Ok, I really forgot something. Or should I say we forgot something.
Since my youngest does not have her driver’s license, I knew she would eventually need an official ID. Oh well, I found that out today when we tried to set up a checking account for her. Hmm, one more thing to do and only two more days to do it in.
This could have been done earlier, but it wasn’t.
Short post in keeping with other short posts to mark century posts. #400
One of the many things I look forward to at the beginning of the school year is to check out the fresh faces of the new faculty of my alma mater, particularly in the spot that seems to be a revolving door as of late. Let me say that from experience and word of mouth the previous band director will not be missed. However, the new director had to jump in quickly as days after her arrival, she had to get the band ready for the Festival of Flags parade. A group of 20 marching down North Michigan Avenue doing the best they could under the circumstances.
Reading the new instructor’s bio in the hometown scandal sheet makes me think that she is very ambitious and hopefully will stick around long enough to bring some of these goals to fruition. Miss Reardon is a Sandusky native who graduated from UT. She plays the trombone, cello, piano, and sings. Very well versed. One of her goals is to bring musical theatre back to the EHS stage. AWESOME! It has been several years since Emily and I (can’t remember who the dramatic director was) brought the “Nifty Fifties” to the stage. More of a revue of car tunes strung together by a flimsy plot, but fun.
Good luck to the new musical maestro!
And we still need the bloody scissors… (that’s the British use of bloody.) I was able to find a very expensive stethoscope, but the 5 1/2 inch Lister bandage scissors are not available locally. If I knew they would get here on time, I would order them online, but I didn’t think of that sooner. These should be available at the school before classes start. I hope so. I still have one or two places to check, but the time is limited.
Scrubs are still in transit (as far as I know). I hope they get in soon too. I would like to make sure everything is in place.
Other than getting all the ducks in a row, things are moving along. The countdown continues….
I was listening to the radio in the car and I heard a commercial for a reading program for kids. It sounded like you sat the kid (under 5) in front of the TV and turned on a video. The ‘mother’ was happy that she didn’t have to do any work!!!
While I’m all for getting kids to read early in life, I am totally against sitting the kid in front of the TV to have them learn? What ever happened to reading to your children? What ever happened to children reading to their parents? I remember reading many stories to my girls. We read almost every day, from Dr Seuss to the Narnia series. Did it help? I can only say that the girls all like to read.
If I hear the commercial again, I will try to post a link. I want to make sure what I hear was correct.
I have posted numerous times about my favorite teacher, role model, etc (it is very nearly the first anniversary of her passing). Tonight at work, I had a surprise when my high school French came into my line. “Bonjour, Professeur Peters! Comment allez-vous?” She looked really well. A few years following my graduation, she had some health problems. She asked me if I was still a Star Trek/Star Wars fan. AH, she knows me so well. I made flash cards of French vocabulary in the shape of the NCC-1701 (“No bloody -A, -B, -C, Or -D”). We would get bonbons or other rewards for creativity. I told her that I have been doing plays around the area over the last several years. She has seen pictures in the paper but has yet to come to any.
One of my favorite parts of French class was the video contest. I believe it was a countywide (or maybe even longer reaching than that) contest in which classes could submit short skits to be judged for prizes. How I wish YouTube was around back then. I did not think to ask Madame if she kept any of the videos. Anyway, the senior year video Nicolas, Thomas, Jean, and I made was by far our most hilarious. It was a cooking spoof in which we made lapin a la moutarde (or… rabbit in mustard sauce). Think the Swedish Chef (or Julia Child it was French after all) meets the Three Stooges and you pretty well get the idea. Whoever decided to give me the role I undertook, I’ll never know but… it was memorable to say the least.
What a fun trip down memory lane!
My youngest is heading off to College this Saturday. This week we are getting things together to make sure she has everything she needs to start the new year.
My daughter needs some special equipment for her college career. The non-special equipment/clothing became special because my daughter is small. The small/petite scrubs have to be hemmed to fit. We went all over the place to find a coverall that even came close to fitting. Rubber boots, same thing. You may ask what she is going into with scrubs, coveralls and boots. Her chosen field is Vet-Tech. So with the current clothing and equipment it looks like she will spend a part of the semester in a barn or two. The hoof pick she needed kind of gave that away.
We are also picking up a few things so she can set up house keeping in her new apartment. It is a furnished apartment shared with 3 other young ladies. This is my first daughter to live on campus during college. I may go through some empty nest feelings later, but for now I am just excited for my daughter. More on all of this later in the week.
OOOPS… wrong show… or is it?. Tonight was the read-through for my latest on-stage endeavor. I will say that reading the script with the actors (sans one) was an absolute RIOT! You Have the Right to Remain Dead is much more than an audience-participatory murder mystery, it almost plays like a melodrama. I believe I alluded to the fact that this is a play-within-a-play with the actors portraying actors on stage as well as the characters within a very Tennessee Williams-esque production. It will be quite a challenge to keep under control as the hilarity ensues throughout. All of the actors are on stage throughout the entire show. Among the colorful cast of characters are the actors within the local community theatre, the director, the teenage backstage manager, and an inept detective who I believe will be very reminiscent of Columbo (rumpled trenchcoat, tattered notepad, and all).
The fun begins when one of the “actors” is murdered. Each of the remaining thespians (on and off stage) and the audience itself is suspect. Everyone has a different motive for doing the poor sap in and it is up to Officer Bainbridge to discover whodunit, how, and why. Nothing is as it seems, the clues pile up at a hilarious rate, until the guilty party is revealed. In order to find out who did what to whom and with what it was done to whom be sure to come to the Huber Theatre October 9-11. A double show on October 10. Judging from the read-through this will be yet another memorably great production but aren’t they all memorable…good or bad?
