically mediocre, but fun to make nonetheless. I can't remember the exact dimension. Something like... 18x12in? Hmmm.
In a forum somewhere on that one site, there was a discussion topic that asked a simple question…Top or Bottom.
And after reading all the comments in that thread, and believe me you should read them because they are extremely amusing, I decided to reply to that thread and offer up my perspective.
And then, as one or two of you might know by now, I noticed my reply was getting rather long winded so I decided to answer this question in my blog where there is less of a chance that something I mig
I've been thinking a lot about writing. Today I came across two bits of 'advice' that I found yonks ago and put in a box. Where I originally found them I have no idea. However, as they are worth pondering I thought I'd post them. Here's the first:
Eight basic necessities to create a story - probably, methinks, sword and sorcery. Though they do adapt.
1) one Hero
2) one Villain
3) one object they both desire
4) one journey
5) a couple of sidekicks (generally not more than 3)
6) one wisened
I guess it starts again.
I'm double majoring in Art History and Painting. I find it's harder, for me, than premed. The image is a drawing I worked on my first semester of school. Medium is charcoal. That was some fine paper... wish I could afford drawing on it exclusively. It felt like cotton. I started working on it at midnight. I find myself more relaxed the sleepier I am. No inhibitions. If anybody can tell me why I'm unproductive while I'm fully awake, I'm willing listen.
Anyway, I'm now i
I've always tried to keep you all up to date with what is happening with our foster boys, but Julian has been difficult so I have held off until I could try to put it all together. He came to us on Halloween morning at around 10:30 am.
Julian was removed from our home this morning.
I guess that needs some explanation.
Julian is 15 years old now and this is the 23rd home that he has been in since he was 2 years old. He has no concept of what family is all about. We tried to show him that, b
Drum roll please...
I take great pleasure in announcing my newest short story,
The Policeman's Birthday Cake
I haven't written a story for a while, so I hope you enjoy it.
So, after a hard drive crash on Wednesday, I was in the PDX Apple Store to get another drive installed in my MacBook. The genius at the Genius Bar took the little gem to the surgical suite and began the surgery. I waited close to the Bar near a wall. I put my laptop bag on the floor at my feet and looked at some accessories on the wall. Within three minutes, a very delightful and very gay (at least according to my bidar) young man in a blue Apple Store shirt walked over, smiling, and asked i
Virtue and Integrity (dé or te 德)
I made good on a lost wager today. The wager was with a colleague, a woman two months older than I with whom I shared a remarkably similar late childhood and early adulthood. She was a South Carolinian and I lived most of my life in Florida. She and I, in separate parts of the world, marched, sat-in, protested, and worked on behalf of civil rights, women’s rights, sexual minority rights—you get the picture.
She was a Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. She
I was reading about some of the horrors that are happening around the world...always a lovely way to pass the hours ...when it occurred to me that the religious right and their conservative cohorts are not all that friendly to LGBTQ people. But it doesn't stop with them. Various regimes are imposing anti-gay legislation in many different forms, all around the world.
The familiar suspects, who deny the rights of LGBTQ people, can be thought of as waging a war against more than LGBTQ people. Th
True story:
Student 1: "Mr. Civil, Student 2 just tried to bite me!"
EC: (Turns and glares at Student 2) "I knew it!"
Student 2: "What?"
EC: "You're a vampire! I've been saying it for years, but does anyone ever listen to crazy old Mr. Civil? No. Well, now they'll see that crazy old Mr. Civil isn't really all that old. I mean, crazy." (Rolls up a newspaper into a cone.)
Student 1: "What are you doing?"
EC: "What must be done. Hold still, Student 2, you're going to feel a slight stakey sens
I wonder how much of what we write is truly original?
I read a poem by bi_janus today, just now in fact, and I allowed my mind to go blank. This is not a difficult feat for me, unless I think with my feet.
Anyway back to bi_janus' poem, which you can read here, Original Face Instruction Manual for Worrywarts
I confess the title seemed to not do the poem justice, but it works if you think about your original face. The poem gave me pause for thought, and I was put into the frame of mind that us
Last night our GLBTQ Community Center was vandalized. Someone used a gear shaft from an automobile transmission to smash our front window. We have been open for two years, and this was the first example of homophobia that we have experienced. Actually, I had expected it sooner, and I think it's a good sign that it hasn't happened sooner.
Here's a picture of the damage. Notice the gear shaft lying on the sidewalk.
Of course, our local police took the report, but I'm not sure if anything wil
Advice for the young on love: get ready for the struggle. You can’t take care of anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself. Don’t let the strong winds born of identification with your beloved extinguish the small flame of your ego. Don’t let your ego grow to the extent that it tries to encompass your beloved. Welcome a companion. And, as important, this work is fun even when painful, so let your souls laugh. The practice is all we have.
This has been around for a while. I used it at the last Incident Management Team training I ran for firefighters and cops. Cooperation and coordination are essential to good incident management, and I'm always interested in the reaction it gets from cops and firefighters. I use it regularly; so far no one at FEMA has complained.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D8CB3inzSQ
The UK must be such a cooperative land.
