Catch-up

Finished Parchment of Leaves and told Eva that we didn't read the same book. She didn't think it ended. I'm left to wonder how in the world she could think that. Beautiful. Exquisite. Magnificent.

Forgot about a funny from yesterday. Two teachers were telling the story of finding a boy in the hall playing games as to where he was supposed to be for lunch. One caught him and told him where he was supposed to be. The other one ran into him as he was going back to his rightful place. She started to say something, and he said, "I know. I'm headed back. Ms. Z already told me." (He wasn't smart about it; he was just matter-0f-fact.) The teacher was laughing about it in the lounge and she said, "I bet when he sees me, he's thinking, 'Here comes the b&#*@.'" Just as she was saying that last phrase, Tony D. walked in the door. The timing couldn't have been planned better!

Bush won both the teacher and the student elections, as did the Republican party and the marriage amendment.

Bart's car (with him in it) got clipped today by a maniac driver who didn't stop. Filing a mail-in police report about that.

Brian is convinced that we're going to get a referral come New Year's Eve. Oh, me of little faith.

If you don't mind my saying so

I'm 2/3 of the way through Parchment of Leaves and I believe it is the most beautifully written novel I have ever laid my hands on.

Election coverage

BUSH WINS!

The mock election at school proved to be a landslide for Republicans while the Weekly Reader poll--a poll that has accurately predicted the president since 1954--gave Bush a pretty lop-sided victory, as well.

Shoot me if you will; I'm doing the happy dance!

Will this NEVER end? I HOPE NOT!

Our efficient secretary sent out the bulletin today along with a message:

Most of you know that Mom is in the restroom at Butler. They are having a little Fall Festival Friday night. They have several local businesses that have donated prizes, such as floral arrangements, gift certificates, etc., and I am selling chances for $1 each. Money from this raffle will go in the nursing home activity fund. See me if you would like to purchase a chance.

It took a few e-mails from staff for her to realize that she had accidentally locked her mother in the restroom in Butler rather than in the rest home in Butler.

That's OK. These gaffes are the only things holding us together.

Church today

Randy Fryman and I, when we get on theology, have to be the two most pig-headed people in this Northern Kentucky vicinity.

What I'm saying is, when we get together, we ain't gonna be mainstream.

So today we found ourselves once again discussing the rituals of "the church" and the fact that I refuse to attend this week, being our week of "revival." Maybe it's pride; maybe it's an attitude I need to adjust. I'm never sure on this count. I do know, though, that Randy and I both agreed that we were having "church" in the middle of the library at 3:45 this afternoon, separation of church and state be hanged.

"Where two or three are gathered in my name..." Randy and I made two.

"there will I be also." I don't think we were talking about Jesus behind his back. It's kind of hard to do that when he's everywhere, as he promised.

"Forsake not yourselves the assembly of yourselves, and all the more as you see the day approaching." Randy and I were assembled.

Today isn't Sunday. We didn't have a building with a steeple. (All the better.) Instead of instruments, we were surrounded by books and paper and computers.

And I felt a lot more encouraged and focused today than I've felt in quite a while.

Dangling modifiers and smart alecks

My tape dispensers and scissors have come up missing over the past couple of days. After a glance around the place, I decided that they had been accidentally absconded. I sent an e-mail this morning:

I am missing a black tape dispenser, a red tape dispenser, and more than one pair of blue-handled scissors. If anyone has inadvertantly relocated these items (they should be marked), please return them to the library ASAP. Thanks.

Later, I received this reply from our math teacher:

The red tape dispenser has been relocated to Frankfort where there is never a shortage.

I had to put it on the library listserv. Even Frankfort loved it!

Makes the drudgery somewhat better

One of our teachers said that she was teaching dance today and that she had her students sitting on the floor while she stood in the middle. One of the boys said, "Miss _________, I can tell you wear thongs."

She whipped around to face him. "WHAT?!"

The rest of the class snapped their attention toward him, too.

"Yeah. It's the way your toes are shaped..."

