Robert Ebsen

Years ago I learned, as a teacher, to reinforce or reward children with those things they enjoy doing, i.e., their passions. So I reinforced children with extra time for painting, extra time for building paper airplanes.

Here I am this morning, 12 years into retirement, and I am thinking about what reinforces me. It is easy — the things I enjoy doing.

My short list of present day passions:

• I love to make pop-up cards, paper engineer them, and improve upon them all the time. This week my latest innovation was to paste, back to back, two 110-pound sheets of paper for the card. Now my pop-up pictures are much better supported over time.
• I love the surprise of testing my pool water chemistry every morning to see how well my saltwater chlorine generator is doing.
• I love searching for things on my computer. For example, I recently wanted to find a picture of a giraffe. I inputted the word giraffe into the Spotlight search bar of my Mac, and I enjoyed looking at all the pictures of giraffes I had collected over the years, as well as all references to giraffes that appeared in my documents and emails.
• I love to photograph and catalogue old documents. I recently hauled two boxes of letters from the attic. They sit on my computer worktable, waiting to be photographed, labeled and placed in files.
• I love to make creative books for my grandchildren. Last night I was up late working on a book with pictures of Dora the Explorer interacting with my granddaughter. I copied and pasted Dora in various poses. Then, using Photoshop elements, I pasted them into pictures I took of my granddaughter on Monday.

Okay, now I would like to reconcile my current passions into one expression of who I am:

Exaggeration (pop-ups – as far as they will pop out),

Surprise (the luck of the draw in searching my computer),

Documentation (filing documents)

Creation (Dora the Explorer playing with my granddaughter).

I am an exaggerated, surprised, documented, creative guy.

Better than being bored, right?

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen51@gmail.com