Postcards from the Funny Farm

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Katelynn is a writer I ran across recently with a real hunger to write and connect through her writing. She has a very upbeat tone in all her posts and I was lucky to get her to guestblog at Postcards today. There is more 411 on her in the footer of this post. Enjoy her thoughtful and talented contribution!

Damien contacted me a few days ago and asked if I would be interested in doing a guest blog for him. He said he preferred the topic to be about inspiration or psychology. Since I know nothing about psychology I decided to go with inspiration (:

Because I write, not only on my blog but other writing outlets as well, inspiration is huge to me. Sometimes it’s hard to look around and feel inspired because we see our surroundings constantly. Everyday, there’s the same neighbors, same work place, same family, same habits. But if we look a little bit deeper, there’s always something there waiting for us, ready to jump out and surprise us.

One evening I was sitting down chatting to my dad, drinking a cup of tea and just enjoying the comforts of my family. My dad is from England, he came to Canada when he was 29 and decided to stay once he met my mom. I am extremely proud of my British heritage, possibly because of the novelty of it, but also because of the history. Taking a sip of his tea, dad started to tell me a story I hadn’t heard before.

A great aunt of mine had moved to Ireland with her family way back when. In this point in time the IRA were openly threatening and taking the lives of their opposition. Their influence was a constant worry for the Irish communities.

My aunt had been invited to a dance, her chauffeur, Teddy, drove the car to the entrance, helped her into the back seat and closed the door behind her. The manor where the evening was taking place was quite aways from my aunts estate and as they drove along the country roads, the sun set on the hills; it was a beautiful fall evening.

Turning a corner they came across a site I’m sure my aunt never forgot. A confrontation had occurred between the IRA and several other men. The men had been shot and left for dead along the roadside. Ordering her driver to stop, my aunt, not caring about her beautiful clothes, jumped out of the car and ran to the side of one of the men, his chest bloody and eyes distant. There was no pulse. Teddy called for her to come back, he warned that the IRA members might still be near and she would be in danger. She didn’t care, the went from one man to the next, checking for signs of life. Unfortunately, these are all the details I know of the story even though I have asked more family for details.

See what I mean about being inspired? Just when you think your family is normal and boring!

As bloggers it seems we’re constantly encouraged to join something, do something, or go somewhere interesting so we’ll have another topic to write about…and obviously there’s nothing wrong with that. But what about just sitting there, having a cup of tea with a relative, and finding out more of where you came from? If you’re even more adventurous, you could look even further in your background by hooking up with a family tree site and see what you come up with. Personally, I find it much more interesting to come from the horses mouth. Besides, family always enjoys company (:

Meet the Guest Blogger: Katelyn Jane, an Etsy Seller, creative blogger, wife and tea drinker, lives and writes in British Columbia, Canada. She loves riding her dog sled to work, inventing new storage ideas for her igloo and making leather with her teeth (or lack of).

I got that title from an old Alarm song. It’s a great tune with an even greater message for the visionaries among us in 2008.

Instead of waiting for others to be our inspiration, we have to be the inspiration to others AND to ourselves.

As you may have gathered from this series’ title, I grew up in Orange County. 45 minutes from Disneyland and 2 hours from the Mexico border. Nice living! When I moved up here to the high desert of California in August of 2002 I had nothing more than 300 bucks in my pocket and what seemed like a mystical job contract to teach public school. I left behind a rental apartment and everything else that had been “home.” I had decided some months earlier that a return to teaching was what my life and soul needed at age 33. You can read more about my transition back into teaching in my article entitled: Success and Relativity. Anyway, I didn’t mind the details of the move, I just knew this was my return to teaching and return to joy. It was as if I was in the story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the teaching job was my “golden ticket.”

The people I met up here, from the interview onward were magical. They saw the light in me and in turn I saw theirs. People offered to let me sleep on their couches, rent their condos, go out to dinner with them, set me up with women … note: I was single then … it was like out of a dream. The dream wasn’t so much about what they offered me though, it was about the light they shined into my heart. I remember thinking of the high desert as a magical place that no one in Orange County, where I grew up, could ever touch. Well, of course, I see now after nearly six years that wasn’t the case, it was merely my perception brought on by simple things people did.

