a whispered word

because of a word said in passing, a word taken as a hint, a word passed on with cues, all is changed. i thought the changes were long overdue, but why do i feel so guilty, sad. i am probably only one small pebble in the stream that changes the course of events. sometimes the course of events need to be split.

you can think an idea to death, i have to believe it was meant to be and i was just a way of passing the word along.

four and twenty blackbirds

well, maybe not quite....it is lawn watering season. since i don't have automatic sprinklers, i move the thompson twin around about every 2 or 3 hours. ie when i get back to the house from where ever. each time i come back there are birds, mostly red-winged blackbirds and robins having a spa day under the sprinklers. oh to be a child again and play in the sprinklers. walking in a gentle rain is almost as good.

double checking

it is a good thing that the official document for graduates is the transcript. i swear if i ever make a document without an error i will fall over dead from shock. i put down two students as having honors when they didn't. good thing a program is just a program. it was gone over with a fine tooth comb. of course the students wouldn't say anything about being promoted.

the art of saying no

you would think that by my age i would know how to say no. i am not volunteering to do anything from now until the middle of summer. my house is a disaster area, my lawn needs mowing, and the ironing is really, really piling up. so what brought all this on? i volunteered to make photo collages of the campus and students for leaving personnel. i volunteered to teach a girl how to drive a stick shift, i volunteered to sponsor the kids who wanted to make mother's day cards, i volunteered --sort of--to buy the gifts for the going away people. what was i thinking. my regular job entails checking classes and transcripts for students at the end of the year, making my own tests, and grading them, making sure the seniors have everything in place, and i have all the reglia....which reminds me, i volunteered to do the seniors weekend handout program. urggghhhh!

spring of farewells

the cliche is that spring is a time of new beginnings. it probably depends on the angle. for school it is the ending of many things--papers, books, exercises, grades, classes, and for some the end of being at this particular school. of course, the seniors will be going on as they should. but, we are also loosing an english teacher, a bible teacher, the cafeteria director--we lost the boys' dean in the middle of the year. it is a good thing or bad? probably some of each.
in public school teachers can stay on in places for years. my sister went back to a place where she had taught at least twenty-five years previously and there were still some of the same teachers. i know a few academy teachers who have stayed in one place for a very long time--one a science teacher which was a good thing, and the other an english teacher who comes with mixed reviews.
it is probably good that things do change else everyone and everything gets in a rut and the world goes forward while the rut diggers are not looking up from their work.

it is probably time to stop teaching people to follow the ruts.

Lilacs

a close up of part of the picture.

the lavender room

my sis is into lavender and purple big time. so when she saw this cool quilt in spearfish she bought it and i bought the picture of lilacs to go over her hand made cherrywood chest. i do not know how it originally came into the family...maybe my cousin doug knows. but my grandmother had it for a while and then for some crazy reason sold it to some friends of hers. the only thing i remember about them is that the lady could make great bisquits using the wrong techniques. anyway it caused a great rift in the family and finally it came back to grandmother. and then to my sis. it is a great chest. i hope she has written a history on the bottom of one of the drawers. or maybe grandmother did. i have pieces of furniture with her writing on the bottom of drawers and shelves. i have added my own comments. the picture is her birthday and christmas present and all other occasions gift for the year 2006.

being thrifty

my nephew just moved his business to a new place and requested a wreath for the wall. since i needed to have a display for the music conference of young students, i decided to combine the two projects. so first i used all of the flowers for the music program.... i got minus points from my distance employers for not doing anything last year. it was a matter of money. since i am using these for another project it didn't cost my close or distant employers anything.

just about when i was going to weld them into a wreath, i found out there was a big board meeting. so reconfigured everything, took out the flags and the gold stars.

no it is all at home and i have about 2 days to make a wreath before i travel northwest...... and do my taxes.