Opening the hearts

Monday I got an e-mail from a listserv: Can anyone here help Emily? She has hypoplastic left heart syndrome, she is in China, and Beijing's hospital can't help her.

I knew that condition too well. A friend lost her baby to that 9 years ago.

A bunch of us volunteered to help. Some contacted organizations that give grants to help bring children here. I volunteered to call Children's to see if we could get her in. Others sent money for the foster family.

I got word last night that Emily had died.

But...

I had told Brian about Emily early on. He's done a 180 and has decided that someone--ANYONE almost--needs to help the children there who have problems. Makes me wonder where we'll be in a few years...

Good quote

"Sometimes people of faith say, 'Well, God is going to take care of everything.' But what Christians need to realize is that God takes care of everything precisely through His people. He always calls His people into the battle." -- Father Frank Pavone

Today's novel-ty

Sharon V.'s class came in for books today. The boys ALWAYS want something as close to her minimum of 100 pages as they can get. Today, though, one of the boys, Josh, said, "Give me something that is on this list," and he proceeded to hand me the list for the next Gala. I told him that I may have one, but I wasn't sure. Sure enough, though, I did have one. It was close to 400 pages long.

His eyes popped and he stood for several minutes, contemplating. He really wanted something shorter, but at the same time...Finally, he checked it out, still gazing at the size of the thing.

The class left and he and his buddy stayed behind for a moment. Adam looked at Josh and said, "What's the matter?"

Josh, still stunned at what he'd picked out, said, "Well, look at this thing! Gee! It's a novel!"

Only after I howled did he realize what he had said.

We've flipped our LID!

We are now officially, officially, officially "pregnant." Received word yesterday that our dossier was logged in in Guangzhou, China, on October 13, 2004. Simply, that means our dossier has been translated into the official Chinese language and now they know we exist...BOY, do they know. (Actually, it isn't too bad.)

What that means in a nutshell is that come March (I hope) or April (more likely), we will know who our daughter is. =)

I've already bought my "maternity top." Hope I get it in time to wear it Friday week for dress-down day.

A (too much) informational lunch

Our NJROTC commander entered the lounge as a group of us was eating lunch today to ask Mr. D. (our assistant principal) if he had his radio. The commode in the men's bathroom across the hall was running and someone needed to alert the custodial staff.

In a few moments, we heard the head custodian, leading her band of custodial women up the hall. Then we heard Michelle yell, "Is anybody in here?" Pause. "We're coming in!"

In a couple of moments, the three came into the lounge. Michelle picked up the phone and told the secretary that she had "caught" the running toilet. Then she said, "I had to fix the stopper ball. I had an automatic flusher on there, but Mr. W. complained that it would flush the whole time he was sitting there; then it quit when he needed it to flush."

Two of the three of us who were eating were nearly dying as we tried to suppress our laughter.

"I'm not kidding!" she continued. "He shared one morning when I had just gotten to school--in full detail! Then he finally said, 'I guess it's too early for this conversation.'"

I said, "MIDNIGHT is too early for that conversation." I am a verbal person. Imagery abounds as you tell this stuff. EEEEEEEeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!

We continued laughing and Mr. D., with his keen sense of humor, said, "Hey! It isn't funny! Mr. W isn't the only one that happens to! It doesn't discriminate! It's happened to me lots of times!"

All I could think when I was leaving was that I'd see Mr. W. in the hall on my way back to the room.

And Patty wondered when we had installed bidets in the men's restroom.

Lights, Cameras...

We caught the action today.

Spent the morning watching Mr. White leading these men around the building. By 11:30 kids were talking about security cameras in the 300 hallway.

Now SBDM had discussed the possibility of getting them last Wednesday. That was as far as it got; so when Teri and I met up in the hallway later, we both were like, "What the heck?"

She called me later. "They're demos," she said. "We're keeping them a few days to try them out."

Little did we know that some kids would take that thought to heart.

By 12:30, I was getting an entirely different message from Teri.

"Carolyn!" she whispered loudly through the hallway as I was walking around the corner. "Come here."

