Little Crystal Apple

My mom and I were at the Ohio Thrift store yesterday for their monthly half price event. I love going to that store. It relaxes me. I can browse through the shoes looking for new ones, or through the mugs and housing wares looking for special things. We found two pretty mugs with giraffes that were made in Japan and were very artistic and had comfortable handles and even though neither myself or my mom need any mugs at all, I had her buy them and someday I will take them home. :)

I love looking through the sweaters the most. This store makes sure that they are all facing the same way on the rack and are color coded, so I can begin at the beginning of one aisle and flip quickly through the sweaters, looking for my mom and myself. I throw things to her to try on and make my own pile. Usually sticking to brands I recognize and know would have been expensive new. My mom got 7 sweaters (one her first cashmere) yesterday and I got one. But earlier this vacation time I've gotten 5, so only 1 for me is good.

When I was in the small stuff section, I came across a small crystal apple. I usually don't collect apple things but I have one really pretty glass apple paperweight, also from the goodwill, with little bubbles in it. My students would come over to my desk and admire it. (Luckily no one threw it, as it would have been a weighty projectile.) Little apple trinkets always remind me of being a teacher and make me feel a little fuzzy inside. I picked it up and admired it. If it were 90 cents like the paperweight had been I don't think I would have hesitated, but it was 2.92 and not on sale. It also might be considered unnecessary clutter, which my dear husband has trained me not to accumulate. But I held it for a while and thought about it, and pictured it on a shelf in my classroom (currently nonexistent) looking shiny and meaning, a teacher is here. There must be parts of me that still want to teach.

Extreme Home Makeover

Fred and I watch Extreme Home Makeover on most Sundays. Usually it involves a family who has gone through or is going through something tragic, like incurable illness in a family member, or recent widowhood, or a serious injury in the line of duty that requires a member to be in a wheel chair but the house is not accessible. Also, the family is usually doing something exceptional. Like a member supporting others in a similar distressful situation, or caring for kids in the neighborhood. The Home Makeover team comes in and tears down the house and builds another, perfectly suited to the family's needs.

In the families where there is some sort of community outreach going on, the home makeover team will usually create the house with the service in mind. Such as a large kitchen for someone who cooks for others, or a big clubhouse for someone who has the neighborhood kids over for afternoon homework or play time.

For the families doing an outreach, when they come into the house that has been made especially for ease of continuing that outreach, the responses are different than the houses that are just for the family to enjoy. They come into the house so overjoyed, not for themselves, but for all of the people they will now be able to serve.

Last time I watched, a woman who has a muscular degenerative disease who is in a wheelchair and her son with extreme vision problems, both cook for and serve the kids of the community. She makes sure that they have enough to eat and cooks lots of dinners (One time she cooked Christmas dinner for 480 people from a tiny unaccessible kitchen without enough room for her to rotate her wheelchair.) and provides them a safe place to work on homework or hang out after school, most importantly she tells them that she loves them. I say most importantly because as a teacher, there were many times where I felt that that was the most important thing I was doing. Letting kids know that I love them. Lots of kids don't hear that very often. Parents are stressed, overworking, or just don't realize the importance of it, so I would do it as often as I could. The kids appreciated it so much.

As soon as she was let into her brand new house she was overwhelmed that she could have so much room and such a great kitchen and storeplaces for gifts and supplies, not so she could relax but so that she could serve the kids so much more efficiently.

I told Fred that this was her thing. It was what she lived for. I wonder what my thing is. What am I living for? Who am I serving? Who am I giving the position above my own concerns and cares and spending myself for?

I don't think anything or anybody right now, but I would like to seek the Lord to find out what that is for me. I'd rather not it be nothing.

When I was teaching I so enjoyed being there for the kids, letting them know I cared for them, loved them, and felt that it was my small something. (I didn't love the actual teaching part as much.) Now I have no something.

Tenor, Pregnancy, Teacher

I am a tenor in my barbershop women's chorus, and I have been listening to the two new songs that we will be doing this year. Unforgettable and the song for Cheers, (where everyone knows your name). If you don't know about barbershop music. There are four parts, but they have different names than in choral singing. There is the tenor (above the lead), the lead (the soprano in choral music, singing the melody), the baritone and the bass.

The tenor part can be quite high and when warmed up and singing with the chorus, others have told me that how high I can get is impressive :) But here in my own home, singing with the learning tapes is so high it always gives me a headache, and I can't do it for long. So, I just realized that I need to practice along with my part, but an octave down and then it is comfortable. That is what I have been doing for the last half hour. But it took a while to realize it, so I have a headache from the first 15 minutes.

I could be pregnant. My boobs feel different, a little fuller and bigger, and my poops have been strange - insistent and frequent. I have read online about the boobs thing, but not the poops. (Sometimes I hope that no one is actually reading this as I am honest to the point of embarrassment, so if you have read it, no need to comment.) But there is no need to buy a pregnancy test yet, as my ovulation time could have been as late as the 24th and you need to be 10-12 days past your ovulation time for any kind of accuracy in the tests. So I am hoping and waiting.

I'm not sure what to write about most days, my life is not that exciting right now. Nothing about funny things my toddler said or did, no anxiety about not getting enough sleep with a baby around, no job to stress over or to tell little stories about, no crazy maniacal principal who has it out for me, no angry parents to e-mail me, (not that there were many of those when I was a teacher).

I was thinking for the last week or so about the "exit interview" I forced on the assistant superintendent of the Mountain View Schools, when I was let go (not tenured). The unfair part of it was that there was no consideration given to the many people who thought I was a great asset to the school district. The previous principal (who had been there my first year), the parents who loved me, the other teachers who heard so many complimentary things about me from our fellow students, the opinions of the mentor teachers who had observed me over and over for both years, none of them were considered. The only person who mattered was the principal, who ran the school and staff with fear and unreasonable behaviors and lies. Even though the district heard from the teachers many times about her behavior, it didn't matter to them, they kept her for the second year and listened to her in the face of all of the positive things being said about me. It was so unreasonable.

So, I had been rehearsing and ruminating how I would have expressed all of that if I'd been able to think that clearly at the "exit interview". At breakfast on Saturday (Fred and I went to our favorite place, the Country Gourmet on El Camino. We go there every Saturday and split a breakfast.) I told Fred my thoughts (he has a way of injecting sense into my concerns and making me look at things differently.) He said that it could have been a few things. One, they were just lazy and did not want to look into things fully or Two, they were idiots or Three, they wanted to close their eyes to the truth and put their hats in with the principal (whom they seem to like, at least enough to keep her for an additional year.) I did feel better after he said that. It really had nothing to do with me.

I am able to get a lot of exercise this year having my days free and keep my stress down which could help with the getting pregnant thing.