Category: My Life

Happy birthday, Canada — eh!

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July 1 is Canada Day – the celebration of the nationhood of one of the two best countries on earth. 

I find it hard to believe it’s almost four years since I was there. That was five musicals and two theatre restaurant shows ago.  I’ve started my own business, established several blogs and had thirteen books published since then! 

It’s certainly not dissatisfaction with my own life or what I have achieved that makes me want to go back.

To say that I love Canada would be an understatement.  Part of me has a strong sensation of belonging there as much as I do here in Australia. I have been adopted by my Canadian family and take my role as an honorary Canadian very seriously. 

I’m longing to get back there but circumstances are currently prevailing against me making that happen anytime soon. 

I have people and places there that I love and miss and wish I could hug. I have decided not to name those people here, as the post got very soppy, very quickly when I started to do so. Trust me when I tell you it’s a good thing I backspaced that part. 

I long to see Niagara Falls, and to feel its music and thunder resonate with my soul again. Every time I have been there, I have experienced a profound awareness that I was always meant to be there, and each time I left, I felt a little more in tune with my spirit than I had been before. 

Niagara is also special because it is where Sean and I had our adoption ceremony, by which we became brother and sister. That night is etched indelibly into my heart and memory, as I know it is in his.

I would love to go back to PrInce Edward Island and spend more time exploring. PEI is such a beautiful place – whichever way you look, it’s just pretty – and my friends there have welcomed me into their homes and their lives in the most generous ways. 

My heart absolutely aches for the lakes and rolling hills of south-eastern Quebec, and to walk along my favorite part of the the road that follows the shore of Lake Champlain. There, too, I have people very dear to my heart.

I would love to revisit Montreal and Ottawa, because those places hold such happy memories. 

Of course, there are still many places and things I have yet to see. My brother Sean and I have started compiling another list, and it’s looking like I may need to make several more trips if we are going to achieve them all:

  • visit Churchill in Manitoba to see the polar bears. We did see polar bears at Toronto Zoo, but that’s not really the same thing.
  • do the train trip over the Rockies, and to see Banff and Jasper. see more of see more of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick than we did last time. There’s so much more history and beautiful scenery to explore. 
  • visit Newfoundland and Labrador. Who doesn’t want to see icebergs and fjords and Viking settlements? 

Oh, Canada. You beautiful thing. You’re wonderful and you have so much to offer. I hope you have a sensational day, and many, many more wonderful years ahead. 

I am coming back. I promise. Wait for me. xx

The Squirrels Have Checked Out.

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It’s the last day of term. 

Even though I am, like every other teacher, exhausted and keen for that bell to ring at the end of the day, I am still trying desperately to keep the kids on task and get things finished before then. 

The problem is, they’ve already checked out. 
They just don’t care. 
They’re restless. 
They’re talkative. 
They’re twitchy. 
Their eyes have glazed over with the promise of freedom, of late sleep-ins and no school uniforms or restrictions on their social media life for the next two weeks. 

If you’ve ever watched a squirrel running around in a park or a forest, that is the precise image of the mental and emotional engagement in my classroom today.
One or two are evolving into chipmunks as I watch. 

Except for that one kid at the back, who is working like a champion to get everything completed. 
I don’t have favourites, but today I really love that kid. 

Nominated!

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Guess who got nominated again for Top Female Author 2019? 

I did, that’s who!

‘Smoke and Shadows’ has been nominated in the Poetry category – the same one in which Nova won in 2017.

It’s fair to say I am excited!

It couldn’t have come at a better time. The crazy busy pace and emotional demands of the last three weeks and the stress I have been under because of things outside my control have really worn me down, and while I’ve enjoyed the release of ‘A Rose By Any Other Name’, I haven’t really given my books or my writing the attention they deserve at all the past month or so.  I’ve started a number of poems lately, but haven’t finished any of them… yet.

It’s really nice to know someone loved my book enough to nominated it. I love it, and I’m proud of it for so many reasons – but that is no guarantee that anyone else is going to. The reviews have been good, though, so I have reason to hope that others will enjoy reading it, too. 

It’s also very timely reminder that there are things which transcend those times of stress and exhaustion in our lives that seem to take over and leave no time or energy for anything else.  

