Miss F. and her friends have a word they use to describe the mix of nervousness and excitement just before a good thing happens – they say they are nexcited. That is exactly how I feel at the moment, hence the 5 a.m. post.
Today is my first day at my new job as the manager of knowledge mobilization at the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development. I am super excited about it, but at the same time, after almost eight years of communications jobs, I will be doing something different and I do feel nervous.
This is, of course, great news for this blog as well. I always tried to keep my communications jobs separate from the rest of my life, but I feel no need to do so now. You can expect all sorts of posts that will deal with rural development and policy, probably a great deal more about my own graduate research in those fields, as well as a lot more about how universities and rural communities could and should work together. This also means that I feel free to pursue some other projects that have been on hold for some time now and I am very excited about that too.
The photo above, the more I look at it, the more it is becoming one of my favourite photos of all time. If you asked me a month ago how I felt about my life, I’d probably say that I felt a bit like the girl on the right – I had plenty of rope to roam around, but it could have been yanked at any time. Today, I definitely feel like that girl jumping off the wharf. The photograph was made on Change Islands a few weeks ago during the Great Fogo Island Punt Race.
Those who know me, know that I dislike being in the middle of large groups of people engaged in mindless small talk. That’s the major reason why I don’t photograph weddings – they drive me around the bend. I just spent three days surrounded by 500 people and I can’t tell you how good it felt to spend the morning picking berries with the girls and cooking a dinner for everybody afterwards. I will say that some aspects of the last three days were fun, but I desperately needed my alone time. It will take me a week to recover from this.
On that note, here is an essay by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic that some time ago caused a bit of controversy: Caring for Your Introvert.
The photo is from Change Islands. Local residents and visitors are watching the Great Fogo Island Punt Race from the government wharf earlier this month.The race is not just a tourist attraction, but also an important part in preserving the local knowledge and tradition of wooden boat building.
Croatian word of the day: borovnica blueberry [boro vni tza]
A few weeks ago, I lucked out and was able to photograph a little bit of The Great Fogo Island Punt Race – a 10 mile rowing race from Fogo to Change Islands and back. The rowers use traditional and locally built boats called punts. A cranky punt is a fast, but more difficult boat to handle and, when the punts were fishing vessels, having a cranky boat was not a good thing. Things have changed. Bellow is a trailer for a locally produced documentary Cranky. And the photo is of two boys on the government wharf in Change Islands where they were watching and very seriously discussing the race.
