If the shoe fits – and other clichés.

Just finished up our first of three weeks as visiting author/teachers at the Singapore American School. Every morning at 6:45am the wide smiling Mr. Ali pulls up to our hotel and whisks us off to the sprawling campus and then he deposits us back at 3pm a little bit tuckered out but always impressed with the work accomplished by the students during the day.

Singapore is a city state – think Manhattan with its towering buildings surrounding a green space. Now – get rid of all the trash on the streets of NYC and replace Central Park with a rainforest jungle complete with monkeys and boa constrictors and you’d be approaching what Singapore is.

This visit is really a gift to a couple of itinerant poet educators such as Sara and myself – set up by our friend Dr. Nancy Johnson an education professor at a state university in Seattle Washington.

Okay you’ve heard the old adage those who can do and those who can’t teach right? Well, first off it’s a pretty stupid adage – teaching is one of the toughest professions one can do and teaching teachers to teach is doubly so. One of the most deadly traps a teacher can fall into is losing touch with the goals of their profession. Whether it be dancing as fast as one can to prepare students for some barely relevant high stakes test sacrificing critical and deeper thinking skills or becoming so entrenched in the academic theory side that real classroom experience becomes something decades removed for the folks who are sending fledgling educators into the bubbling cauldron that is, for example, a middle school.

This is what makes our friend Dr. Johnson special. She has ditched her university job for two years to come to Singapore and teach 8th grade language arts. What many would classify not only a leave of absence but also the leaving of one’s senses is the embodiment of another much more applicable adage of walking the walk.

It is one thing to expound on classroom strategies or sing the praises of the difference a  teacher can make while giving a keynote at a conference but it’s so much more relevant to lead by example wearing the shoes of the profession. So here’s another adage for ya, what have you done lately?

Well lately Sara and I have been privileged to work with Dr. Johnson and her teaching partner, Brian Arleth’s classes and we are so looking forward to the next two weeks with the rest of the 8th grade RLA professionals here at SAS. it is so very rare that we get to have this much constant contact with the same students.

So we’re going to take the weekend here to do a little bit of writing – recharge our batteries – (and maybe help Brian pick out a new mountain bike) so we can hit the classroom Monday (can you stand another adage?) bright eyed and bushy tailed as a long tailed macaque.

Not so Heavy Metal

Okay -

So I have been doing some bike restoration and other work over at my dad's garage. His place is super well equipped for anything that one might decide to do to a piece of metal. I've decided to try my hand at some metal sculpting - or rather metal pounding, distressing, cutting, heating, bending  painting and chemically etching. So far my subject mater has been pretty aquatic - but that doesn't mean everything I do will be fishy. I figure once I have 12 - 15 pieces done I might start shopping around for a gallery show - we'll see. In the meantime here are a couple things I've made.

 This one is 55 inches tall and each fish is a bout 30 inches long. It was my dad's idea to drill out and mount it in an old slab of concrete.

 

 This is a pic of the wood carvings that inspired the above piece.

 This Stingray has a 45" wingspan and 46" from tail tip to horn.

This guy is 36 inches long.

Clicking on the image will give you bigger view. Unfortunately pics don't do these justice - you can't see how the clear-coat gives them a nice depth - but this'll give you an idea of what I've been up to.

A Pleasant Conundrum

Last week Sara and I did a little bartering. Our friends Anne Goudvis and Stephanie Harvey (if you are part of the literacy and comprehension education world you know what rock stars these two are) wanted a little help with some presentations they were working on – PowerPoint and video editing stuff. So, it seems the Goudvis clan owns an amazing house up in the mountains outside of Aspen – built by the foresighted patriarch – Ted Goudvis years ago. Steph and Anne asked if we would be willing to come on out and help them in exchange for the use of said house and transportation.

Well I may have been born in the morning but I wasn’t born THIS morning. We jumped on the opportunity. I rented myself a bike and did some hill climbing – Sara got ten thousand or so new words added to a YA novel she is working on and we met a family of minks near the confluence of the two rivers which meet behind the Goudvis homestead.  Here’s just a few pics from out excursion.

A photo during a hike Sara and I took along Conundrum Creek.

Wildflowers on Independence Pass

Shot outside the door of the Goudvis’ house.

Hunter S Thompson’s table at the Woody Creek Tavern.

Me outside the Woody Creek

One of the baby minks (a kit) that we spied. At least I am pretty sure it’s a mink – let me know if you know different.

1950 Schwinn Spitfie Rehab

Finished the Schwinn off today and delivered it to its owner. She was happy with the work and told me that she would dig up a photo of her and the bike when she first got it 61 years ago - that'll make for a sweet before and after.

 Here it is in its restored state with a market basket and all.

 My son's girlfriend takes it for a spin.

A happy customer!

Spitfire update 3

 Okay - as expected I have hit the hurry up and wait stage - have seat-post, new handlebars and a market basket that I am waiting  delivery on to finish up this re-build. But it is coming along pretty nicely. I've brought it back to my house after doing the frame work over at my dad's and have it pretty much back together - the wheels and tires are on and trued the crank has had it's bearing cleaned and repacked - a new set of pedals - a couple broken bolts drilled out and then re-tapped. I even took it for a seat-less ride last night. 

 Putting the first of many coats of blue - masked off head tube has already been painted white.

