an introduction...

A month or two ago, or perhaps it was a few months (you know how fast time passes us by these days), my friend Jenna suggested that I "PLEASE write [my] thoughts into a book!"... Well it's not a book, but a blog is a definite start!! It is something that I've been meaning to do for a long, long time now... I guess I could use the excuse that "life got in the way", a pretty damn great excuse I say :-)

Three years ago now (Wow, 3 years already??!!), I spent an extensive period of time travelling and living in Canada. The first town I "settled" in was Banff - a town an hour and a half from Calgary, Alberta, located within the Canadian Rocky Mountains. I actually specifically remember that first bus ride into those mountains for the very first time, amazed at the size of the magnificent mountains beautifully blanketed in white from the freshly fallen snow, not quite believing I was actually going to be living there!! A long-winded introduction to the explanation of the title for this blog... I met and worked with an Irish man, Gary, for 7 months. Pretty much every day we'd experience something new or unexpectedly find out a new fact, and Gary's immediate response would be, "Everyday's a school day!"

It's true though. We are all living a continuous lesson. Our experiences constantly shape and develop our lives, and our personalities.

After a much needed job change, and now working as a nanny for two different families, I am amazed everyday at the astonishing pace the 15 month old boy I look after is growing, developing and learning. Who knew that on Monday when he was walking 3 or 4 steps at a time on his own that by the following Monday he'd be walking practically everywhere!! In ONE week?? How quickly we change!! How quickly life changes us!!

I am back at University studying a second degree. This time it's a Bachelor of Health Science. I'd forgotten how wonderful it was to work our brains; to study and fill our minds with new knowledge and ideas. And upon reflection, my happiest times are when I am consciously, actively learning and making new discoveries. Travelling provides that, as does opening a textbook, visiting a museum or an art gallery. My financial situation may not allow me to jump on a plane anytime soon (as would be one of my wishes!), but my new texbooks are currently providing plenty of stimualation, shaping and developing my thoughts on topics I once knew absolutely nothing about!!

I like how blogs leave a little question or statement upon their completion that encourages the reader to reflect on what they have just been reading... sooo I'm going to make that a "feature' of mine too!!

... What have you learned this "school" day??

I'm still stocked after reading about the solar system earlier this year - all the maps we see of it ARE NOT DRAWN TO SCALE!! This is really showing my ignorance I know, BUT, I cannot for the life me ever remember being told that the pictures they showed us in school were not a fair representation of how the solar system actually looks.

"Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale." WHAT???!!! "Even if you add lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. One diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). One the same scale, Promixa Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometers away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away."
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (p.45)