Check, Check, Check

Even though retired me can usually take care of all the errands during the week while Heidi is at work, there are times when we both miss our old weekend routine of heading out together with a list of stops to make and chores to check off. Today was a Saturday like that. 

The day dawned damp and gray, and Lucy had a grooming appointment at 10, so it seemed like a good idea to drop her off and start our to-do list. First up was the library, where I had some holds to pick up, and Heidi needed to renew her card. Then we were off to the car wash to scrub all the crow poop from the car. (But that's another post!)

Our next stop was the pet supply center for food and treats for our dog and cats, although we lingered at the birds, reptiles, and fish, wondering if there might be a place in our home for one (or a dozen) of them. And we were just on our way to pick up an order in town when we got the call that Lucy was ready, so we swung by to collect her before crossing the river into the city.

A little while later, we were on our way home, feeling neither rushed nor harried, but rather quite satisfied at all we had accomplished together.

Why take on just one challenge when you can tackle two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for living and writing. 

At a Pup's Pace

Walking the dog can be a delicate balance of pace. While I want to get out for a little brisk exercise, she wants to take her time and enjoy all the scents along the way. I'm all for stopping to smell the roses (occasionally), but must we also pause for every light post, fire hydrant, and even the weird frogs on a neighbor's stoop? 

I also understand that sniffing is a dog's version of social media, just as stooping for a quick pee afterwards is the equivalent of a like. But two miles an hour? Is too slow. 

I will concede this, though: considering all the dog poop my negligent neighbors have left in the aftermath of the snow, my dog never even comes close to stepping in it. 

I wish I could say the same for myself.

Why take on just one challenge when you can tackle two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for living and writing. 

Mwah!

In the summer of 2006, I participated in the Northern Virginia Writing Project Summer Institute. Spending three weeks learning and writing with teachers from all over Northern Virginia was a career-changing experience.  

An essential part of the institute was putting all of us into writing groups, and three afternoons a week, we met with four of our peers to share writing, receive feedback, and offer suggestions. So, not only was I immersed in pedagogy and literacy, but I was forced to become, in practice, the teacher-writer I knew I should be.

Three big things came out of that summer: 

1) I recentered my middle school ELA class on writing. 

2) I collaborated with a colleague to use our district's LMS (Blackboard) to build a virtual writing community shared by students in two different schools (remember, this was September 2006, the exact same month Facebook launched). 

3) Three teacher friends and I formed a writing group with the intention to meet regularly, enjoy a nice dinner, and share our writing.

Twenty years on, I'm retired, but I'd like to think I left a bit of a legacy at my school. Students there still participate in the 100 Day Writing Challenge I created after completing this very SOLSC in 2009. As for Write Here, Write Now, the virtual writing community we built back then, if we could have captured that lightning in a bottle, I might be writing to you from my seaside estate in some exotic location.

But my writing group? Continues on! And it is those friends, Ellen, Leah, and Mary, whom I am thinking of today. I love you all!

Why tackle just one challenge when you can take on two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for action and writing. 

Bedside Manner

Another plus to retirement is that I finally feel like I have the time to schedule, not to mention attend, all those health check-ups my primary care provider recommends. I've always been good about the basics: dentist, annual physical, and mammogram, but some of the others often slipped through the cracks in my calendar. 

Recently, I was at a new dermatologist for an annual skin check. "How long has it been since your last screening?" she asked.

"It's been a few years," I admitted.

"I don't mean to scold," she started mildly, "but--"

"Go ahead and let me have it!" I interrupted with a laugh. "I deserve it!"

"Generally, we try not to lecture," she replied, "because we do want you to come back. Every year." She looked at me kindly but pointedly. "No one likes to feel judged."

She was right! And in the name of convenience and self-care, I scheduled my appointment for next year on my way out.

Why tackle just one challenge when you can take on two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for action and writing. 

I ❤️ Tuesdays

Many years ago, after the principal of our school retired, everyone always commented on how great she looked whenever we saw her. "You have to stay busy!" she would advise us with a relaxed smile. "I have all my bags lined up by the door. Monday is tennis; Tuesday is bowling; Thursday is golf, and I have my church and my family, too."

It just so happens that Tuesday is my bowling day, now, too. Thanks to her, I've joined a women's league with many former school employees. On the thirty Tuesdays of the season, we meet at a local bowling center at 10 a.m. (which seems like such a civilized start time to me!) and, with our team of three, bowl three games against another of the ten teams in the league. The game meets you where you are, and despite the league's average age being around 75 years old, it's very competitive and really fun. 

I once took an eight-week rowing class on the Potomac River. "How many of you are here to get in shape?" asked the instructor on the first morning. Lots of us raised our hands. "What you need to understand," he continued, "is that you row because you love it. Crew doesn't get you in shape, you have to get in shape for crew." He had a point, and although I liked rowing? I didn't love it, and after those eight weeks, I found other ways to work out. 

