After spending three weeks in academia, with no time to read newspapers or watch the news, let alone be active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and such, it’s been interesting getting (slowly) back into the swing of things. Today, in between researching topics on peer-reviewed journals for a paper I have to write, I caught up on some blogs. (Er, can you spell “procrastinate,” class?)

I’ve been neglecting blogs, and not just my own. Looking through my feeds, I see several blogs that have 200 posts I have not read, nor is it likely I will get to them. The ones I do read regularly — and make sure to catch up on during times like this — are written by people I know, feel I know, like and respect, or that make me laugh or are related to work or inspire me. It seems the ones that fall into the category of 200+ unread posts are the ones that just post too darned often. And yes, every day is too often, no matter how brilliant you are.

But having time to write for and read blogs is all a matter of maintaining balance, something my team tackled in a group presentation we had to do last week for the Public Speaking course (go Team 3!). We took the position that cramming the extra 15-20 hours of work that will apparently be required of our BA program is doable. We tried to make it clear, though, that adding extra schoolwork means adjusting time spent elsewhere, not taking away family time or neglecting our health. After all, if Canadians typically watch about 22 hours of TV a week, how difficult can it be to pry ourselves away from the tube and instead hit the books?

By coincidence, one of the blog posts I read today touched on the very topic of balance. The always inspiring Colleen Wainwright, Communicatrix, suggested shared an update to the instruction often given by agencies and independents: “Fast. Good. Cheap. Pick any two.” In other words, if you want it good and you want it tomorrow, be prepared to pay extra for it.

Colleen suggests credits the hilarious David Sedaris (writing in The New Yorker) for the “Four Burner” model worth aspiring to: “Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.”

The idea is not that you can’t have all four; Colleen says, “it’s that you can’t have an exceptional level of all four at once.” So if you are a workaholic, and your family and friends are important to you, then maybe your health is going to suffer. Or if family is everything, one of the other three is going to get a lot less attention. Or, you’re going to keep juggling all the balls in the air by merely doing the best you can, and that’s fine. Her advice:

“Pick one to hit out of the park or pick a life that lets you gracefully enjoy a bit from the sampler plate of all four. Pick, though. Pick today, and then pick again tomorrow…”

The key here is making it a thoughtful choice.

(In case you’re wondering, the photo above is the bridge in the Japanese garden at Royal Roads University in B.C.)

Each day has been incredibly long, but three weeks here at Royal Roads University have indeed gone fairly quickly, as many predicted. Now my bags are packed, and the cab will arrive in about 20 minutes to take me a few of my classmates to the airport. Home, here we come!

Our official three-week residency ended yesterday with a Skype chat with one professor and an in-person chat with two others. A former student who just graduated this year from the same program also spoke to us of what’s to come. Everyone paints the picture of work, work, work, but assures us we can fit this into our lives. Say goodbye to Big Brother and Jersey Shore, though. (However, I refuse to give up Dancing With The Stars!)

There has been much talk of this program as being the beginning of a journey, the first step of not just a two-year adventure, but also of a new stage in our lives. Some of us know what we want the BA degree to do for us. Others will figure that out when we get there. All of us, I think, are excited, eager and hopeful as well as more than a little scared about the next two years of this program.

I went on an official tour of the grounds, garden and castle yesterday, adding a pile of other photos to the many I already have. I thought the photo above, the path leading to a gate that leads to who knows where, captured the feeling of this journey we are on, the possibilities open to us, and the beauty that surrounds us. As with any journey, it’s not just about the destination, but about what we do and see and experience along the way. (That’s the gate at the end of the path, below.)

I also enjoyed some fabulous meals, with a doggie bag last night for the “starving student.” Yay! Also wonderful: a one-hour hot stone massage, breaking down the knots in my neck and shoulders from 9 to 5 days of school and assignments and paying attention.