Of course, we know that, but sometimes we forget to keep that thought in our mind. It’s amazing the difference a little bit of encouragement and support can make. 

Winners are announced on July 8th. I’ll be sure to let you know if I win! 

Dear Facebook… Yet Again.

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I quote, verbatim, this afternoon’s status on my Facebook profile.

Dear Facebook,

You have been temporarily blocked from accessing some of my features.

I’m not telling you why. 
I”m not going to listen to your appeal.

But you can bet your algorithmic little hiney I’m going to have my eye on you for quite some time. Possibly forever.

Joanne Van Leerdam, June 25, 2019.

So, it seems that I’ve run afoul of the Facebook algorithm yet again.
Now they’re suggesting I’m a robot.

You read that right. A robot.

I haven’t made identical posts in forever. I vary what I post from page to page. l really don’t know what brought that on.

And let’s not overlook the irony of an algorithm calling me a robot. It’s beyond ridiculous.

They can’t still be sour about my “What I Do and Don’t Like About Facebook” post… can they?

One suggestion that has been made is that when I’ve posted about things that annoy me, some well-meaning people have responded with the “angry face” reaction because they’re angry at the nonsense that a certain social media platform is throwing at people lately.

Apparently, for all its cleverness, the Facebook algorithm is unable to comprehend that it’s actually Facebook people are angry at. It interprets this reaction as those people being angry at me.

This is good to know.

Because who could be angry at Facebook or its ever-changing algorithm?

It’s fair to say that Facebook is not doing a single thing to recommend itself to me right now.

What I Love… And What Frustrates Me… About Snapchat

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I’m proud to say that this was one of my first-ever Snapchats.

Snapchat has been the subject of much controversy in the past – mostly from people who have never used it. I know a lot of people have been vocal in their criticism of the ease with which teens could use it to send pictures of their naughty bits to one another. To be honest, they haven’t ever needed SnapChat to do that.  And, in a further moment of not-so-surprising honesty, I’ve never used Snapchat for that either. 

It’s like anything: you can use it sensibly, and be careful who you add to your contacts, or you can be an idiot and endanger any bit of credibility you ever had. Snapchat is definitely not alone in that regard. 

Contrary to all the negative press it has had, Snapchat is actually pretty cool. 

The process is simple:

  • Take a snap, choose who you want to send it to, and send it. 
  • If you want everyone to be able to see it, you add it to your “story”.
  • If you don’t, people will only see your snap if you actually send it to them individually. 
  • You can choose how long you want the photo or video to last. Once the time you set expires, it’s gone. 

It’s important to remember that people can take a screenshot, and people can be offended, so common sense and decency are still required. 

I have great fun using Snapchat for quick, easy contact with my family and friends.  It’s also a great way to quickly and easily share a moment in your day in ways that are hard to otherwise express. 

In that respect. It’s super duper effective. 

It’s actually great for introverts because we can communicate meaningfully without actually having to make, or answer, a phone call. I have found that if you send enough Snapchats, they know you’re okay and what you’re doing, and don’t actually try to call anywhere near as often. That may sound awful, but if you ask any introvert you know, they’ll tell you it’s a fact of life: talking on the phone for any length of time is hard, especially if you’re tired or unwell.

I also use it to share my comedic genius with the world. You’ve got to take your opportunities where you can get them, after all. 

  • When you can’t put into words how bad your hospital food is…
  • When you want to show kids these days what life without a phone was like…

My absolute favourite use of Snapchat, though, is when my family use it to send me baby spam. I’m one of those aunties who can never get enough pics of my babies so Snapchat offers a great way for them to send me pictures without all the cranky “we don’t want baby spam” whiners on Facebook and Instagram getting their noses out of joint. Snapchat makes it easy to be a lot more direct and “one on one” with your pictures. 

You don’t even have to take a photo every time. You can just use the instant message function if that’s all you want to do.  But then… why wouldn’t you take a photo every time when you’ve got those filters to play with? 

Seriously, the Snapchat  filters are fantastic. One minute I’m a washed out, permanently exhausted 50-something English teacher, and the next, I’m a cat… or an emu… or a pirate… or whatever the filters of the day offer. Sometimes, I have instant makeup and smoother, younger skin. Sometimes I can add a piercing or a tattoo. Finding out what the filters are each day is as much fun as using them. 

