The Five (#10 Slowly Getting Later Edition)

1. The Iditarod is happening right now. When I started at my current job, eight years ago, I worked with several classes that studied the Iditarod and I became a fan. One of the ways I supported the classes was by curating the videos posted on the website so that students got to see the ones that highlighted some particularly unique aspect of the experience or some detail that the students had learned/read about. (Also, I was able to weed out any in which the mushers used language that wasn't quite fit for middle school.) We had a school "insider" subscription which gave us access to all the posted videos as well as GPS tracking of the race and all kinds of other details. The curriculum has changed since then, and classes no longer spend time studying the Iditarod in particular. I, however, am a fan for life, and now pay for my own "insider" subscription so I can watch the videos and keep up with the race. Once in a while I will share a particularly interesting update with one of the teachers. The whole thing is utterly fascinating to me. It has been especially interesting to watch the race evolve through the COVID pandemic - it was in the middle of the race in 2020 when things started to shut down. The website, even without a subscription, is pretty interesting and full of information. Learning about the race is a great tie-in for children who love adventure stories and have read some of Gary Paulsen's accounts of survival, both fiction and nonfiction. I would love to go to Alaska someday and see the places where the race takes place, but I don't know that I'm hearty enough to actually travel to any of them!

2. Do you ever suffer from book panic? Every once in a while I will feel myself working into a crisis when I think about how fast books are being published and thinking about all the books I know about that I've never read and all the books that will be published in the future that I will want to read. It's not an exaggeration to say that my "to be read" pile is several lifetimes long. When my hormones aren't in attack mode, I am able to think of it from a more delightful angle: I know I will NEVER run out of things I want to read. 

3. Are you ever disappointed that you still need to work on things like regulating your emotions as an adult? No, just me? Having two teenagers (delightful as they are) of my own, and working with hundreds of middle school students (delightful as they are), I am no stranger to frustration and hurt feelings. I'm a super emotional person...Do I think you're upset with me? Then I'll probably cry. I can't seem to help it. But I do try to keep in mind that, most of the time, the decisions the teens and tweens in my life make have almost nothing to do with me. Sometimes they are upset about circumstances that I have nothing to do with and I just get in the way of their emotions. I'm 100% inclined to meet them where they are and get just as worked up as them - but I continue to learn, a little more each year, to separate that knee-jerk emotional reaction from my actual response. I don't have to throw fuel on whatever fire is in front of me. This is easier with my students than my own children, but I keep working on it. Sigh.

4. This past weekend I drove to St. Louis to pick Harper up for her exciting spring break in Ohio. There was some kind of backup on the interstate so my GPS rerouted me onto rural country roads to avoid whatever the situation on I-70 was. I was driving between cornfields when a HUGE bald eagle swooped low over the road right in front of my car. Don't worry, I did not hit it! I wish it had been safe and/or possible to take a picture in that moment because it was magnificent. I don't think I'd ever seen one so close, and definitely not with its wings fully spread. It took my breath away. 

5. Speaking of driving to pick up Harper, we finally secured a vehicle for her to drive. So she'll head back to school on her own after this break. I'm glad we worked it out that she could have a car - our jobs just aren't flexible enough to always be able to drive back and forth when she needs to be picked up. This will make life much, much easier. It is a little bittersweet though, because we've had a lot of good time in the car together the last several years, especially driving back and forth to visit colleges. I'm not going to be sorry not to drive six hours two days in a row, but I am going to miss those little bubbles of time with my girl. 

The Five (#9 Citrus Sherbet Edition)

1. A couple of weeks ago we ran into the fancy grocery store near us (not where we usually shop) and I saw this rainbow sherbet in the freezer. It is one of the only times I've ever seen lemon, orange, and lime sherbet in any of the grocery stores in Ohio. This is my absolutely favorite flavor combination, which I fell in love with at The Chocolate Factory - where my dad used to take us as kids. I don't even think they carry the flavor any more. When I'm visiting family in Wisconsin I can often get the Cedar Crest version from a local grocery store, but that brand hasn't made it's way to Ohio yet. I have sometimes considered trying to get dry ice so I could bring the Cedar Crest variety home to Ohio, but now I don't have to!

 

If you are a certain age, you probably remember the food fight scene from the movie Hook, which I always think of when I eat rainbow sherbet (even the inferior type w/ raspberry instead of lemon).

