Give us an H!

[liv]

ghoti (NB that's a different person from ghoti) posted the meme where someone picks a letter for you, and you post ten things that you love beginning with that letter. And if anyone else wants to play, you can comment and ask for a letter, and I will happily suggest one.

I'm going to alter the meme and post ten things I love at the moment, rather than ten things I love in general, cos that gives me a chance to post some of the stuff I've been too busy to talk about since the end of summer.

1. Husband, recently acquired by angelofthenorth: I really like gwyddno as a person, having had the privilege of getting to know him during their whirlwind romance. And their wedding, in the middle of September, was a completely wonderful occasion.
   
   
2. Holiday: The wedding gave us an excuse for a holiday in Wales. We didn't have much free time in Cardiff, but managed to meet up with draigwen for a drink in the Goat Major and had a pleasant meal in a restaurant she recommended, Giovanni's. We stayed overnight in a funny little B&B called Prest Gaarden, which was reincarnated from the Norwegian consulate (!) Then jack drove us down to the holiday cottage belonging to a cousin of my mother's, where I spent most of my childhood summers with my family.
   
   The week there was in every way as magical as I remembered! The Cottage has been modernized and made cosy and convenient rather than damp and impossible, but it's still the same in character. And the day-trips which seemed like huge expeditions when I was little turned out to be easy 10 or 15-mile drives. The weather was good enough to enjoy outdoor activities, such as walking the incredibly beautiful Pembrokeshire Coast Path National Park, and scrambling over the rocks to the perfect beach where I have so many memories, but not brilliant enough to bring out hordes of tourists for midweek September days, so we had the place to ourselves. We made it to Skomer Island where we saw several Atlantic seals including, amazingly, a two-day-old baby, still at the white fluffy stage but able to crawl over the rocks quite independently. Also Carew Castle and tidal mill, and Pembroke, and plenty of time to enjoy eachother's company without any distractions (not even mobile phone signal!)
   
   I took some snapshots, but they don't even slightly do the place justice.
   
   
3. High Holy Days In spite of having nothing like enough time to prepare, and in spite of coming down with a really inconvenient cold on the day of Yom Kippur, the big festivals have gone better than I could have expected. It was the right mix of celebratory and solemn, I got people involved without making loads of extra work for myself. It was also absolutely amazing to have hatam_soferet helping me, partly because nearly everybody finds music more spiritual than just reading, and partly because it meant doing half of YK, which is realistic, rather than all of it, which is not very sane. But also because hatam_soferet is just wonderful, her singing voice, her depth of knowledge, her sensitivity. I felt honoured to be sharing a pulpit with her. Breaking the fast with a simple bring-and-share meal made a lot more sense than going out to a restaurant. I messed up the timings slightly, mainly due to forgetting where exactly the memorial service comes in the Orthodox liturgy, and that's the fixed point you have to work around, but it all worked out. [Note to self for future years: morning service 90 minutes, Torah service c 1 hr, then Yizkor. Don't assume Musaf will come in much under 2 hours. Try to negotiate for more than 1 hour for the last two services!]
   
   
4. Which leads on to: Hebrew congregation (sneaks in under H because "Hebrew" was the politically correct term for Jewish when "Jew" was pretty much synonymous with "loan shark"). The community have been absolutely lovely, it's been a hard year for them with the illness and eventual death of our beloved President, but they're keeping up a sense of hope for the future without being wildly unrealistic. And they're being careful not to resent me for not being Sydney, while working at continuing his compassionate, welcoming example. They're also good at practical things; they don't devalue those tasks or assume they're a women's thing. The break-fast after Yom Kippur was completely lovely; we over-catered drastically, but it was so friendly and companionable and the perfect transition from solemn to mundane. And we had a go at building a succah; it didn't really hold up, and I forgot to plan things so that we would have a chance to use it during daylight, but it felt very symbolic that we were able to make an effort to observe the traditional rituals and it was friendly and fun in spite of practical difficulties.
   
   
5. House-guests hatam_soferet's visit has been more wonderful than I can describe. Partly because geography means I see her far too rarely, but also because we work really well sharing space. I had been a bit nervous about her dog, as I'm not always good with dogs, but the creature seemed to take to me. I just loved coming home from work to be greated by a tiny dog going absolutely wild with joy, and my dear friend with hugs and tea. hatam_soferet is about the only person who makes me question my strong preference for living alone; life was just so much brighter with her around. She's left me with the most amazing souvenirs of the visit, too, a fuzzy purple blanket she crocheted for me, and two owl necklaces, one of which has feathers and one of which has ears you can press to reveal a watch. (The latter involved a trip to Claire's Accessories, which I definitely wouldn't dare on my own, but hatam_soferet discovered that owl jewellery is fashionable with the pre-teen set at the moment. And the adorable dog definitely detracted from the "what are you old, boring people doing in this shop?" thing.)
   
   
6. High winds The heatwave at the beginning of October was lovely and all, but honestly I don't thrive in very hot temperatures, and autumn has always been my season. When it started getting blustery and cold I could feel my spirits lifting.
   
   
7. Helping students be awesome I'm finding teaching particularly satisfying at the moment, partly because it's my third time round and I know what I'm doing so I can settle into the actual teaching part of the teaching without the stress of a steep learning curve. And partly because I've had a run of students approaching me and asking for advice about how to pull themselves up from "okay" to "outstanding". It's just amazing to work with young people who are so bright and motivated and self-aware and watch them working things out that are going to make their ambitions attainable.
   
   
8. Helping the medical school be awesome My secret project is now sufficiently underway that I can talk about it: I've been put in charge of a new programme to pair students up with senior doctors and academic faculty so they can form long-term mentoring relationships. I'm so enthusiastic about this idea, and I am also really proud that I've been given responsibility for making it happen, because it seems to include lots of things I'm good at.
   