I will be one of those frantic parents in the Walmart checkout line on the first day of school. I’ve never been there to witness them myself, but I know they exist; I’ll find out for sure tomorrow when I join them. Yes, I planned ahead well enough to buy the necessary school supplies, but what I failed to do was to supervise the middle-schooler who was excitedly stuffing her new backpack, apparently ignoring the direction to “pack what’s on your list”. Not really her fault – like I said, I should have been supervising her more carefully. But as a result, our 4th grader now has a locker full of 4th grade school supplies AND Kindergarten school supplies (she brought them to school last Friday during orientation), while our Kindergartner has an empty backpack.
We could follow our oldest daughter into her new middle school tomorrow to repo her sister’s school supplies, but I’m pretty sure being the only student whose parents follow her into school (especially with little brother and sisters in tow) could cause her emotional damage beyond repair. I’ll take my chances at Walmart.
Well, summer is officially over – school starts tomorrow! I could be like everyone else and say “where did the summer go?”, but for me, it actually didn’t go as fast as I would have thought. We were so busy; though it was good-busy; not like so-much-work-to-do-busy. But much fun was had and I enjoyed every minute! Last week was spent at school open houses and orientations, as well as a training event at our church to allow us to volunteer with our church’s student ministries. That was an interesting evening – it began with us volunteers breaking off into groups of about 15 and making lines. We were given a spoon tied to a string which was wound around a “spool” ie, an empty tube of toilet paper. The first person in the line (me) was to put the spoon down their shirt and pants and give it to the next person who was supposed to put it up their pants and shirt, then to the next person who was supposed to put it down the shirt and pants, effectively “threading” the line of people together. Kind of strange, I thought, but what’s going to happen once we’re all “wearing” the string??? It was a little scary, but luckily, the threading was the entire ice-breaking activity, and the rest of the evening was pleasantly spent listening to a guest speaker while munching on all kinds of orange snacks (orange was the theme for the evening – I never really thought about how many party snacks are orange before!).
Today we had so many activities and volunteering planned for church that we were on the go from 8:30 in the morning until about 3:30 in the afternoon. Busy, but it was time well-spent, especially since we finished up the day with Kidstuff (a cute show with a wonderful message for the kids) and then a carnival with LOTS of treats and fun for the kids; they had a blast. Good thing too – we need to get settled down early tonight in order to get our oldest to school by 7:30 in the morning!!! She is starting middle school, and yes, to those of you who have asked – she will be switching classes, kind of like the “block” style they had when I was in middle school. My daughter has a homeroom, but then she switches for language arts and math and perhaps other subjects as well. And they do gym class strangely – there are 4 classes: gym, music, technology (typing, etc.), and art, and they take one of these 4 classes every day for 9 weeks and then switch to another. That sounds pretty cool to me! I would have LOVED it if I only had to worry about gym for 9 weeks of the year! But, being in middle school also means that she has to change for gym class, poor thing – I remember that aspect of middle school making a lot of kids really nervous. And at orientation last week, the principal gave us parents a talk about making sure we wash the gym clothes – the kids are getting to “that age”, she said, which prompted me to whisper to my friend nearby, “I’m not ready!” But my daughter IS ready for middle school, and she seems to be making her way from tween to teen in no time – UGH! Poor thing got her first pimple just in time for the first day of middle school, but she doesn’t seem to mind too much, so we’re not making it a big deal. It’s not like we’re publishing it on the internet for the entire world to read or anything… But what are moms for? She can thank me when she’s older and finds this through some sort of google search or something.
Our second oldest is starting Kindergarten. This is our “difficult” child; our strong-willed one. Samantha has a mind of her own, and some of the things she says leave us in stitches – others leave us shaking our heads, but we’ll stick to the positives here. It seems that Samantha has the same Kindergarten teacher that her sister had a few years ago, and my husband and I are chuckling to ourselves about the unintentional “joke” we’re about to play on our local school system. We are wondering how many years it will take for word to spread amongst the teachers in town about how much of a… well, difference there is between Samantha and her big sister… No need to go off about it here, like I said, we need to call it an early night, but it will suffice to say that any teacher of Taylor’s who gets Samantha 4 years later will probably be surprised 🙂
I was going to write about the younger two as well, but it’s bedtime already and this post is long enough – that’s what I get for not blogging regularly, I guess, an über-post!
If so, consider this an update. A few months ago I found out about a talented Japanese boy named Yuto Miyazawa on the Ellen show (found out via the ‘net of course- I don’t watch shows like Ellen). This boy at just nine years of age plays a mean guitar. Here is the clip of him on the aforementioned show:
Too unfortunate he chooses someone like Ozzy Osbourne to imitate, but I suppose they can’t all choose more godly heavy metal like Disciple, Kutless, or Red. 😉 ) The update, if this is one, is that Ozzy just had Yuto as a guest at a concert the other night he did for Blizzcon 2009. Here’s a clip:
Put me on the crazy train, but I think Yuto did a better job singing the song on the Ellen show than Ozzy did at Blizzcon! Okay, to be fair Ozzy had just finished a set, and to put this politely he ain’t getting any younger. I did have to cringe though when he dropped the f-bomb right in front of Yuto, twice. So what do you all think?