2. I get served a lot of teacher content on social media and this post from Bored Teachers made me laugh out loud this past week:

I 100% remember classmates' desks being emptied out like this. I also remember the satisfaction of cleaning/reorganizing my own desk. I don't think my desk ever got dumped, I would have been mortified. And I do have a hard time imagining anyone doing this in 2024. Public humiliation was much more common in the 80s.

3. For the second year in a row we had late February tornadoes in our area. Fortunately there was no damage for us, just a lot of little branches/twigs all over the place. Our weather radio/phones/sirens went off around 4:45 a.m. last Wednesday, which was an interesting wake up call. Lots of blurry students at the middle school that day. Michael's bedroom is in the lower level of our house so we just let him keep sleeping. Basement bedrooms might see more spiders than the upstairs variety but at least you're already in your tornado safe space! (If it had been really close to us we would have relocated him to the basement bathroom, for what it's worth, but we were on the edge of the area of concern.)

4. This quarter the teacher next door to the library is teaching a first period theater elective. This past week groups were running lines/learning scripts in the hallway outside the library and in the library itself. There are several convincing actors in the group because I kept hearing them and thinking I needed to jump up and see if everyone was okay, they sounded so distressed! It is absolutely fascinating to see which students excel in those situations because it isn't always who you'd imagine. Same goes with watching the students play sports.

5. It is JUST THIS YEAR occurring to me that presidential elections in the US coincide with leap years. Obviously I can just look at a calendar/Google to figure out whether a year is a leap year so it wasn't as though I was spending a lot of time fretting about how I struggled to keep track of which type of year it was. I'm not sure how that never occurred to me before now. Am I fretting about the future of our democracy? Must be a leap year!

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!

The Five (#7)

1. I am sitting on some bleachers at the last club volleyball tournament of Michael's season. He plays today and tomorrow and then club is over and high school tryouts begin Monday. Hopefully my time on the bleachers isn't coming to an end any time soon. Although, I'm not going to lie, I always find it difficult to be gone for the entire weekend and missing the opportunity to catch up on everything I didn't get to during the week. Please don't misunderstand, I AM glad to have these weekends with Michael and, as a bonus, he's gotten to practice quite a bit of highway driving as we journey back and forth across Indiana and Ohio.

2. Do other adults have trouble responding to text and/or email? I'm typically not bad at responding when a quick answer will do, but, with anything of substance, I'm completely guilty about waiting until I have time to craft a proper response, which often leads to the text/email getting buried under newer messages and I end up never replying to things I meant to take the most care with. Just me?

3. I was in a meeting recently where we spent a good deal of time discussing how to manage AI in a school setting. I'm thinking this has to be a little what it felt like when the internet itself was new and the adults and children were figuring it out at the same time (adults often more slowly than children). AI is so intriguing as a tool that could support all kinds of learning, and yet feels like such a disaster for cheating/shortcuts that are going to mean students are short-changing their own learning. I know this has ramifications far beyond school, but obviously school is the place I'm going to see/notice it the most. We haven't seen too much concern over AI us in the middle school where I work, but it does feel like just a matter of time.

4. It's been an interesting emotional week for the kids. On the down side, Michael wasn't feeling recovered from having COVID until Wednesday and is still digging out a little from the school he missed. Harper started feeling crummy early in the week (yes, again) and was diagnosed with strep. While I'm sorry she was sick again, I was seriously thrilled to learn it was strep which is treatable with a remedy that helps quickly. On the upside, Michael got into his school's marketing program for junior and senior year, and Harper found out she got an RA position for next year. I'll be interested to see how both things play out, and I'm happy they're happy. 

5. For people who recognize it, this past Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent. Whenever Ash Wednesday rolls around I think of Christine Kane's magnificent song, "Mary Catherine's Ash Wednesday Journal Entry." For anyone who grew up in or adjacent to a Catholic household, I think you'd get a kick out of giving this a listen.

The Five (#6)

1. So if two-thirds of the time I haven't remembered to post on Friday night, I'm changing it from, "The Friday Five" to just, "The Five." I will still aim for Friday but then I won't need any kind of disclaimer when I miss... This is really just for my own mental housekeeping, but welcome to my brain. I'm a little out of sorts because Michael tested positive for COVID mid-week and I stayed home from work Friday because I wasn't feeling well. He is feeling crummy but he'll survive; we're still waiting to see if the other shoe drops. 

