Difference Between Sisters and Brothers!

Every once in a while, I'll give one of my siblings the "gift of time" for a birthday gift. I've primarily done it for Ann and Louise (only one person at a time, though!). My sisters are always more than happy to have me help them with projects - cleaning, sorting, organizing, etc. This is a gift I enjoy giving and they enjoy receiving. I'm not always timely in my once-a-month intentions, but I usually get it all done in one calendar year.

For Tom's July 2018 birthday, I gave him this gift. It was the first time I've ever done this for my brother. Wow, was it hard. It has taken me 19 months to finally give / do something for the one year I intended! When I kept bringing this up, he kept saying I didn't need to do anything else. "That's not the point! What do you want?" He mostly wanted just to spend time with his little sister . . . he is such an incredibly sweet guy.

I'm not sure how I should try to do something like this for him in the future . . . but I know that my sisters have a much easier time bossing me around! (Just kidding. They're lovely, but are happy to have me help with projects.)

Here's my copy of the "coupon" for Tom:

Movies and Recovery

Since I knew I would have some "down time" while recovering from total knee replacement surgery, I requested a bunch of videos from the library that I'd been meaning to watch. I just wanted to make some quick notes. It's weird for me to watch so much media in less than a month's time!

Ready Player One - I loved this! I'm not really a video game person, but I loved all the 80s cultural references and music. I loved the underdog beating the Goliath. Perhaps I had low expectations and that's why it surprised me so much. Louie and I watched it together and he enjoyed it, too. True confession: after I had returned it to the library, I was looking at clips on YouTube and ended up getting it from the library a second time and re-watching it! I just really enjoyed it.

Iron Lady - I'm glad I watched this without Louie. Although I love Meryl Streep and I'm up for learning about historical figures and eras, it was a bit slow-paced. It opens as Margaret Thatcher is in her dotage and uses flashbacks to tell her story. I liked that she was a shopkeeper's daughter and "rose above" her "station" in life. I'm glad that she made her way in a man's world.

Crazy Rich Asians - I watched this one alone, too. Louie said he wasn't interested, but I think he might have enjoyed it. I was delighted by Rachel's story. I think the cast was fantastic (though I didn't know who Awkwafina was before this). My favorite scenes were when her mom came to see her (I cried) and the Mah-jong game. I would watch this again! Loved it!

Manchester By the Sea - I got this thinking it was something else. My friend Kathy loved this and I need to ask her why. I thought it was super depressing. Casey Affleck plays a man who is deeply troubled. He seems to be dead inside. He gets into bar fights. When his brother dies and he has to return to deal with the details, he learns his brother has left him in charge of his teenage nephew. Long, sad, winding story with an unsatisfying (to me) resolution.

A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish - Netflix. Louie watched it with me and said, "I think the target audience was 13 year old girls." "We didn't have to watch the whole thing!" We usually decide within 10-15 minutes if it's worth the hour and a half. Oh well. It was cute. I like Cinderella stories.

Knight Christmas - Netflix. I had watched this home alone and should have waited to watch it with Louie. Not much less silly than the other one, but geared for an older audience at least.

White Christmas - Netflix. Also watched alone. For the third(?) time in my life.

Woman in Gold - watched alone. So cool! I'm amazed at how it turned out. In fact, I had to look up the info online afterward. The painting is in the U.S. now! Absolutely amazing. The interviews afterward made me chuckle. The young lawyer dude never comments on how cool it is that RYAN REYNOLDS is portraying him!

Ender's Game - DVD. Rewatch for us. Just makes me want to reread Card's books which are so much better than this movie. Interesting to see Harrison Ford as Graff . . .

A Brilliant Young Mind - I liked it more than Louie did. Asa Butterfield is incredible. I'm so very glad that our children were not autistic! I loved the young girl.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? - This documentary about Fred Rogers was extremely well-done. I thought about my mom and how much she loved Mr. Rogers and what he stood for. This was worthwhile and interesting. I like Mr. Rogers more and more the older I get and the more course the world gets.

Motivational Notecards

I was going through a clipped together bunch of notecards to pick a new face-forward one when I realized that a lot of these don't "speak" to me anymore. They were all meaningful at one point in time, so I decided to scan, blog, and recycle. (I still have a few dozen clipped together at my desk.)

One that was in pencil and wouldn't scan well says, "Goals are Dreams with Deadlines." I disliked writing "SMART" goals for professional purposes. It felt artificial. This quotation caught my attention, though. I like the concept.

Fight the Control Freak: 
Slow down
Reduce anxiety (have faith)
Delegate
Give up "if onlys"
Defer to others
Count your blessings
Value people
Be neither pushy nor pushover
Know circle of influence
Do one thing at a time
Learn to be led


Great Leaders Exhibit:
Caring
Integrity
High Expectations (no mediocrity)


PUCK:
Provide values and purpose
Unleash and develop skills
Create team power
Keep the accent on the positive


The Seattle Pike Place Fish Market!
Play
Make Their Day
Be There
Choose Your Attitude


CAVE People
You can't change C(itizens) A(gainst) V(irtually) E(verything) People!


I can.


I have many, many more, but these were quick and easy to weed out.