I do love bowling, though! And knowing that lifting, squatting, lunging, and ab work might improve my average is a great motivator for working out these days.

Why tackle just one challenge when you can take on two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for action and writing. 

Gray's Anatomy

The book I'm reading, 33 Place Brugman, by Alice Austen, tells the story of WWII and the occupation of Belgium through the voices of the residents of the apartment building at the eponymous address in Brussels.  The story is full of heroes, villains, philosophers, and artists, and explores how the horrors of war test one's humanity. 

One of the characters I find most engaging is Charlotte Sauvin, a college student living with her architect father. Charlotte is colorblind, but fundamentally artistic; her colorblindness is not a shortcoming but rather shapes her perspective and finely shades her observations. 

Many of the other characters spend time wondering how Charlotte sees what they are seeing; some wish she could see it the way they do, but Charlotte herself never wonders what the world looks like beyond her ability to see it. Why should she? There is beauty in her perception.

I thought of Charlotte on this bleak March day. The leaden sky, bare branches, and congregations of crows could be considered dreary. But they also create a dreamy monochrome; walking the dog is like being inside a black-and-white photograph. The unrelenting gray tones offer no promise of spring, yet they are beautiful on their own, independent of yesterday's holly in the bright snow or tomorrow's daffodils blooming in the first green grass.

Why do one challenge when you can do two? This month, I'm using the Action for Happiness Mindful March calendar as a daily prompt for action and writing. 

My Agenda

When I retired a couple of years ago, finding a new structure for my days was one of the hardest parts of leaving the classroom. When you're a teacher, a bell literally rings to tell you when it's time for your next commitment on a schedule that was set by someone else. After thirty-plus years of that, I found myself at loose ends when it was up to me to fill my days.

But now, halfway through my second year of retirement, I feel like I'm finally settling into it. With time for lunches and more dinners out with friends, as well as my bowling league, subbing at my former school, and a consulting job as a teacher coach, my calendar seems more full than ever. 

As much as I'm enjoying the variety and flexibility of my new life, juggling all those activities and keeping my own schedule has been tougher than I imagined. The calendar on my phone used to be little more than a novelty, but it's my best friend now!

Why do one challenge when you can do two? This month, I'm going to use the Action for Happiness calendar as a daily prompt for action and writing. Today's activity? Set an intention to live with awareness and kindness.

Taxing

I've been filing my own taxes since I started earning money in college, but gone are the days when all I needed for the chore was the 1099 booklet, one W-2, a single INT form, a pencil, and a stamp.

Over the decades, a series of employer-contribution fund changes, home ownership, marriage, and inheritance have made my finances increasingly complex. Retirement and my new part-time gigs haven't helped either, and when I logged on to an online tax prep service this morning, the helpful bot who greeted me cheerfully predicted it would take only four hours and 37 minutes to complete the task.

I suppose I ought to be grateful that I have an income to be taxed. 

And I am!

Counting the Years

"How old are you?" asked a cheeky first grader when he sat down next to me at the literacy center I was observing.

"How old are you?" I asked in return.

"Six," he answered with a slightly insolent chin nod.

"I'm ten and a half times that," I replied.

"So you're a hundred?" he said.

Fortunately, it was not a math center, so I ignored his miscalculation. "Why don't you get started on your word family assignment?" I suggested.

Of Course

"Just so you know," the teacher whispered to me as I slipped into my observation chair, "there's going to be a fire drill at 8:30."

I laughed and shrugged, but when that high-pitched intermittent siren went off? I jumped. Then I got up, joined the line of quiet first graders, and exited the building through the door in their classroom. As we stood in the chilly February morning, I surveyed the school building. Built in 1952, it had the sprawling design of the elementary schools of my childhood: single story, brick on the outside, cinder block on the inside, with rows of hopper windows. 

At least we can go right back in, I thought, eying the blue door as a cold wind cut through my sweater. But that was not to be. Although the school seemed unchanged since it was built over 70 years ago, there was actually an obvious security upgrade. 

The classroom doors could no longer be opened from the outside. So we all walked silently down the sidewalk and in through the front entrance.

High Bar

The teacher had given the directions. 

"It's simple," she assured her students. "You know that one of the five requirements for a sentence is that it starts with a capital letter, so you just need to correct the first letter of these sentences," she pointed to the worksheet, "and then write them on the line below."

After asking if there were any questions or concerns, she moved to the focus group table and called a student over to work. The rest of the class settled into their task, and it wasn't long before a little girl slipped her paper into the green basket next to where I was sitting. "Can I see that?" I asked.

She shrugged and walked away, and I plucked the worksheet out of the bin and flipped it over. It appeared to be blank, except for her name.

