Just Popping In...

I'm still on a blogging hiatus, but I couldn't resist posting this.

Very, very early on Saturday mornings, Art goes for a long jog on the Pearl Harbor bike path. I'm asleep when he goes out and often still asleep when he gets back. When he got home today, there was a text message from our worried son asking if he was OK.

Art had sent our kids in Illinois and Maryland a photo of the beautiful moon he was seeing during his run. For much of the run, the water line is within a few feet of him.

When I woke up, Alexa on my Echo Dot sounded a notification that our area was under a tsunami watch from the undersea volcanic eruption near Tonga. This photo was taken by a Japanese weather satellite. 

The tsunami alert has since been cancelled. 

But sheesh! There's Art jogging next to the beach area and there was a tsunami alert? 😱 No sirens? No warning? Good grief! He had no clue that anything was amiss.

I hope everyone in Tonga is OK. Wow!

Blog Hiatus

Happy New Year, everyone!

I'm afraid I will be taking a hiatus from blogging. I don't know why, but suddenly I find myself unable to keep up with everything. 

Twice a week now, I'm on FaceTime with my grandsons for a couple of hours reading stories and going over some academic enrichment concepts. Yes, they're both very bright, but I still love enhancing their knowledge. 

Well, the real reason is that my son and daughter-in-law have to work from home and I just want to spend quality time with these very excited, amazingly cheerful, adorable boys to enable their parents to concentrate on what they need to do.

Since I don't have any teaching materials anymore, I'm having to create them from some office/art supplies I have at home. I'm also spending time writing lesson plans again. It's tricky since one grandson is barely 4 and the other is 6. On days when both are there it's not always easy to keep them engaged at the same time. And yet, they are almost always very focused and interested which makes things easier.

And so although I'll drop in every so often if something pops up, I'll be taking this little hiatus. Just know... as the Terminator used to say, "I'll be back!"

Damaged Mail

I recently saw a blog post on ApacheDug's Teepee about a Christmas card that came to him partially torn off.

I thought at the time that it was quite unusual. Art remembers something like that happening to us many, many moons ago, but I couldn't. 

I wondered why the postal department didn't include the other broken piece of mail so he could at least tape it together to read the entire card.

AND THEN....

Would you believe?

My sister-in-law and brother sent a thank you card to us last week and WOW! There it is! A huge hunk was torn off. And again, we didn't get the side that was broken off.

So now I'm wondering about mail we send out. Should I use shipping tape and wrap it around the letter?

Have any of you seen this problem?

I must tell you that our mail carrier is the absolute BEST!!! I've seen her doing extra trips to deliver packages and she's told us how they're all struggling to keep up with everything.

Have any of you had your mail damaged this way recently?

Cauliflower Rice?

Art's goal for me in the past few months has been to reduce my glucose levels. On one of our grocery shopping trips to Sam's Club, he noticed Riced Cauliflower.

"Since you're avoiding rice to reduce your carb levels, I'll bet this will help," he said.

Hmmmm.... I was not thrilled with the idea but he put it in our cart.

And he made it a point to serve it to me at dinner that night. 😏

Riced cauliflower is merely chopped up cauliflower that looks sorta kinda like rice. But you know what? Since I've lost a lot of my ability to taste much, it wasn't bad at all. In fact, Art is now starting to eat it too. 

Mom? Nope. Rice is rice to her. She says she's 92 and will eat rice. And that is that.

Guns at the High School

A few weeks ago we got a call from our daughter that guns at my granddaughter’s Illinois high school had been found. The police were there and the school was on lockdown until students were eventually sent home. School would be closed for 3 weeks and there would be remote learning again while they figured out how to keep guns out of the school and also what to do about the recent COVID surge.

This brought memories back for me when Laurie Dann went into an elementary school, shot and killed a boy and shot several other students before killing herself.

All the schools in the area went on high alert trying to figure out how to prevent this from happening again. We ended up with a buzzer system so you’d have to buzz the office to let you in. But nothing is foolproof. 

I remember one (sort of) funny thing where we were briefly told that the code phrase “There will be a volley ball game for all teachers after school,” would be the alert that there was a shooter or whatever in the school. Well… when the code phrase was used as a drill, some teachers came out of their classroom asking, “What volleyball game?”

I had to prepare my 1st grade class for the remote possibility that should something like that happen to us, they would have to hunker down, hide and do what I say immediately. I assured them that I would lock the door so nobody could come in.

One very bright student asked, “But we have glass windows on our door. They could break the glass, stick their hand in and open the door...couldn't they?” 

Hmmmm…. So…. I said, “Well, you really don’t have to worry. I’m a grown up and I will always take care of you and protect you so you will be safe.” 

Amazingly, they believed me and were reassured. But would children be reassured these days? This happened about 30 years ago. Since then, how many school shootings have there been? How many children have died? Do we have better gun control laws? 

Nope. Guns have only proliferated.  

And then there's Omicron running rampant everywhere and we still have too many leaders who keep fighting mandating vaccines or mask wearing. 

It’s an insane world we are living in. Here’s hoping and hoping that 2022 shows more improvement.