Things I have learned and am learning about myself over these three weeks of intense schoolwork:

• I am way more of a homebody than even I thought. Three weeks is a long time to be away from home, and I miss my family.
• Although I love books and always thought that’s how I learned best, I am finding that a good professor brings even a dense subject alive.
• I don’t say much in class even in a subject like writing that is my area of (some) expertise. I want to say even less in public speaking, but that’s not an option.
• I have discovered a fascination with peacocks. There are so many that strut about the grounds, and I have taken way too many photos of them. A gift shop employee told me the other day that the males lose many of their colourful feathers after all those mating displays; then staff harvest the loose feathers to sell to crazy peacock-obsessed people like me. Apparently the university frowns upon harvesting directly from the birds. Hey, I was just asking.

This week is going to be intense, with a theory paper due, delivery of a solo two-minute speech, practice and delivery of a group six-minute speech, and a writing assignment to do with websites. In between working on these various projects will be lots of dry runs, and perhaps some dry heaves as well!

But this time next week I will be home, and I am so looking forward to that.

Aren’t peacocks handsome birds? Well, the males anyway. I love the brilliant blues and greens of their feathers.  And there are plenty of these creatures strutting around the grounds of Royal Roads University.

Week two of my three-week residency starts tomorrow, another week of 9-5 days, punctuated with a mid-week pub night. The weekends are a mix of school work, walking the many campus trails, socializing with other students and quiet time. I spent part of this weekend crafting a paper on communication theory, and writing and practicing a one-minute speech that I have to deliver in class. This particular part of the course is so far out of my comfort zone that it just has to be good for me, right?

The dorm is the very opposite of luxurious, but it certainly sets the tone that here, I am a student.

That’s how my first day of kindergarten began, or at least how I remember it. And while I don’t have that same sense of panic today, I do feel a bit like that little five-year-old, not sure what’s in store for me. But hey, I have my new school supplies, and presumably, I’m up for the task.

I’m staying in a dorm much like the one in which Son #2 spent his first year in university. There’s a desk, chair, single bed, closet, sink. The floor is co-ed, but the bathrooms are not. Bright lights illuminate the hallway all night, and the walls are thin enough that you hear every footstep and slam of heavy doors. It gives off kind of a hospital vibe. Or maybe “jail” is a more apt description, for someone used to the independent life and the freedom of choosing how to spend each day.

This is really only day 2 of the actual online BA in Professional Communications program at Royal Roads University, just outside Victoria, B.C. I suspect that yesterday, wherein much of the time was spent meeting new people, getting school I.D., finding our way around and such, was the calm before the storm. We only had one class, Professional Writing, and no homework. Today, however, is sure to be a different story. Classes run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an hour for lunch and a half-hour afternoon break.

Best line of the writing class, by the way, from our instructor Rosa: “Good writing is a courtesy. I’m teaching you to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in language.” And this: “Grammar is the vase meant to contain the thought.”

More later.

You may recognize this road sign, which I have borrowed from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s helpful guide to common and not-so-common road signs. It means there’s a bump or uneven pavement on the road ahead. The yellow “caution” indicates drivers should slow down and keep control of their vehicles.

There’s a bump coming up in the road ahead of me, too. I’ve decided to go back to school.

Oh, it seemed like a good idea back when I applied to Royal Roads University earlier this year. This is kind of a “bucket list” thing; something I have wanted to do for a long time. My own children are close to completing their own degrees, and they are pretty self-sufficient. It seemed like a good time to pursue my own.

The degree I’m pursuing is a two-year online BA in Professional Communication. It’s set up so students “manage their education while maintaining work and family life” due to the “unique learning model that combines convenient web-based learning with short [three-week] on-campus residencies.”

So I find myself three weeks away from this on-campus residency, which is on the other side of the country in Victoria, B.C., up to my neck in work and wondering what on earth I was thinking.

I already have a stack of “work” work. Now I’ve added three textbooks to read and assignments to complete every week until I go. There are apparently 45 of us in this class of 2012, and we all had to introduce ourselves in three separate online discussion forums and comment on at least two of the other posts. We have to watch several videos and speeches and comment on those. My in-box overflows every day with an extra 30-50 messages because there appears to be no way to subscribe to the forums in digest form.

I’m having to work hard at not freaking out, too:

• I’m paranoid about missing an assignment because it’s up to the students to find them, and I’ve already discovered a forum I hadn’t subscribed to a week after it had launched.
• One of the first three concurrent courses is my absolute all-time least favourite, Public Speaking.
• Almost all the other students are quite a bit younger than me; one or two have children, but I’ll be the “senior stateswoman” for sure.
• My three weeks in residence will be in a typical tiny single-bed dorm room, with a shared bathroom down the hall.
• It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school and I can’t help but worry about keeping up.