She was laughing so I knew this was good.

"Those cameras. They caught two kids stealing stuff! Only two cameras and only in the 300 hallway, and they caught two kids stealing stuff!"

I hope those two don't become gamblers. They don't have a shot.

Speaker phones are the devil

Of late I've grown accustomed to using the speaker feature on my school phone. It's great for those times when kids check out books and/or the printer runs out of paper. My hands are free and I don't have the concern of dropping the phone off my shoulder and onto the hard surfaces around me.

So when the phone rang today around lunch--our busiest time, I hit the speaker button and continued doing whatever it was that I had been doing before it rang.

"Good afternoon. Library," I said.

"Mrs. Reid?" It was our zany English teacher, Mr. King.

Now a few moments before I had asked some of the kids to quiet down--an unusual move on my part, but one of the girls was yelling loudly enough for the adjoining hallways to catch every word. (She was talking to a teacher.) About 10-15 people were in the library and all but three of them were students.

AND a couple minutes before, I had also sent the newest booklist for the Literary Gala to all of the English teachers.

These two factors combined with not ever knowing what may proceed out of Mr. King's mouth should have been enough to make me pick up the phone, regardless, but I am a slow learner.

"Mrs. Reid, this is Mr. King. Uh...I noticed that The Time-Traveler's Wife is on the Gala list. Who's leading it?"

"Mrs. Harper," I replied.

I heard a groan of what I interpreted to be disappointment.

"Why?" I asked. "Did you want to lead the discussion on it?"

"Uh...no."

The crowd around me was being amazingly respectful. I could have heard Mr. King if I'd had the speaker volume down all the way--which, of course, I didn't.

"Uh...I thought I'd call because--well, it's a really good book, but--"

I reached for the phone. Too late.

"...the main character has sex with himself."

I chose THEN to grab the phone.

The kids were wonderful. I heard a few snorts and I saw some shoulders bouncing, but most seemed not to know how to react. Mr. Fryman, a fellow who had my mother in Sunday School class, looked at me like, "What are you promoting now?"

"Uhh...Mr. King. I had you on speaker phone."

"You had me on speaker phone?" He let out a nervous chuckle.

"Yeah. Good news is that I think I have a bunch of kids who want to read it now."

I related the story to Sharon V., another English teacher, after we attended a meeting and she howled. She called a little bit later with some news.

"Take me off speaker phone," was the first thing she said.

Good stuff from John Fischer

Talking about the decision Jesus made to go to the cross and unpleasant responsibilities in this life:

"...Of course, the cup of death He faced and my pile of mundane responsibilities can hardly be spoken of in the same breath, but the principle is the same. Somehow, He got himself to be willing to do what He didn't want to do. 'Not my will, but thine be done,' He prayed. Maybe I could learn something from His experience...This time He said, 'My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, thy will be done.'

"There is something very obvious here, so simple it could be missed. There was a way to make the cup of death pass away: drink it."

From my favorite chapter so far, "Where's the Graffiti?":

"In contrast [to separate-from-the-world Christian mentality], it is clearly implied by His prayer that Jesus wants us to be in the middle of things, just as He was. He wants us to be vulnerable to the attacks of the world, out where His prayer is not just a nice idea from a morning devotional hour but a matter of survival. If we aren't out where it's dangerous, we mock Jesus's concern for our protection and undermine His reason for sending us as His ambassadors to the world."

Explains a lot of what Rich Mullins said.

And another favorite, "The Art of Fromming":

"Fromming is simply not enough. We can't stop at telling people what they are being saved from. They need a good dose of to--to excellence, to learning, to creativity, to exploration, to experimentation, to God, to risk, to love, to life! We are called to do all this in the world...Christ has not saved us from the world; He has saved us to the world. His prayer for all believers continues: 'As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world' (John 17:18).

"If we could just stop all this fromming, imagine what we could get down to!"

"Holier Than Who?"