Literary Pet Names

When Louie and I were discussing our new little German Shepherd puppy, we had very different ideas about names! I liked another spice name, since Pepper had been such a wonderful dog. But he didn't like Basil, Coriander, Oregano, or anything else I came up with. He liked German names, but I didn't care for Franz or any of the others that I saw on lists.

Then I found this site: The Best Literary Pet Names: Canine Edition by Derek Attig. I was already a fan of the Book Riot website, so this was an easy "sell" for me. As I read through some of the names, Louie and I both liked "Titus" and so that's what we chose. It fits him well! I liked the site so much, I wanted to save it here and share it with others!

Here are some shots of Titus when he was a pup and at age 2 years old.

Student Teaching in 1989

Louie asked me what I was working on the other day. I was typing info into a GoogleDoc. It was student feedback from my student teaching experience in the spring of 1989 at Nicollet Junior High in Burnsville, MN. He thought it was crazy, naturally. I had contemplated just chucking them in the recycle bin . . . but since I have touched them a number of times and haven't been able to get rid of them, I decided to digitize. My husband's next observation was that it would be quicker to take photos of them rather than typing student input. My response is that I would do it however it worked best for me.

Now that I've finished, I scanned two to add to this blog. Some observations:

• I used a mimeograph machine in 1989! I remember the smell, the feel, the purple, but it's so weird to see that again! We didn't use Powerpoints back then. (Just Googled it. Powerpoint was released on my son Morgan's birthday!) Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
• Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for $14 million three months after it appeared.

•  I should have spent more time and energy teaching those students about to and too, alot is not a word, etc.
• I sometimes question why I became a teacher, my abilities, etc. I believe I have more positive qualities as an educator than weaknesses. I care enough to try to improve on my weaknesses.
• I'm not positive, but I think these responses were from my "gifted" class . . . I had 3 or 4 sections of regular ninth grade English and one gifted group.
• I'm so grateful to my cooperating teacher, Steve Ketcham, for all he did to support and encourage me. What a blessing! I should send him a letter of thanks.

Here are two that I scanned of the 30-ish I typed:

If anyone actually wants to read all the responses, they're here.

Seriously?

I sometimes hang on to scraps of paper even past the point of logic. Why?

I need to ask myself that question. Today, I grabbed a scrap of paper. It said "Backyardigans library episode / Zorro." I Googled it and found that season 3 episode 320 was called "The Masked Retriever." I was going to watch it online and recycle the note.

Nickelodeon wants me to pay to watch it. No thanks.

I checked two local libraries . . . Hennepin County has a Nickelodeon DVD with several shows on it, but not this episode of Backyardigans. Hmmm.

I'm definitely not going to spend money to see it. It's curiosity more than anything. I love libraries and someone commented on this to me. I've never in my life seen "Backyardigans." It's an animated kids show. I own a copy of "Channel Chasers" from the Fairly OddParents show . . . because it piqued my sense of humor.

The bottom of the note also says "Phineas and Ferb" . . . another animated show. Why?

I think I can just move on from this. Seriously. In the grand scheme of eternity (and all that is available to watch, read, do . . . ) why would I waste another second on this?

Back in the Day, Savings Accounts Earned Interest!

In part of my quest to declutter my home and my life, I got out my old savings account books that I had with the Richfield Bloomington Credit Union back in the 80s. Although there's absolutely no reason to keep these - the account was closed decades ago - I held on to them. As I flipped through them, I realized there were some observations I might want to hang onto. Here they are!

• I opened the account in 1982. At the time, I worked at McDonald's. I remember my mom had me deposit alternate paychecks into savings. (I got to cash and spend the other weeks' checks. I was and am proficient at spending, so I'm glad she "made" me save, too!)
• The interest rates were insanely good back then!!! $20.53 on a balance of $992.70 (12.31.1982) $22.99 on $1377.20 (3.31.1983) $38.23 on $2581.09 (6.30.1983) Dude! No wonder my savings account was a big deal to me back then!
• I tried so hard to keep track of "my" money and my parents' money. They deposited into that account . . . it somehow escaped my notice that it was supposed to be my college account.
• When I withdrew a bunch of my money to buy Louie a sailboat for his birthday in 1985 (we still have and use that Sunfish!), my mom was furious. Even though I used "my" money and not hers, the whole idea was to save for COLLEGE, not buy a $1,500 boat for my sweetheart.
• A lot of the deposits were loan repayments from Tom and from Louise. I'm not sure what money my parents had loaned them, but it's interesting that my parents chose to deposit the money in my account. Later, Louie and I borrowed money from my parents to have the well and septic installed at Strawberry Lake. I remember how good it felt to get that paid off!
• My parents were very generous. Besides paying for my college education (both bachelors and masters), they paid for a lot of our wedding expenses, some dental work, etc. They were amazingly generous.

I could probably make more observations, but my alarm is telling me it's time to go. I am so very blessed. Sometimes looking at and dealing with the clutter in my life is a good chance to remember and appreciate my blessings. The maximum amount in this account was $16,734.58 in January 1985. My mom deposited her unemployment check for $2,178. Wow. This brings back more memories of that time in our lives . . . for a different blog entry.