Its easy to edit a picture using the menu at the top right of whatever picture you take This allows you to:

  • add text, labels, and/or stickers
  • crop your photo
  • doodle or write on your picture
  • attach a URL or website to your image
  • cut out part of your picture to create a sticker

You can also easily save any picture you like to your phone’s camera roll, using the little down arrow icon at the bottom left of the image.


There isn’t really a lot that annoys me about Snapchat, but I probably should mention:

  • The silly, click-bait stuff they post on the “discover” page. Ugh.  Once I’ve looked at my friends’ stories, I swipe away from the page. 
  • On specific dates – Christmas, New Year, that kind of thing – the ’Snapchat Team’ send pictures or videos that you have to watch to get rid of them. Some of them are clever. Others… not so much. 
  • Occasionally, there will be a filter that makes me look uncannily like my brother. I’m really not so keen on those, but it is kind of fun freaking out his daughters and our sisters with the pictures. And no… I’m not going to show you what I mean! 

For me, the frustrations are very minor compared to the fun I have with the app. It’s a keeper. 

A Favourite Shakespeare Play: ‘Macbeth’

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Macbeth is a play that has always fascinated people, engaging their superstitions as well as their imaginations. For this reason, its often called The Scottish Play by actors and theatre folk, as it’s believed to be unlucky to say ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre.

It’s a cracker of a story. The supernatural ‘weird sisters’ tell Macbeth he’s going to be Thane of Cawdor, and then tell him he is going to be king. In response, Macbeth does everything in his power to make it happen, only to be haunted by his victims and unable to actually enjoy his success when it does. You really do have to wonder how it would have all worked out if he’d responded with, “That’s nice!” and let things happen as they would. 

Of course, you can’t just blame it all on Macbeth. His wife – whom I like to call Lady Macdeath – plays a significant part in engineering him onto the throne, mostly by bullying him into doing things he doesn’t really want to do.

The play has some fabulous macabre moments— the witches are spooky, their prophecies are uncanny, and you can bet your last dollar you don’t want to eat what they’re cooking in that cauldron. Even better is the part where Banquo’s ghost shows up for dinner shaking his “gory locks”: that is my favourite scene in the whole play.

Laced with suspense, intrigue, and dramatic irony, ‘Macbeth’ keeps the audience hooked to the very end, even though we all know by now how it’s going to work out. There’s more magic than just “Double, double, toil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” in this play. 

Strangely enough, reading the text has brought me some odd comfort this weekend as I contemplate the fate of people who manipulate, lie and use others for their own nefarious purposes. I have taken dark satisfaction in seeing those who chose to do evil get what they deserved in the end. It may not be gracious, but it is quite therapeutic to think that maybe the Fates really do have things under control. Sometimes you need to take your catharsis wherever you can get it. 

That, of course, is the genius of all Shakespeare’s plays. He deals in the emotions we all understand – ambition, greed, love, anger, jealousy, pride, and the experience of being at the receiving end of the bad behaviour of others. The language may have changed slightly, but human nature certainly has not. 

Shakespeare doesn’t have to work hard to make the audience dislike Macbeth and his cold-hearted shrew of a wife: we get it. We have all seen people succeed by means of deceiving and manipulating others, or by stabbing someone else in the back, and we don’t like them, either.

Things For Which I Am Thankful Today

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Today, I am feeling very low. So, I am trying to focus on things for which I am thankful. 

I know it won’t fix things, but it’s a positive distraction from my own misery. 

Most of these are in no particular reason, although the first four are in the right place at the top of the list of what I am thankful for today: 

  • My best friend. For so, so many reasons that I can only barely start to count. 
  • Encouragement from friends. Even when life really sucks, they have my back. 
  • My dog. Abbey the Labby always knows when I need extra love. 
  • Scout Kitty purring on my lap. She, too, has been extra attentive. 
  • The lovely quilt with which I have wrapped myself. It was a gift from my best friend at Christmas time, and given that I can’t hug her today, it’s the next best thing. 
  • The audiobook I’m listening to. It’s good to give my mind something else to do. 
  • Peanut butter on toast. 
  • Coffee. In all honesty, I am thankful for coffee every day. You all should be, too… because even if you’re not drinking it, I am. 
  • Downtime, and the fact that I got all those exams and reports done. I really don’t think I could have maintained that pace much longer. 
  • The fact that I do not have to sit upright on stupid courtroom seats for one single minute of today. My spine has been brutalised this past week. 
  • Pain medication.  Enough said.
  • A Poet’s Curse. I’ve been reading it for therapeutic reasons last night and today. It helps. 