As she bustled about her desk, pulling out her device and preparing to do the next task, I caught her eye and waved. "C'mere," I mouthed, pointing at the paper. 

She sighed and reluctantly returned.

"You were supposed to do this!" I said in mock surprise.

She pointed to lightly scrawled pencil marks at the beginning of each sentence. 

"Are these the capital letters?" I asked.

She nodded.

"You were supposed to write the sentence, with the capital letter, on this line,"  I pointed.

She took the worksheet from my hand and put it back in the basket.

"You're probably going to have to do it again!" I whispered.

She shrugged and returned to her seat.

Meanwhile, our quiet conversation had caught the kids at the nearest table's attention.

"What the heck?!" said one to the other with a look of utter disbelief on his face.

"She said it was easy," his friend shook his head, "but it's impossible!"

Ties That Bind

"Did you hear Ellen is retiring?" I asked Mimi about our dear mutual friend at bowling this morning.

Mimi was the assistant principal at our school when Ellen started there back in 1992. She was also a mentor when Ellen moved from the classroom to admin, and a colleague when Ellen was hired as the other assistant principal at our school. As it happens, Sharon, our principal from that time, and Susan, our Director of Counseling, are also in the bowling league; reconnecting with them has been one of the top reasons I've enjoyed bowling so much.

Mimi's face lit up at the news. "No!" she answered. "I'm going to have to give her a call and congratulate her!" 

A little while later, I heard her talking to Sharon and Susan. "We could have our whole admin team here!" she beamed. "Wouldn't that be something?"

Their smiles were as wide as hers.

Underneath It All

I spent my entire teaching career in a compact, self-sufficient school district. For most of that time, it seemed like we didn't care how anybody else was doing anything; we had our own way. It didn't matter, for example, when neighboring school districts started, scheduled breaks, or called off for weather; our central administration made their own calls. We were relatively small, affluent, and independent.

All that changed gradually over the decades I worked there. Starting at the turn of the century, with the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, there was a big push toward standardization, and individual schools and their policies became more centralized at all levels —nationally, statewide, regionally, and within the district. We were all supposed to be doing pretty much the same thing and measuring our success with high-stakes tests.

But I digress. I sat down to write about how I used to only have to check one district to see if my day would be affected by school cancellations or delays, but, ironically, now that I'm retired, I have to check three: one for my wife's schedule, one for my bowling league, and one for my consulting gig. Some things can't be standardized.

I thought that was kind of funny, but now I see I still feel some kind of way about NCLB and all its unintended consequences. All these years later, I still resent the loss of responsiveness and independence that came with uniformity for uniformity's sake.

Magic AI Ball

I can't even remember why I wanted it. 

Something made me think a button that randomly pulls a post from my blog archive would be a fun addition, so I put an AI site on the task and asked for the HTML code I needed to create such a widget. 

Oh my lord! What followed was an hour or so of cutting, pasting, saving, and testing. I will say that AI is a cheerful, confident collaborator. In addition to reassuring me that I wasn't at fault after every failed attempt, it offered a perfect "final solution" (its words, not mine) at least seven times. 

I almost believed it would work before I ran out of free queries, but alas, no such button currently exists. According to the chatbot, the breakdown is a result of several factors-- the sheer number of posts in the archive, the clunkiness of "Blogger being Blogger," and some sort of indexing issue with Google. 

By the end? I almost expected it to say, Reply hazy, try again later.

Barky McBarkster

Maybe it was the fact that, in the next breath, after telling us that Lucy barks for hours when we're not home, our neighbor offered, "It could be ghosts, though. We have at least two down here," that I did not believe it.

"When is she ever even alone?" I asked Heidi, indignantly, "I'm here almost all the time."

"That could be part of the problem," my reasonable wife suggested. "If it's the separation anxiety we've seen in the past, the fact that someone is here most of the time makes the times when she's alone worse."

I was still very skeptical. So much so that I found an app and downloaded it to both my phone and my iPad, turning the iPad into a bark monitor. "Now we'll see about this," I said firmly as I locked the door behind us on our way to see the Oscar Shorts.

The barking started on my phone before we even got to Bill and Emily's to pick them up, and throughout the movies, I received dozens of silent notifications on my watch that Lucy was barking. Even so, I held out hope for false positives, but when we got home, and I checked the activity log, it broke my heart to hear Lucy barking almost constantly, and often desperately, for close to an hour on two occasions.

Assuming it's not ghosts triggering her, our attention turns to solutions. Stay tuned.

She Showed Me

I took Lucy for a long walk this afternoon, passing through the little local shopping center near the end of our sojourn so that I could stop at the pharmacy. Dogs are allowed in there, and in fact, if Lucy had her way, we would go through those aisles every time we were in the area. I also had a library book on hold that I needed to pick up, and since you can check materials out with your phone, I thought it would be easy to sneak in and out the side door with Lucy.