 Fenders blue as well - notice how dull the paint is. That is because it is a base coat clear coat process. First you shoot the color in three or four coats - then you shoot a second clear paint that adds the shine and deepens the basecoat color.

Here are the parts after clear coating.

And here is the state of things in my basement today.

And a before pic to see how far we've come.

Spitfire update 2

 Gravity feed spray gun.

 sanded and cleaned ready for a coat of primer

 

 just hangin' 'round my dad's garage

 Primed

  

Okay - all primed now and ready for some base coat color. I was able to shoot back over to my dad's garage (he is the guy with all the top notch paint and air tools that make my metal shaping and painting pipe dreams possible) and get a  coat of white highlight on so barring flooding I should be painting the blue tomorrow and maybe even clear-coating in the evening. Still waiting on some parts to arrive - so I could be soon entering the hurry up and wait stage of this build.

Scwinn Spitfire Update

Steadily getting things done on the Spitfire rebuild. Receiving parts at regular intervals from UPS. While I am going to try and keep this thing looking as stock as possible I am more worried about making it a safe and dependable ride - so I am upgrading some components and refurbishing others.

The bearings, while dirty, are good quality and need only to be cleaned and repacked with some nice pristine blue goo but things like pedals and tires are being replaced with new but contemporary looking parts.

 Here's a some nasty looking wheel bearings before and after.

 This is probably the original grease - it looks like grasshopper chewing tabacco and is just as sticky.

 All stripped down.

 Some jobs have got to be done by hand and I've got a couple blisters to attest to this.

 

 With a little luck I'll be shooting primer on this thing in the next day or two.

November 17, 1950

Picked up a bike to restore today from a friend of mine’s mom. It has been hers all her life and we’re gonna see about getting it back on the road again. It’s an old Schwinn Spitfire. According to the serial number stamped on the bottom bracket (the place where the pedals go through) the little blue demon’s birth date was November 17, 1950 - a Scorpio. Still four more years until it would qualify for Medicare – and who knows what kind of shape that’ll be in by then – so we're gonna go ahead and treat it now.

Here's some before pics:

And here's the state of affairs this evening:

Time out for a commercial break

Okay -

I know I said I would catch up here but I just got a new video program and have been messing with it for a couple days. My next post will be getting back to our trip to SE Asia and be about Vietnam but here’s a video I created yesterday around a recoding of me reading one of my poems last year at Lix n Kix.

More Borneo

Heading out to the island for snorkeling - the water is so muddy because this is where the river empties into the ocean.

The second day of our visit to Kota Kinabalu Sara and I took a snorkeling excursion to an island off the coast about three hours away. We jumped in a van driving into the countryside swerving around cattle as they meandered on the roadway then hopped a motorboat for the Mantanani Islands.

We floated about looking at the tropical fish swimming amongst the coral below and then had a nice lunch at one of the stilted houses offshore from the Island. This was both our first attempts at snorkeling and we both enjoyed it. (So much so that I even purchased a prescription mask a couple days later to use on our final day out and about before we got to work at the conference.)

Now true to form we started out with a sunny morning but by three in the afternoon the skies had turned ugly and we raced a thunderstorm back to the shore just in the nick of time. This was pretty much the weather pattern for our whole visit to Borneo and we learned to get out and about on the motorbike very early in the morning (it was already well into the 80s by 6qm) and to be headed back to our room or within a short driving distance of it by two in the afternoon. Riding the bike in the rain wasn't the worse thing one could do though as it was warm - but the raindrops did sting a bit.

Notice the change of water color once we have got a bit offshore.

Later when we moved to the more posh environs of the conference hotel we found that the resort had its own set of islands that one could boat twenty minutes out to for some snorkeling. This is what prompted me to buy the prescription lens masks (which I got for less than half the price it would have been here in the states.)

It was during this little outing that two pretty amazing things happened. First off while we were lounging on the beach after an early morning swim about the reef Sara looks across the beach which was starting to fill up with visitors and says," Hey, isn't that Fiona?"

Sure enough we had run into the Australian couple again - this was starting to get a bit freaky. Here we were three or four days past running into them at the Sunday market and now they ended up on this same island (one of a half dozen or so they could have stopped at a short boat ride from the city) at exactly the same time we were there. I started to wonder if maybe this couple were a member of one of our karasses.

This small island had a sheltered picnic kind of area with a half dozen 55 gallon drum BBQ grills and just past noon they fired up those grills and started throwing some chicken onto them sizzling and wafting the aroma of cooked meat over the beach and into the jungle that started where the beach left off.

This is when the second amazing thing happened - as the aroma of the cooking chicken made its way into the jungle it enticed a dozen or so monitor lizard ranging in size from four to six feet long to come side-winding out of the lush green undergrowth and meander around the grills hoping for a handout. It was pretty boss to see these guys in a relatively wild state (the begging for BBQ chicken notwithstanding) when my only other chances to see lizards this big before this had been a couple specimens behind tempered glass in a zoo situation. I could have kicked myself for not bringing a camera that morning - but, that gives me reason to head back someday in order to record the monitor lizard BBQ chicken migration.

Well, Nick and Fiona treated Sara and me to some ginger iced tea at a Tiki hut and then we were back on the speedboat to get ready for our conference - play time was over and we needed to be ready for our sessions. After all - the whole reason we had the opportunity to see and do the swinging stuff we were up to was because EARCOS had been kind enough to invite us there.

Next up: Vietnam.