The people were and still are magical but many have left the desert. One woman in particular who was instrumental in hiring me sufferred unspeakable loss when her son and his wife lost a baby in delivery. This world can be so harsh. She left the district and I don’t see her anymore. Others have retired and some have just moved on. I find myself sometimes asking: “Was the magic real? Where has it gone?” There you have the place to put my title: We are the Light.

In life we are lucky at times to be touched by the magic of others. We must never forget however that we have that same power to touch others. We see the light in people they often don’t see themselves. Let your words and actions pour light like water into the “vases” of people. Let them be better for knowing you. I’ll never forget the time my Grandpa had such an impact on me when he bought me a set of Callaway irons as a kid. I used to polish them nightly. Golf was a better game for me because of his generosity. That’s the kind of impact we should all have.

Remember also that the world is not always a mystical place. It is most the time, at its most complex level, just people walking on sand getting to their next destination. It takes people of vision, like you and I my friend, to to create the perception of magic.

The things that are eternal are actions and words you dream. Only you can start them. Only you can bring them back. Only you can keep them going. There really isn’t much to say on this except: GO AND DO!

An aside here at closing: Below are 4 of my family pictures. Each person in them “happened” post-desert … post-magic. Looking at them reminds me that home is where I probably need to shine the brightest, before I take on the world. Wouldn’t you agree?

How many electronic items do you own that are obsolete? I went through my classroom the other day collecting old items like cables and tape recorders and even a record player to clear out some clutter. It was remarkable to me how many district-purchased things were now useless. I remember when I was a senior in high school in 1987, I had a computer class in which we worked tediously on Apple computers that ran programs from those disks that actually were “floppy.” It got me wondering about what might soon be obsolete that I use today.

It’s kind of a depressing thought to me to think even the very blog I write in daily will one day be replaced with something else. Certainly my Compaq laptop with 36G hard-drive memory and 500M RAM has been supplanted in the marketplace. I’m actually afraid to look at what is out there now, and my laptop is only about two years old. Oh, and do I need to go into much detail on this keyword: hybrids?

Anyway, without letting progress overwhelm me, I try to be a student of the marketplace. Mostly in blogging and educational tools, but in all other areas of my life where it seems to be an issue. For example, my wife and our kids and I are moving into our new home in 30 days. This is so exciting and I find myself reading up and considering all the features of a home audio and tv system. I don’t have the money to get them all right away, but nowadays that may be a “plus” for the long term. I want to “future proof” my home as much as I can. If that means paying a little more for some things, I think it will be wiser in the long run. One example I ran across are HDMI splitters. Ignore the fancy name, they are simply connectors that hook up the speakers to your sound system. I read the current audio cables people use nowadays will not be able to handle the up-and-coming-systems of the near future. This is, of course, only one example of what likely lays before me on my first-time-home-owner safari!

All this stuff is enough to make me want to wear earplugs when I go shopping for electronic stuff.

Do you ever walk through the TV’s at Wal-Mart and think: “If only I’d have waited a couple more months?”

I bought a house today! Isn’t it absolutely amazing? 2 story 3 bedrooms with 2.75 bath and a den type room downstairs. Okay, I’ll admit it’s not as pricey and lush as those Branson homes for sale everyone is talking about, but we love it! This is our first home purchase, we have rented as a family for 6 years. Like my brother, our realtor, said “Good things come to those who wait.” It took us months to get pre-approved because our debt/income ratio is a little high due to my student loans. After getting approved for the loan, it only took us 3 days to find this dream-house and today they accepted our offer.

It has the coolest pool you ever saw. It reminds me of one of those 1950’s pool party movies. Sarah and I are thrilled. We can finally start taking pictures of our family in a place we are paying on to own. This is a great feeling. Since I share a lot of what’s going on in my life on here, I figured this was definitely appropriate! We move in in Mid May! Say tuned for the mother of all housewarming party pictures!

(and then … the Funny Farm Blogging convention party LOL)