Moving Forward

For the past month, there have been a lot of tears around here. Carmen is sad to leave her elementary school and a bit nervous about moving up to middle school. She is excited about it, sure, but sad. She'll miss her teachers and the school, and she has loved her time there. She had big plans for the last week of classes and we had counted on that time to ease her into graduating from elementary school and looking ahead to middle school.

Then the flood hit. We stayed home from school Friday. Then again on Monday. And now we don't go back until Thursday and then only for a half day to gather belongings, get report cards, and say goodbye.

The tears started in earnest last night. She was very upset by it all:

They didn't get to do activity day, which was a crushing blow not because she loves the activities but because she and the Leadership Club spent a lot of time planning the stations and making it fun for the rest of the kids.

They didn't get to do the year-end wrap-up party for Leadership Club.

They may not get to do the Grade 4 Farewell assembly, which they have been preparing for over the past month.

Her soccer city finals were at best postponed but likely cancelled outright.

In short, she's upset that all of the things she was looking forward to, all the rites of passage for the exiting grade fours, were taken from her.

She sat in her bed last night and wept about the injustice of it. She was so disappointed and it was heartbreaking to watch. She is not a fan of change at the best of times so this was all too much for her to handle.

We tried to put it all into perspective for her. She has her bed to sleep in. She has a dry house. Her belongings weren't washed away in the flooding. We and all of our friends and family are safe. Carmen and I had gone with our friend Tania to deliver some donations to NeighbourLink, which is a great organization that collects necessities and disperses them to the various communities that need them. Carmen got to see the amount of stuff that is required and how much is shipping out to help these people affected by flooding. And we tried to explain how much more would be needed in the weeks and months to come.

She gets it. And as she sat on her bed, cursing the flood and all it had taken from her, she acknowledged that she was lucky. She knows that she is fortunate while many others were not this past week. But it doesn't make her feel any better, doesn't make her feel less sad and frustrated with how the end of the year has turned out. I told her it was out of our control and we'd have to make the best of it. We'll go to school and spend the final half-day enjoying the friends and teachers that have made the last five years such an incredible experience for her.

She'll cry a little. I probably will too. We'll say goodbye and we'll move forward. Then we'll spend some time this summer helping victims of the flood move forward too.

Did it For the Money

I think it's time to come clean. Before I go any further, remember this happened a long time ago. I was in university in Toronto, which is an expensive city, and I needed some extra cash. I only did it the once and wouldn't do it again, probably. Okay. Here goes.

I sold my body for money.

There. I feel so much better now. It happened over the course of a couple weeks -- I spent pretty much the whole day, three or so times a week, laying there. When it was done I took my money and I never looked back.

I guess maybe I should rephrase this. I actually sold my body for science. Money too, but I was a guinea pig. I answered an ad posted through U of T, completed some preliminary medical tests, and I was up and running. I had to lay on a chaise all day hooked up to monitors, and every hour or two I'd puff on an inhaler. Some days it was a placebo and others it was a new asthma medication being tested on healthy non-asthmatic people to see if there were any adverse affects. I sat and read, watched TV and got paid a couple hundred bucks for my trouble. It was a university student's dream gig!

Sure, I could sure tell when I puffed from the real inhalers. Sure, my heart raced and my hands shook like crazy. And sure, I don't think that product ever made it to market. I'm guessing asthmatics wouldn't appreciate dealing with a thundering heart rate and hand tremors in the middle of an asthma attack.

But, hey, being a medical test subject was a rite of passage for a broke university student far from home. I took my money and ran, thankful to get out of there with the same number of digits and no side affects that required excising, drainage, or special creams.