2. Illness is absolutely everywhere - so many students are out sick with strep, flu, COVID, and other nondescript ailments. But we're pretty sure Michael got it through his volleyball team, several members had tested positive ahead of their tournament last weekend, those players didn't attend, of course, but the whole team had been exposed. And if he didn't get it from his specific team, it's more than likely that we were exposed in Cleveland:

There were 30-ish volleyball courts in the convention center so, um, a LOT of people. I know COVID is just something we live with now, but it doesn't mean I want to get it. 

3. At that same tournament I took a volleyball straight to my nose/glasses during the team's warm up on Sunday. I may have been looking down at my phone and not paying the amount of attention I should have been, given my court-side seat. Lesson learned. I got some ice from the lovely trainers and strict instructions to come back to see them if I started to feel dizzy, which, thankfully, I did not. But my nose is still sore to the touch on one side. Sadly it was hard to tell whether I had a bit of a black eye or if my eye bags just always look that dark.

4. I have a chicken recipe I make with relative frequency that involves shaking some chicken breasts in a bag of seasoned flour. I'm not a person who is necessarily fussy about name brand vs store brand items, but I do feel like the store brand "Ziploc" style bags are of far inferior quality. Last week one of the bags split open, not at the "zipper," when I was prepping the chicken. Here is the photo I sent Matt with the message, "No more store brand bags:"

There was flour everywhere! I had to vacuum the counter before wiping it down and disinfecting everything. Fortunately the actual chicken did not go flying from the bag so dinner was salvageable after a thorough kitchen clean up.

5. On the way home from a high school volleyball open gym a couple of weeks ago Michael and I got pulled over. I was driving and I was so confused because I knew I wasn't speeding, my lights were on, I had used my turn signal before the turn I'd just made...So when the officer asked if I knew why he'd pulled me over I honestly said I had no idea. Well it turns out my registration was expired, by OVER A YEAR! Whoops! The sticker on my license plate had, in fact, expired in November of 2022. And, since we apparently failed to renew it in 2022, we never got a reminder to renew in 2023, so I've bene driving an unregistered car around for quite some time. I cannot fathom how I hadn't been pulled over for that before now. I ended up having to take the title to BMV and basically get a brand new registration since my car was no longer in the system. The officer kindly gave me a warning, instead of a ticket, and suggested I take care of it sooner than later. I was really, really, tempted to call the police department and try to leave him a message that I had, in fact, had it taken care of the very next day, proving that I am an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, but even I know that would have been a little over the top. So let this be an PSA to you to check that you've updated your sticker and/or your actual registration!

The Friday Five (5)

1. After a rough weekend during which her temperature went up to 103.5, Harper finally started to feel better on Sunday night/Monday. And then she got a concussion Monday night! She wasn't able to be evaluated by the health center until Wednesday morning, when her concussion was officially diagnosed. (Unfortunately, it's not her first, so she pretty much already knew that's what was happening.) The doctor who diagnosed her concussion immediately sent her over to the office that handles accommodations and she was given a note for three weeks of relaxed attendance policies, extra time for assignments, and extra time for tests/quizzes. Knowing Harper she's unlikely to take full advantage of that, but it's good to know she can take care of herself without fearing she's going to end up completely in the weeds with her classes. By that afternoon her professors had already been notified. The university hasn't handled everything perfectly (the food situation is wild!) but I was pleased that they don't seem to mess around with head injuries. Also, I would like to petition the universe to give the girl a break, thank you very much.

2. Valentine's Day is coming up and I typically send my young nieces and nephews cards for that kind of holiday. Historically I include a note and a sheet or two of stickers. The problem is that I'm not sure all the nieces and nephews are equally enthralled by the stickers, especially as they are getting a little older. My oldest nephew is in 2nd grade. So I'm toying with the idea of just putting a little cash in the cards, or maybe cash and stickers. Maybe just cash for the boys and cash and stickers for the girls - which sounds sexist, but my sister would probably confirm that her sons do not actually care about the stickers and my brother would confirm that my nieces do, in fact, enjoy them. Same for my niece on Matt's side of the family. This is the kind of long distance bribery I engage in to try to make sure they know I love them.