He begins by complaining about people who stop mid-swear-word, saying he doesn't like it because it makes him feel "...as if I just sprouted wings and wore this silly glow over my head. (Is this what Jesus meant by being a light in the world--glowing in the dark?)."

"Christians get frustrated the same way other people do. We always worry about money, fight with our mates, lose our tempers, gossip, and distrust one another. We even swear; except we have 'Christian' swear words like 'gee,' 'darn it' and 'shoot.' Does changing a few letters somehow sanctify an outburst of anger?"

"...Sin has already been judged on the Cross, and righeousness will be established in Heaven."

I could re-publish this whole chapter.

My "day off"

If you want to call it that.

Did five loads--wait...six loads of laundry and hung two out. I cleaned windows only to realize they need puttying again, so I'll have to clean windows again once that is done tomorrow (please!). I washed the dog, folded laundry, worked (and am still working) on the house, went to get pizza, talked to Dad, talked to Mom, talked to Rich, talked to Bart, talked to Brian (twice)...

I forget the rest.

Now I have to go get windows out of the way and make the bed.

The sin of omission

A friend of mine was describing a new battle she is having with her eighth-grade daughter. Emily has fallen into the game of telling only what she wants her parents to know while leaving them in the dark about important details that she knows will affect their decisions. Sharon has explained to her that this is a lie, too--a lie of omission. Of course, when they went shopping the other day, her mother spent a little more than she was supposed to have. As they walked out the door, Sharon told Emily, "Now, we don't have to tell Dad about buying these other things." Emily, being her mother's daughter, jumped right on it. "Oh!" she brought up slyly. "Is this one of those lies of omission you've been telling me about?"

As humorous as that was, yesterday I ran across a situation that was not humorous. This situation made me re-reevaluate what is going on with our country at this time.

Our newest classified worker is in a classroom right off the library. Her job is to help with kids who have emotional and behavioral disorders. She's tough--hard-core, a mutual friend calls her. But she loves with the toughness that she hits life in general. She's deep. She's real. I love her.

So yesterday was movie day in the EBD classroom. The teacher, trying to find movies of value, chose Schindler's List. Judy came through the library and said, "I'm staying with you. I can't watch this."

I sympathized. That is one of a handful of movies that I really want to see, but I can't bring myself to watch it. Like The Passion, Life Is Beautiful, and a few others, even the thought of sitting in front of a screen, watching the suffering or at least knowing it is going on, is more than I can take.

Still, I didn't think this outlook fit Judy.

She continued. "I worked with a man who had a tattoo on his wrist. For a long time, I thought it said "Mom"..."

I got chills.

"Once you got to really know him, he'd tell you about it. He was 16 when he was taken. He was tough, too. The only reason they kept him alive was because he was a welder. When he learned he was making war equipment for the German army, he'd hold the weld a little too long. They soon figured out what was going on, so the guards would make the workers mark them.

"One fellow was older and he had lots of experience with this kind of work, so they made him a supervisor over the welders. One day, they acted up, so the guards took the supervisor out and executed him. They left this man locked up in a cage with his body for two weeks.

"And the German Jews are still upset with the United States today. This went on for years and we knew about it. German Jews were calling their American relatives, telling them what was going on. Word got to high places, but no one did anything..."

I chimed in. "Until someone attacked us directly and then we felt like we had to get involved."

"That's right. No one thought it was any of our business, but here people were dying and being tortured and were leading miserable lives, and it wasn't our problem."

And they say God works in mysterious ways. What if he'd stopped the bombings at Pearl Harbor?

I made a parallel. "So now here we are, in Iraq, and people say we don't need to be there when the same thing was going on there."

"Exactly. And you can understand why some of the Iraqis don't want us there! We were there before and we pulled out before we did our jobs and it just got worse for them. Now we're back and people are afraid we're going to do the same thing again."

I'm not pro-war. I hate the idea of us being there, but I know that we're there for a good reason, regardless of the spin. Hussein had his own Holocaust going. bin Ladin wants one. Sometimes there are better ways to handle things, but sometimes there aren't.

This time, I'm not sure we have a choice.