going to work

my trip home was slowed frist by snow in the sierra's...the train was 5 hours late. but it plugged along pretty good afterwards. but when i reached hastings a blizzard had settled in. and it took my ride a little while to get to the station.
it was so snowy that the bus drive to the east to pick up students was delayed until the next day. but i postholed it to the office to do some work. and the next day also. it cleared enough by tuesday night that the principal drove the bus east and picked up students in the night and brought them back in time for classes on wednesday morning. walking in the snow can be quite a challange...no walks shoveled and only part of the roads cleared. couldn't drive the jeep! a 5 foot drift in front of the garage and this old lady does not do shoveling of big drifts anymore. the tractor was late doing driveways because the milk truck...a big semi...got stuck down on the farm. but a week and a half later almost all the snow is gone. yesterday was rain, hail and watch for tornado day. i just want it to be nice tomorrow so i can go crane watching.

lolita in tehran & bad dirt

over spring break my daughter and i traded books. i love annie p and bad dirt. i think i read it in two days. i traded it to my daughter for reading lolita in tehran, much different in temperment, but very revealing. both reveal culture of a specific time and place but one with wry humor and the other with a wistfulness for better times.

this is the suggested reading list for reading lolita in tehran compliled by the author.

nuha al-radi, baghdad diaries
margaret atwood, the blind assassin
jane austen, emma, mansfield park, & pride and prejudice*
saul bellow, the dean's december & more die of heartbreak
emily bronte, wuthering heights* (read only once-too dark, now that i am older, want more cheerful items)
lewis carroll, alice's adventures in wonderland* (if only i could figure out the math stuff)
jaseph conrad, under western eyes
henry fielding, shamela & tome jones* (:))
gustave flaubert, madame bovary
anne frank, the diary of anne frank (hasn't everybody read this is grade school or high school)
henry james, the ambassadors, daisy miller*, & washington square
franz kafka, in the penal colony & the trial*
katherine kressman talor, address unkown
herman melville, the confidence man
vladimir nabokov, lotita (don't think i can read that one), invitation to a beheading, & pnin
sarah orne jewett, the country of the pointed firs
iraj pezeshkzad, my uncle napoleon
diane ravitch, the language poice
julie slamon, the net of dreams
marjane satrapi, persepolis
scheherazade, a thousand and one tales* (loved this book when i was in high school)
f scott fitzgerald, the great gatsby (never read because it just seemed to decadent)
*ones i have read

picture worth a thou....

monday was twin day....that's all i am going to say

free acrobatic show

as i was driving home this evening ...close to sunset...i saw a swarm of birds performing acrobatics. group acrobtics. the snow geese are flying overhead now in their typical raggedy v shapes, but i am pretty sure the swarm was not snow geese. they were tightly packed and performed as one, it seemed as if they had one mind or were connected like the borg. the maintain a tight group that folded over and over on itself making them appear like a black cloud one minute and nearly invisable the next. sometimes they were in an oval shape and sometimes they stretched out into a pencil shape. i had my camera but they were to far away. they would have been like pencil dots.

acrobats

There are some pictures online, but they do not do justice to the actual visual image of birds swarming. The snow geese have been overhead in their typical intertwined v shapes, but the birds i saw coming home this evening were more acrobatic than geese. they were quite far away and it was almost sunset, but they formed a black cloud that twisted to darkness and then to almost complete transparency. they stayed in an aemebic shape that changed from almost a perfect oval to a worm shape all the time folding over and over on themselves. it was as if their minds were connected in some fashion a la borg.

i don't like cloudy overcast days, but there is something about low laying fog that is interesting. maybe because it softens the harshness of the world around us. distances become a mystery. paths lead into unknown places. there is a little bit of scary, too. who knows what is lurking in the mist.

