A Rough Kind of Beauty

There was a rough kind of beauty in Gibsons and Sechelt today.

It was raining a heck of a lot over on the Sunshine Coast, but instead of feeling closed in and suffocated (like I usually do on rainy Vancouver days), the pelting rain felt free and fresh.

We set off from home to catch the late morning ferry. We still had those prepaid tickets from 10 years ago (good grief), and didn't want to let them go to waste. Well, what do you know; when we got to the ticket booth and eagerly held out those bright pink slips of paper, the lady said that they were obsolete now and that they were mere scraps of paper! She told us we had had until March 2010 to transfer the money on them to the new "Experience" card they have now, and that it was too late for anything. It was awful. So we paid about $100 for a trip we would not have taken if we hadn't had those tickets.

A Letter from Birmingham Jail

I am loving the flow of Martin Luther King Jr.'s words. It's so poetic; each word sounds like he chose it carefully, judging its meaning and impact on the readers. I can't believe the version we read nowadays (if you haven't, read it here) is nearly the same as his very first draft of it, which apparently he wrote on various pieces of paper that were smuggled into his jail cell. He started writing it on the margins of a newspaper, because he read another letter/statement that members of the clergy wrote published in the newspaper. He wrote this letter as a response to that one.

(With me, if I wrote something like this on the first go, I'd cry.)

It is an incredibly long letter, and takes me about half an hour or more to read it all the way through. I've only read it twice, but this time I discovered little treasures of phrases that I missed the first time around. It makes me want to cry at times, and cheer at others. He must have been a fantastic speaker. Unlike me. I am terrified of public speaking. I've been trying to overcome that fear, but it's hard. At one point I felt alright about speeches, but during the summer I lost what little confidence I had gained over the year.

First Post!

Hello there! Call me scribbles for now.

First blog post. Ever.

Anyway, I like to swim, read, and study languages in my spare time. Oh, and write. Of course.

A few days ago, I finally mustered up the courage to actually click on that orange arrow, "CREATE A BLOG" for the first time. I had been wanting to make one, but just could not find a good enough reason. Until my English teacher said we had to.

Oh, well. Might as well do it, now that I have a reason.