   
9. Handheld internet I'm in love with my new Android phone, because it just crosses the threshold that my old Blackberry didn't quite reach of being a perfectly usable pocket internet browsing device. (I don't really love the hardware, but this is supposed to be a positivity meme!) Mainly it's the fact that the resolution is good enough to fit a couple of paragraphs on the screen, and that it reflows text properly on nearly all sites. But it makes geography less unpleasant when I can spend a several-hour train journey happily browsing DW, blogs, newspaper articles etc. Unlike with my old phone, I no longer really feel the need to bring a netbook as well on most journeys. And I have just eliminated boredom from my life because there's always some words for me to read when I have to wait five minutes for anything. Yay living in the future!
   
   
10. Home I'm not the most house-proud person, and there are lots of little aesthetic and practical improvements I haven't got round to making. And with everything being so intense during the first half of October, between teaching and religious commitments, housekeeping was the thing that fell by the wayside. But still, it's lovely to have a place to come back to that is arranged to suit me, whether it's after a wonderful holiday or an intense week at work.

Anyway, yes, just one more festival to go and then I can relax until Chanukah. So I'm hoping to be around online more than I have been for the past several weeks!

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

Hugs. Isn't it just wonderful to come home to a dog going wild with joy?

I had the best time doing YK with you. It was easily the most powerful YK I've had in ten years. Um, logistics may mean I'm actually around in cispondia next YK, and I would love to come back and do it again.

[liv]

Everything about your visit was wonderful! I could go on about it for pages and pages, only it would probably embarrass you, and doing the catch-up in this format was supposed to be a way to make myself be at least reasonably concise. I knew I was going to miss you once you left, but I didn't realize I'd miss Waan as well.

The possibility of you being around for next year's YK is really really exciting! I won't mention it because I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but the community would be thrilled to bits if you came back. They are all thorough Soferet fans already.

[hatam_soferet]

More hugs and TEA.

I need to talk logistics with you at some point.

[emperor]

8 sounds cool; if you had any time to expand on what you did/are doing, that'd be very interesting.

[liv]

I will talk about the mentoring programme more once it's actually up and running, at the moment it exists mainly in the heads of me and a couple of colleagues.

The theory behind it is that medical students (I expect vets are the same) are constantly being assessed and evaluated and appraised and examined and judged. Which means that they often don't want to ask for help with anything at all, even quite positive things, because they are afraid it will count against them in a pretty cut-throat job market. The ones who are in real trouble can get help; the medical school has a really world-class student support service. But the ones who are, y'know, basically doing ok, not failing anything or miserably unhappy, but not really living up to their potential either, don't really get much attention.

So the plan is that each student at the beginning of the course gets paired up with an "Academic advisor" from faculty, and we create a system in which they meet up in person at least twice a year. We're aiming to keep paperwork to a minimum and set something up that is completely personal and one-to-one between student and mentor. There's no judgement or competitiveness, nobody looking over their shoulder checking that they have accomplished x, y and z objectives during their meetings, just a chance to build up a relationship with someone and create some space where they can think about the bigger picture rather than the five thousand little tasks they need to complete this week.

The quirk is that we restart the system when students move into third year, mainly because of geographical issues as almost all the learning from third year onwards takes place in clinical / workplace settings rather than on campus. Also the mentors for the later years are going to be practising clinicians rather than academics. They're all at consultant level or equivalent so should have some serious experience of training and mentoring.

The sort of high-minded ideology behind it is that students who are particularly confident, especially if they happen to be white, native English males, usually manage to find some kind of informal mentoring anyway. But women, people from ethnic minority / immigrant backgrounds, and just more retiring students in general, lose out under this informal, ad hoc system. So we're trying to set up something that is more widely accessible. It won't be perfect; some students will inevitably just go through the motions, not realizing the benefits of the system, and some mentor-student relationships just won't work out for personality reasons. But the plan is to increase the coverage beyond those people who tend to do best out of medical school anyway.

[emperor]

Sounds good; we had something at the vet school, but it was ... pretty perfunctory, really. Do you have plans for getting good buy-in from the staff?

[liv]

Getting buy-in is going to involve telling them about it with great enthusiasm – that's the next phase of my job. And putting emphasis on the "no paperwork" aspect; we're asking the students to take on the job of arranging the meetings and informing the school they have done so, the Advisors don't have to police it at all. And some extremely senior people, including the Principal of the Medical School and several hospital Deans are on-side, so the impetus is coming from the top. I hope it's the kind of thing that will be its own reward, because working closely with bright, enthusiastic people to help them become good doctors is really satisfying, at least for a certain personality type. I think the biggest problem is not going to be enthusiasm for the task, but time-planning; for people with active clinical jobs, it's really really hard to make a definite commitment to anything that isn't directly supporting patients.

Letters?

[vatine]

A stave of beech, a letter, such a thing would be appreciated.

Hm, I am sure there are horrible puns on beech/book in Swedish, thinking about it.

Re: Letters?

[liv]

Oh, hello, I haven't seen you for a while! When I went to Swedish class I was told that there's an actual etymological connection between bok and bok, something to do with bark being used in the early development of writing. Although maybe that's just a story they tell foreigners, who knows?

Since you were the first to ask, you can have a high-frequency letter. How about N?

Re: Letters?

[vatine]

It's been... work... lately.

I think bokstavar (book staves) were used as portable, light-weight rune-holding devices. Supposedly, the bark ain't bad for turning into paper-alike, though.

At least the staves are (supposedly) the reason that letters are called "bokstäver" in Swedish.