monday morning

after mumbling about it being a melt down weekend last weekend, i found 8 beautiful red roses on my desk on monday. i got a personal thanks for the sabbath school lesson from an adult and one of the students said it was the best so far this year. unfortunately one of the students sort of gave it away during one of the exercises. ... the student was to walk across a mine field of raw eggs blindfolded with the help of two friends ( one pretending to be the good angel and one the bad angel only the blindfolded person wasn't supposed to know that). No eggs were broken even though i kept rearranging them ( the kids didn't think it quite fair, but i said the devil cheats all the time) because of the careless words of one student the blindfolded student knew who to listen to. but it was okay. the students still got the point. so the roses sat beautifully on my desk for one week and then i took them home to dry. this monday is the monday after board meeting so it will be interesting to hear what transpired. time to go to work.

why i don't make lots of money

i absolutely know that i could not handle a leadership role in any circumstance. i was asked once if i wanted to be a principal and without even blinking, i said no. i cannot handle conflict or stress. this week has been rather stressful....behind on yearbook, missed one deadline...behind on getting restricted list published...forgot to send out reminder cards for a meeting...responsible for a faculty family dinner....have to teach a sabbath school lesson to teens and keep them interested...get the house sort of clean for the faculty family dinner...on top of the usual classes and supervison duties. so, i sort of lost my phone again...left it at home instead of bringing it with me.... caught the lid of the powder creamer on a shelf and had to clean up the counter and the floor....had a lid on a paper cup of coffee and heated it the microwave too long, it blew up and had to clean the microwave out completely....turned the oven on to heat the lasagna and the pie filling that i forgot i spilled caught on fire.... then i had a cover loosely on a container of rosemary butter i was melting for making non-garlic bread and it blew up in the microwave and i had to clean it all up. i think i'll go to bed.

oxymoron

retired hippy~ barbie phone

ghost

i really did want to find my phone. i didn't want to spend the big bucks for replacement. i didn't want to have the contract renewed. so now in the middle of the night i sort of wake up like people do - not quite awake, not quite asleep- and i see a flashing red light. i think, my phone. the thing is, it appears in the same place. when i look in the morning, moving furniture and everything there is no phone. my phone has come back to haunt and harassess me. hahahaha you can't find me. actually i am beginning to think it is one of those big coal trains rumbling by that wakes me and that the red light is from the rail crossings or the light on the caboose. Or maybe it my phone calling me.

phone trap

the phone is lost. i let the battery die before i realized it was missing. since i don't have a land line, i went to the local dispenser of cells and got a new one. the nifty prices are for first time users. then they pull you into a longer contract by "giving" you a discount on the phone. contrary to my sister's opinion, i bought the cheapest one i could get that was a flip phone. the only one they had in stock was PINK. can you imagine me and pink.

i am going to make a little purse with a snap handle --for jean belt loops -- the ones in the stores are all glittery or 50's prints. i didn't like the prints then and they have not aged well.

the big thing is recollecting all the phone numbers and entering them. since i have the same number, i am hoping people will call and then i can just save the number.

i cut down the number of hours but added some roaming hours because this particular provider does not cover western nebraska and the black hills. when i move i will have to change. then i can get a cheap phone with lots of stuff :)

what they need to invent is a little long powered gadget of some kind that starts beeping when the power is almost gone. beeping loudly for people like myself. or i could train my cats to be search cats, like they have search dogs for people and drugs, i will train dennis to find my phone. right.

getting old

getting old magnifies all the faults of yesteryears. once i was able to write a menu for the week down on a piece of paper to take to the grocery store. after one look in cupboard and fridge i was able to go to the store and pick up the items i needed. now i have to write down all the items needed to complete the menu.

now under stress i often misplace my keys. i have one set of car keys lost right now.

and i have lost my cell phone. it has been gone for a week, but i called the phone company and nobody is using it so it is in the house someplace.

my eyesight is worse, i am going deaf, my joints and feet creak, walks are shorter, and i almost fall asleep in church.

and you know the old ladies who wear so much perfume it knocks you out....yeah. well, now i know why. they can't smell it unless it is turn up. i try not to do that to my coworkers.

but what about the good things, do they get accentuated too. am i going to draw better, be more patient? be more sure of myself? hmmmmm