Current Status: Exhausted

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Self Portrait: Exhausted. June 19, 2019.

I don’t write this to complain. I am, however, starting to feel like I need to account for my whereabouts. If this post sounds even remotely whiny, I apologise in advance.

The past few weeks have been brutal. 

A horrid throat infection a few weeks ago laid me low and set me at least ten days behind in my work schedule just before my students sat their mid-year exams. Trying to get those exams marked and into the Semester 1 reports by the deadline was always going to be a challenge, to say the least. 

That task, however, has been complicated by my being at court since last Friday, in the pursuit of justice and hoping for closure in a matter very close to my family and my heart. 

That, in turn, has limited the time available for grading exam papers and writing reports to the weekend and evenings. It also meant that every lesson for this week and next had to be fully prepared, resourced and assigned on the school system before I left work last Thursday afternoon. 

And thus, my waking hours have been fully consumed by matters of high priority that cannot be put off. I’m pulling successive 18 hour days with very little downtime. 

There has been no writing. There has been no reading. My friend taught me to knit on Saturday afternoon, and I completed four rows while I was with her. I haven’t had time to pick that up again yet, either. 

The only relief I have had is the audiobook I am listening to on the drive to and from court each day, and the few minutes I have taken over lunch or dinner to write the day’s blogpost if I am not using one written in advance.

I honestly don’t know how much longer I can keep this up, but I am going to have to try. 

I should finish the exams tonight, but the there is a stack of work and assignments that my students are turning in this week while I am away from school. I need to check, grade and return all of that as soon as I can so the kids get the feedback and help they need to keep on learning and improving.

I don’t know when the court case will finish. I don’t know when I will get all this work done or when I will be able to write again, or read for pleasure. 

Term ends at the end of next week and I am determined to take a well earned break then. Maybe I will sleep for the entire two weeks. 

And if you are one of those people who like to comment on “all those holidays” teachers get?
Don’t. 

Courting Justice.

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Today was hard. 

It was spent in the presence of someone I’d rather never set eyes on again. It was spent in pursuit of justice. It was spent blinking back tears and swallowing my revulsion. 

There is still anger burning within me that I cannot quench. My heart is heavy with the reopening of old wounds. 

And I am powerless, unable to do anything but look on and observe.  

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have the psychic power to set someone on fire from across the room. I could do so, quite willingly, if I were able.

It’s fair to say that if a certain person did happen to spontaneously combust, I would make good use of my bottle of water by drinking it.  

I do not, as a rule, harbour such feelings toward other people. I am fully aware of my own sins and imperfections. But when people commit to the unconscionable and then defend it, any concept of “benefit of the doubt” or “we all make mistakes” is well and truly cast aside. 

I can feel another horror story coming on, but it’s not ready to be written yet. The ideas need to percolate more. And so, I must bide my time.

It will come… and, I trust, so will justice.

The Next Challenge: Learning to Knit

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Today, with encouragement from my friends Kim and Helen, I am undertaking a new challenge: I’m going to learn to knit. 

It is a skill that has defied me in the past. I have tried— and failed—several times before. As humiliating as that has been, I have remained a little jealous of people who can whip up a scarf or pair of gloves, or a lovely sweater, with relative ease. 

My first project is going to be a scarf. I found some wool that I really love, and will look wonderful as a warm, wide scarf that I can wrap around me when it gets cold. I bought the wool and some bamboo knitting needles just the right size, so I’m ready to start. Helen has promised to teach me this afternoon. 

I’m excited. I’m keen to put my past failures behind me. I’m super keen for the scarf. To be honest, that’s probably the biggest motivator, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Right? 

If I catch on and manage to make a go of it, I will update you on my progress at some point. 
If I don’t… we will never speak of this again.