Oh. I said something about a post, didn't I?

Damn.

I should never do that.

The thing is, somewhere between doing laundry, entertaining the cat (very definitely his top priority, at least), and making pointless paint splotches for what may possibly end up being my lamest entry for Illustration Friday ever (and I've had some lame ones), I forgot to think of anything to blather about.

So. Um. Let's see...

I...

... could talk about my fascination with grape leaves, I suppose, but that would make today's pointless photo NOT pointless, and as we all know that if this blog ever comes to a point it will turn into a pumpkin...

Yeah. I should probably stay away from the grape leaves. Besides, it'd be a pretty short post. I like grape leaves. They're fun to draw. The End.

Still leaves me without a topic, though.

I could talk work, I suppose, since work is what made the blog mostly blatherless this week. That might do, especially since I've noticed a couple of new people checking in recently. Hi, new people. You're welcome here, although I have to admit that I can never quite figure out why anyone comes at all...

Too many ellipses, Dee. Stop being so incomplete.





Ok, work, then. I know that my references to work are probably a little confusing, but that's partly because I have one of the odder jobs in the world. And... oh. I'm bleeding. Excuse me a sec.



A minute or so later...
 And more ellipses, apparently...

 Yes, it was a little weird to actually type out that last bit. I should probably delete it, but it made me laugh to see that I'd given you people play-by-play as I went so it'll stay. I have a small patch of eczema (aka atopic dermatitis aka bloody annoying) on my hand that got irritated when I was wearing the wrist splint after my sprain, and I must have scratched off a scab without noticing. TMI? TDB, as Yours Blatheringly always says.

Where was I, anyway?

Right, work.

As my profile says, I'm a naturalist/interpreter. I add the naturalist part in because a) I am a naturalist, and b) although my official title is interpreter (sorry -- School and Youth Programs Interpreter, thank you very much), almost nobody outside the business knows what that means and they assume that I'm multilingual.

There are different kinds of interpretation out there, folks. Some people interpret languages; I interpret natural history. And sometimes history history. And sometimes astronomy, just to throw people off.

The whole point of interpretation is to help people understand things. To teach without being pedantic. That's what I do. Ironic that I ended up teaching, since I come from a family of teachers and took a science degree to try to stay away from teaching. I guess that some things are genetic and you just can't escape them. At least I get to teach in a creative environment.

So that's the philosophy of the job; what's the job itself? Well, as my job title suggests, I spend most of my time doing school programming (as opposed to public programming, although I do a little of that too when I'm needed). For me that means leading actual school groups -- either at the nature centre or at the schools themselves if they've booked me for extension programming -- through what we call an interpretive program. Thus my constant and largely unexplained use of the term program on the blog. Sorry to anyone who thought that I was really a computer wizard for the nature centre.

When I started at the nature centre, leading programs was all that I did. I still do it, but as generally happens when you've been at a job forever there've been more responsibilities added on over the years. Now I also write the programs (which means being familiar with the school curriculum, since nowadays we have to prove our value for the schools' limited budgets. Pretty much all of our programming is curriculum-related. Why didn't I just do an education degree, again? I probably spend more time with the curriculum than a lot of teachers do. Sad, that), make sure that all the props are there, train the interpreters, supervise the interpreters, evaluate the interpreters... well, you get the picture there. June's a busy month for all of that, so I think you can see why the blog falls by the wayside.

Somehow or other it also fell to me to supervise the part-time weekend and evening front desk staff (known as Visitor Services) and edit the quarterly newsletter, which is a giant pain in the behind because no one ever gets their submissions in on time.

When I'm not doing any of the above I might be answering questions from the public, leading edible plant walks, doing astronomy programs with our mobile planetarium (think giant inflatable silver igloo, if you've never seen a mobile planetarium. Or, you know, just google mobile planetarium. That works, too), or drawing, since I accidentally became my own program illustrator a few years ago. What can I say? We're a non-profit. There's no way I'd ever have the budget to pay an artist.

I'll say one thing: with all its annoyances (and really, what job doesn't have at least a few annoyances?), it's a job that offers a lot of variety. On any given day I could be talking about rocks, researching aboriginal plant use, or playing with a snake. It's the kind of thing that's managed to keep my notably short attention span interested for (sigh) twenty years come last September (when did I become old enough to be doing anything for twenty years?), and the kind of field I've been working in for almost twenty-five years now if you count my university summer job. It's weird, it's hard to explain, and it's such a big part of me now that I don't think I'll ever be able to shake it.

A good thing, that? Oh, sometimes. Sometimes I'd rather be working in a library or an art supply store. We all have those sometimes moments, though, and I think I have less of them than most people do.

And that definitely counts as a good thing.

And...



LOOK! A POST!

TIME TO GET LUNCH, NOW!

YOU CAN STOP READING!