Oh, was I wrong! We were only a few steps into the library, next to the hold shelf, when we ran into two little girls who politely asked if they could pet my dog. As they were exclaiming over her, their dad came over, complimented me on my good dog, and thanked me loudly for being so accommodating. Next thing I knew, a librarian was at my side. 

I gulped, but before I could offer my apology, she pointed to the book and phone in my hand and offered to check it out for me. I stood uncomfortably by the door until she returned and informed me that there was actually another book on hold for me. 

Would I like her to find it on the shelf and check that one out for me, too? 

"Yes," I shrugged awkwardly and waited a bit longer. "I'm so sorry for the inconvenience!" I told her as she handed me my book. "Thank you for your help."

"You're welcome," she answered.

"I'll never bring her again," I promised.

She nodded and walked away.

Lose Lose

Declutter! I wrote on my to-do list yeaterday. Get rid of 10 things! And I did. I found ten things in my closet that I hadn't worn in some time, and I added them to the donate bag. 

Putting away the last of the winter decorations was also on my list, and as I prepared to climb down from the attic after stowing the gnomes, lighted tree branch, and window candles until November, my eye fell on another item that I decided it was finally time to dispose of.

I loved the small wooden rocking chair from the moment I saw it in the thrift shop back in 2018. The price was right, too; I walked out of there only $9.99 lighter in the wallet. It was painted a chipped powder blue, but I paid my grad student neighbor to redo it cherry red, and I took it to school. Everyone wanted to sit in that chair! And I didn't blame them, but I was partial to it myself, so there weren't many opportunities for others to enjoy it.

It was only a few months later, when I returned after a few days' absence, that I found it broken. The sub left a note that he had leaned forward when one of the rockers was under a cabinet, and it cracked in half. He was sorry, but there was no offer of replacement. I tried to fix it over the years: glue, screws, and metal mending plates all worked for a while, but it was unusable by the time I retired in 2024. 

I brought it home anyway, certain that in my retirement I would find the time to mend it permanently, but it has languished in the attic ever since. I took a hard look at it yesterday and, wiggling the arms and back, concluded that it was time to let go. As I wrestled it down the pull-down stairs, it pivoted in my hand and swung hard into the closet door, smashing a hole in the hollow panel. 

I cussed myself out soundly, took the rocker downstairs, and knocked it to pieces for the garbage. Then I sighed and ordered new doors for the closet, because that's another thing that I can't fix.

No Protest Here

There were so many high school kids on the streets when I was walking Lucy this afternoon that I checked my watch to see if I had somehow lost an hour. And I almost asked one of them if school was out early, but he crossed the street before I could. I was even more confused when a carload of kids drove by, and rolled down the window to address a boy walking down the sidewalk. 

"Dude!" one shouted. "Stop skipping!"

The young man smiled and placed his finger to his lips.

I had almost forgotten the whole thing by the time Heidi got home, but then, as she was telling me about her day, she mentioned the walkout that students in our district planned to protest ICE this afternoon, and it all made sense. Clearly, these kids were exercising their right to free speech by taking a free afternoon; today, they walked out and kept going.

To be honest? Given the demographics of that high school, many of the students I saw are likely directly or indirectly affected by the crackdowns. They could well be the people their classmates are organizing to support. And if so, I hope they had a nice afternoon off.

Holiday Collab

"Ramadan starts tonight, dear," a friend of mine told me this afternoon, and we commiserated briefly about the challenges of fasting, especially from smoking, for her.

It wasn't until later, when I was planning dinner (lucky lo mein noodles!), that it occurred to me that the Lunar New Year also starts tonight. And a little while after that? I realized that it's Mardi Gras, so Lent starts tonight, too. Such a convergence delighted me, and I had to find out how rare it was.

A little research revealed that the last time these three events intersected was 1863. Somehow, I don't think many people back then were in a position to even realize such a coincidence; the world was divided into much more homogeneous places, religiously, at least.

The next time? It will be 2189, and by then, maybe the world will be down to celebrate together.

Critics Be Darned

"Who says this is good?" Heidi asked as we tried to follow the idiotic rules of the game and the antics of the celebrities competing on the fourth season of the reality show Traitors. 

"I read favorable reviews in a couple of places," I replied a wee bit defensively, "including The New York Times."

She sighed, unconvinced, but she was tolerant enough to watch the first episode, where the cast was introduced, and the three traitors were identified. Then there was the matter of who the secret traitor was, who would be "murdered," and who would be "banished." 

There was enough of a cliffhanger at the end that we agreed to watch the next episode, but when our questions were mostly answered by the beginning of episode three, we had had enough. 

(Even though the Times had a brief feature today about the show, noting how Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, the figure skaters-turned-analysts for the Winter Olympics, have made murder almost wholesome. They really do seem to love them some Traitors over there.)