Monday Morning Musings

Posted on November 1, 2021 under Monday Morning Musings with no comments yet

Stone faced

The week that was… or wasn’t.

Every week I pray for normalcy. Every week my prayers go unanswered. I guess I’m a sorry excuse as a prayerful person.

Just for fun, I decided that I would look up the meaning of normal. “Conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.” Is it just me or has the term normal become extinct? When people start taking ivermectin to treat Covid-19, all bets are off. In case pandemic fatigue has gotten the best of you and you stopped reading about cures several month ago, some people are ingesting a medication intended for livestock to treat or prevent Covid. The FDA in the U.S. and several other health agencies suggest that people who do this are barking up the wrong tree. In some Latin American countries (according to a BBC radio documentary), physicians (!) are giving people intravenous injections of bleach to ward off the virus. I will come clean. I believe in vaccines.

I can honestly say that there hasn’t been a single week during my time in the north that I could consider a normal week. Of course, my timing wasn’t the best. I arrived here a few months before Covid became a household word.

Last week began with the school closed on Monday because of 2 Covid cases in the village the previous week. The next three days were scheduled Professional Development days. The school board decided to open the school back up on Friday. Children and staff arrived at school, donned in Halloween costumes. By 11:30, everyone was sent home… again. Someone in the village had tested positive for Covid. When school will reopen is anyone’s guess. Cases of Covid in this region of Quebec (Nunavik) are rising at an alarming rate.

Those of you who have been following my posts lately know that I have been on a mission. At first, I thought it was “Mission Impossible” but slowly but surely, I have been reorganizing several rooms in the school that needed a major tidy up. I’m being charitable with my choice of words. I have compared “Len’s Labours” to those of Hercules.

This week, I tackled the former computer lab. When I first stepped inside this room, it more resembled a computer labyrinth, “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” This room is very close to the entrance to the school on the elementary side. I asked the ever-patient maintenance guys to completely empty the contents of the room out into the hallway near the entrance to the school. Yes. There were indeed many old computers and computer parts but there was a lot more. The most interesting item was a rather large, and quite magnificent, Inuit sculpture. Two summers ago, construction workers moved the sculpture into the computer lab while they were installing a new floor in the lobby. It never got moved back.

Our high school math teacher is a pretty amazing guy. He is a top- notch educator. He has been at the school for 12 years. He cares about the students and the school. He is also our tech guy. When something goes wrong in the school, Ben is usually the problem solver. Now those of you who know me well understand that technology is not my friend. Oh yes, when it works well, it is my best friend but at the slightest hint of a problem, it becomes my mortal enemy. I wrote about my love/hate affair with computers a few years ago: https://www.week45.com/ctrl-alt-del/ Ben agreed to help me with this truly Herculean task of trying to determine which computers worked and which did not. We set up a workstation in the hallway and began the onerous task of assembling computers and monitors. It took us two full days. Len’s Labours #5 is done!

Some people go all out for Halloween. I am talking specifically here about adults. God bless them. Many of our younger teachers arrived last Friday wearing amazing costumes. They had obviously given a great deal of thought about their costumes. I am not a Halloween grinch, but I was too tired from my most recent labours to put any thought into a costume. Thankfully I wasn’t the only person who arrived at school sans costume.

I told teachers and students that I dressed up as I normally do… as an old man!

Have a great week and welcome to November.