All of this to say that there is very definitely a big bump in the road ahead. Part of my attempt to slow down and keep control of the vehicle is sharply cutting back my online life outside of Royal Roads. I’ll try to blog occasionally and share what’s going on, and maybe I’ll get on Twitter or Facebook once in a while.

So it may seem like I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, but it’s just off the radar for now. See you in September, maybe!

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrates that talent, and I’m pleased to say that Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington is its 28th grand prize winner with this gem:

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

The contest is the brainchild of the amusing Professor Scott Rice (scroll down and read History of the BLFC at the link above) at San Jose State University. He challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels, paying tribute to the famous “It was a dark and stormy night” opening of the novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The line is also plagiarized repeatedly by Snoopy in the Peanuts comics.

The entries can be any length, but most people seem to cram as much detail as possible into as many words as possible. The judges recommend not going beyond 50 or 60 words, but last year’s winner, David McKenzie, managed 88 words.

The one that made me laugh the most out of this year’s winners was the winner of the Purple Prose category, by Scott Davis Jones of Valley Village, California:

“The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.”

The official deadline each year is April 15, with the winner announced mid-June. But don’t despair; the contest accepts submissions “every day of the livelong year.” If you’ve got a truly awful one to share, send it any time to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Department of English, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192-0090, or to srice AT pacbell.net.

Many thanks to my friend Gloria Hildebrandt for reminding me about the contest!

• Academic junk food: College courses with no value other than being an easy way to get an A.
• Anticipointment: The feeling you get when a product or event doesn’t live up to its own hype.
• Ghost work: The workload absorbed by the surviving staff after a layoff, generally with little notice or proper training.
• Golfmail: The result of forwarding your office phone, email etc. to your cellphone, allowing you to play 18 holes while maintaining the illusion that you’re at your desk.
• Premature officiation: When the hockey referee loses sight of the puck momentarily and mistakenly blows the whistle to stop play.
• Rebound job: A job you take, often due to the loss of your old job, knowing it isn’t long-term.
• Reinventing the flat tire: To make the same mistake already made before, despite extended debate and a formal vote.
• Scooby snacks: Token compensation, usually non-monetary, given as an award. From the cartoon Scooby-Doo.
• Urban Amish: A city dweller with no cellphone, no laptop, no iPod, no BlackBerry…

What fun words have you seen lately?

Or not. The one today, on “Temporary Recapture of Input Tax Credits in Ontario and British Columbia,” summarized its contents in 105 words of dense governmentese!

Let’s see, how many of us can easily understand a sentence like that? 100% of readers can usually understand a sentence of eight words, according to the American Press Institute. (I couldn’t find a link to the study itself, but author and writing coach Ann Wylie references it.) Only 0-9% can understand a sentence of 43 or more words. I think we can guarantee that not many people will understand this without reading and re-reading it many times:

From July 1, 2010, until June 30, 2018, with the introduction of the HST in Ontario and British Columbia, large businesses – generally those making taxable supplies worth more than $10 million annually, and certain specified financial institutions – will be required to repay or “recapture” the portion of any available input tax credits (ITCs) that is attributable to the provincial part of the HST that becomes payable, or is paid without having become payable, in respect of a specified property or service that is acquired, or brought into one of these provinces, by a large business for consumption or use by that business in those provinces.

Faced with an indigestible paragraph like this, the writer/editor who wants to be kind to readers will use these tools:

• Break the paragraph into shorter sentences.
• Focus on one thought per sentence. For example, move the explanation of a large business to a separate sentence.
• Use smaller words.
• Replace phrases like “in respect of” with simple transitions, like “for.”

Fortunately (or unfortunately, looking at those lost millions), I am not a large business, so I don’t have to understand that lengthy sentence, or the 28 pages that follow it. For the real scoop on what does apply to me, I’m attending a session tonight put on by the Halton-Peel Communications Association. You can be sure we won’t hear any 105-word sentences.