The Five (#8)

1. One of my friends from high school also has teenagers who play volleyball. They were playing, and she was coaching, at the tournament we went to in Indianapolis last weekend. So, very briefly, I got to say hello to her on Sunday morning at the gym. It has been several years since we'd seen each other, despite the fact that she lives less than 10 minutes from my parents' house in Wisconsin. I was so happy to see her in person that I actually found it difficult to have a coherent conversation. I have known her since we were in first grade and there's something so special about being with a person who has known you nearly your whole life. I hope she knows my ability to converse was inversely proportional to the joy I felt at seeing her in person. 

2. Our city happens to be in the path of totality for the solar eclipse happening in April this year. Our school finally followed what most schools in the area had already done and decided to call is a calamity day so we will have off that day. We had a view of a partial solar eclipse back in August of 2017 and it was pretty cool. Prior to that event I had read the book Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass. I have borrowed it from the public library to read again, leading up to the April event. This is likely the only time in my life I will have an opportunity to witness totality and I'm trying not to think too hard about the fact that we live in a very cloudy region and weather could cause us to miss this spectacular event. 

3. Michael spent the last week choosing his classes for next school year, which will make him a JUNIOR. That is really difficult to believe, but here we are. We are so lucky to be in a school system where the problem students have is that there are too many classes they want to take. He is unlikely to be able to fit in every elective he would like to try before he graduates in a couple of years. I think the most challenging thing is finding a balance of classes that will prepare him for college without being too overwhelming/taxing. Harper took extra science and math her junior and senior years, but she had a little more flexibility in her schedule because of the Latin program being discontinued and never picking up another language. Michael will be in his forth year of German next school year. Hopefully we got it right and his schedule will be challenging but not make him crazy. I'm curious what kind of electives other people remember taking in high school. I think our language classes fulfilled the "arts" requirement because I never took a visual art or music class in high school I also went to a Catholic school and we had to fit religion classes into our schedule with the other core subjects. My favorite high school electives were psychology and Shakespeare.

4. We were impacted by the large AT&T cell phone outage that occurred this past Thursday. I purposefully do not connect my cell phone to the wifi network at school so I had no service at all for most of the work day. An additional wrinkle to this was that I use my phone for two-factor authentication for several apps. So not only could I not make/receive calls or texts, I also couldn't log in to things like my personal email account. Of course it was hardly a big deal to be without those things for a few hours on a random weekday, but it did make me think a little bit about how much I have come to rely on those methods of communication and several apps that I use daily. For example, because I forgot to do it later in the day vs first thing in the morning, the AT&T outage made me lose my Wordle streak. I sent emails to both of the children's school emails from my school email letting them know that that would be the best way to contact me if they needed something during the day. Who remembers back when we just couldn't get ahold of people much of the time?

5. Michael made the JV volleyball team at his high school and has been chosen as co-captain for this year. So my time on the bleachers has not, in fact, come to an end. Fortunately most games are within a 20 minute radius of our house (or closer) and even the further ones will not require entire weekends or overnight hotel stays - yay!