Good phone call

Bart called today. Usually when he calls, something is wrong. Today something was right.

First he made a 108 of 96 (no I didn't invert the numbers) on his Greek test.

Then he said that he has a Wednesday night youth group that could turn into an internship if the minister has anything to do with it.

He's coming home Tuesday night.

The minister at the church where he's going to do youth work told him to do what he could to get home this weekend. (I hope Chik-Fil-A is soon a distant memory, but only on his terms.)

I'm a happy mommy.

An evening with the nieces experiencing another culture

Copied from an e-mail that I sent. Lazy, but why reinvent that proverbial wheel?

Autumn Moon was fun. We pet chicks and milked goats (Emma marched right up there and stuck out her hand. That poor goat needed all the help she could get! She looked miserable!) Emma liked the pigs while Sarah liked the chicks. Emma couldn't figure out what the miniature horse was, I believe. She stared at it like, "Do I touch you?" And we went on a hayride and selected and bought pumpkins out of the patch and ate and had a bonfire and...

The ceremony became terribly disorganized because of the hayride schedule, but we got the gist of what they were doing. The Chinese do this once a year (springtime there) to honor and remember their ancestors. One of the Jei-Jeis (big sisters) told me that it wasn't quite as simple as we make it, but I guess we got the point. All they did last night was call the children from the crowd, introducing them by their names and by their birthplaces. (The bios got to participate, too, so you'd hear "Cincinnati, OH" at one moment, then "Jiangxi Province" the next.) Then the children took a lighted incense stick and stuck it in a pot. I was prepared to be touched by the ceremony, but so much activity was going on that it soon became a free-for-all, so it didn't work that way; but what DID touch me was this couple and their son (?). He is studying at UC and I believe his parents were with him. They didn't speak one word of English. (Actually, the man told Emma and me "bye" as they left but that was it.) I didn't know this at the time I sat Sarah down next to them, though. This woman smiled ALL OVER herself and started talking to Sarah. I got the idea that she was asking Sarah how old she was, but Sarah didn't get it. Then their son (?) asked her in English and she held up 4 fingers. The woman LOVED it. The family talked to Sarah and played with her and Emma (they sat her between them at one point) until they left. Sarah took right to them, too. Emma didn't seem to mind them much, either. The man picked Sarah up and hugged her before he left. They just seemed to be delighted with the girls. I suppose the language barrier had kept most of the children and parents away all evening. When we sat next to them, we didn't care they didn't speak English and they cared as little that we didn't speak Chinese. I got to speak, too, to a couple other exchange students. They are all very sweet people. In the end I took an application for a jei-jei for Mary. I think I'll get started now with that and update when we know about her specifically. It broke my heart last night to see Sarah not understanding what that couple was saying to her when they obviously adored her so much. I decided then that I will do what I can to help Mary keep that connection as well as other connections to her birth culture; after all, she will always be Chinese. Why can't she be fortunate enough to be connected to Dragonfests and ancestral ceremonies AND baseball and apple pie?

FINALLY!!!!!

We got word this afternoon. We're FINALLY DTC! In a few days we'll get our LID. We should receive TA in about 6 months--right after we receive our referral.

Now go figure out all those letters, will you.

Rich thinks HE'S ready to beat a kid!

I've been harassing a friend of mine to get her book selection in for the next Literary Gala--a book discussion group that we hold with the kids. She's been avoiding the subject because she's not even finished with her selection for the first one next week; so I thought she was just trying to annoy me as I have been annoying her when I received this message today:

• Not to change the subject, but I started Out of Order last night. I've read a little over 100 pages, and it's really good. It does have some spicy (though realistic) language. I told Brett I was going to complain to the librarian about the language. He said, "Mom uses those words all the time. She probably didn't see anything wrong with the language."

I caught him later to ride him and it turns out he actually told her that! In front of other teens, at that! Oh, boy.

Earlier this week, the kid was wrongly accused of stealing. His dad and I went to bat for him against the bat who accused him and this is the thanks I get.

;-)