3. Speaking of long distance and mail...I don't think I've written here about the mail situation at Harper's college. I imagine it's not that different from the mail situation at many colleges. At her school they do not have mailboxes in each of the dorms. There is ONE central mail room for the entire campus. So if you get a package, or even just a letter, you get an email (or maybe it's through an app) notification and you can make an appointment to pick it up. Most of the time this is fine, but when she was sick I was thinking what a shame it was that I couldn't send something via Amazon (or whatever online retailer) and have it land in her building. No matter what, she'd have to retrieve it from a building that's a 10 minute walk away, which is not ideal when you're not feeling well. I always imagined I'd send her a lot more mail than I actually have because it seems silly to send a card/letter/postcard with just words on it when I text with her and talk to her nearly every day. She already knows I'm thinking of her. I don't know if the effort of a hand written something is as meaningful to her generation as it is to mine, or at least to me.

4. I'm officially old enough that I have no idea, for the most part, who the popular music artists are these days. I mean, I know Taylor Swift, and have been a fan since I heard her sing "Our Song" when she was on daytime talk shows and I was in my Stay-at-Home-Mom Era. But beyond Taylor I have very little knowledge of popular music (says the woman who still purchases CDs) and when I do recognize recent music it's most likely because it was in a Reel. This is one of the many things I'm noticing that makes me feel old, but not in a way that I mind, exactly. 

5. This, being the fifth week of the new year, should be the week we visited the number one restaurant from last year's experiment. Alas, schedules have conspired against us and we've only made it to numbers 5-3 so far. No problem, it's kind of nice to extend it into February and still be looking forward to the top two finishers. 

The Friday Five (4)

1. Laurie Frankel, an author I have admired since reading This Is How It Always Is, released a new book this week! Family Family is a story that examines both the families we're born to, and the ones we choose. The novel goes back and forth in time and explores issues of adoption, choice, privacy, and celebrity with nuance and grace. I loved it. I got to read an early copy through NetGalley and I'm thrilled that it's now available to everyone.

2. Here is a little PSA for the week. Do you know about 988? 988 is basically 911 for mental health. This is the relatively new, easy to remember, number that is replacing the former Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The old number will still work, but the hope is that people will remember 988 as easily as we all now remember 911. You can call or text that number for support if you are having your own mental health crisis or if you are worried about a loved one and need help helping them. You can even chat with someone to get support online. Learn more about this important lifeline here, and then pay it forward by telling someone else about 988.

3. It has rained and rained and rained this week. On Wednesday I got home from school to find that our power had gone out. The last large old tree in our neighbor's backyard let go of the saturated ground and fell, taking the power lines with it. Fortunately it didn't land on anyone's house but our street was without power for about 12 hours. Now 12 hours is not a horrific amount of time to be without power, but it is an inconvenience. We were fortunate that the temperatures are mild here this week so we were not worried about being too cold. It really helped me be thankful for so many things - we could go to the public library down the street and charge our phones, Chromebooks (Michael), and portable chargers; we could afford to stop and get dinner out instead of cooking at home; we could afford to replace the food in the refrigerator that went bad; we had places to be Wednesday evening so it was already bedtime when we got home anyway. We pulled out the battery-operated camping lanterns and got ready for bed. I don't realize, or think about, how much background noise there is in a house, even when there isn't music playing or a television on. I also never think about the bits of light that are all around: alarm clocks, the WIFI extender, the street lights, etc. My bedroom felt almost womblike that night, snuggled in bed, enveloped by silence and blackness. I slept incredibly soundly...until the power came back on at four a.m. and with it the bathroom light and fan and the furnace. 

4. There is a new professional volleyball league in the U.S. and games began this week. I've loved volleyball since I started playing in 5th grade so I'm very excited about the Pro Volleyball Federation. For now it seems you can stream the games for free online and I'm hoping we can get to Columbus to see The Fury in person sometime this spring. I'm hoping some of our favorite college players from the last few years will show up in the league. Yay! Sports!

5. About a week after heading back to school Harper caught a terrible cold and has been sick all week. She muscled her way through most of her obligations this week, but last night she called me and had a fever. Poor kid. She has been using paper towels to blow her nose because she ran out of tissues and is in kind of a sorry state. With the ease of communication via smartphones it typically doesn't feel like a huge deal for Harper to be six hours away at school, but it really stinks when she's feeling sick and I can't just drop off what she needs or, better yet, bring her home to take care of her for a few days. I know she'll be just fine, but that doesn't make it easier for either of us!