An interrupted blog

Superman became a senior in high school today..

This is the blog I was writing last night when news about the Georgia indictments broke, and of course then I was glued to the TV. The blog isn’t anything that meaningful—it won’t make you day or improve your life. Mostly, it’s just a chance for me to show off how adorable my grandson was at three and whine about my awful computer problem yesterday morning, with a grateful nod to my son, Colin for this patience with me. But what happened in Georgia may change all our lives. It may, probably will lead to difficult days, perhaps even the oft-threatened violence, but I am convinced we will come out better on the other side, and that the tensions and divisions that have beleaguered our nation since 2016 will begin to heal. I think as a country, a democracy, we had no choice but to prosecute our former president and his colleagues to the full extent of the law. And as Fani Willis emphasized, they are presumed innocent by the courts, something that they would deny others. Today is a day to be proud of America.

Hard for me to believe that the kid who ran around my kitchen in a Superman cape is now a senior in high school, but he is, all concerned with which class he should drop and which class he should sign up for. Wish I understood the process—if he didn’t want the class and didn’t need it for credits, how did he get signed up in the first place? He regaled us at supper with tales of the first day, and it sounded as expected—pretty much chaos.

Jacob headed out.

I put out a call on our neighborhood email list for back-to-school pictures of neighborhood children for the next issue of the newsletter, which as you may know I edit. I have been inundated with pictures—which is a good thing. Mostly I get pictures of elementary school children, but I have a few middle and high school. I know, however, there are a lot more high school students in our neighborhood. Perhaps, like Jacob, they don’t want their pictures published. Jacob will be chagrined to be the oldest one in the next newsletter—shh! Don’t tell him. I never intended to tell him about the Superman picture, but his mom couldn’t resist.

I was the one who needed to go back to school today. I had just barely begun work at my computer, when the cursor froze—and then disappeared. Totally. Gone. In a panic, I called my Colin. He spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, saying scroll here with the number key, hit this key, tab there. Do you have any idea how hard it is to naviage a computer without a cursor. Poor Colin was supposed to be preparing for two business phone calls this afternoon and instead he was helping his idiot mother. There would be gaps in our conversation, silences so long that I sometimes asked if he was still there. Other times I could hear the clack of his keyboard as he searched for a solution, I presume. I finally suggested we give it up, he prepare for and take his afternoon phone calls, and we’d reconnect in the evening.

He agreed but emailed a few minutes later with one more instruction. I tried it and eureka! The cursor reappeared. I cannot tell you how devastated I was at the prospect of a day without a computer. Call it an unhealthy addiction if you will, but I had no idea what I’d do all day—even the book I am reading is on my computer. By the by, airplane mode was the culprit and turning it off for half an hour or more part of the solution. Just turning it off and on again apparently doesn’t work. I have always said computers, like people, need time to collect themselves after a crisis.

North Texas is basking in a cool front. Tonight at ten o’clock, when it has been in the upper nineties most evenings, it is eighty-five—and a low of the mid-seventies is predicted. It’s not supposed to last long—a couple of days—and it apparently brings none of the rain we so badly need. But this brief cool front, like the indictments, is so welcome.

Have a great day everyone. Be proud that we live in America.

Back-to-school Sunday

Our country—or the advertising industry—seems to have a special name for every day: Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Love Your Dog Day, Eat More Vegetables Day, and so on. Churches have special days too, besides holy holidays, like Youth Sunday and Reformation Sunday, but I recognized one today and wondered if churches consciously name the last Sunday before school Back-to-School Sunday. The whole service had a different feel about it, an anticipatory vibrancy.

In my family I’m very aware of what our minister called the energy and buzz that surrounds the opening of school. Jacob heads into his senior year in high school, Morgan begins college at Texas Tech, and the rest continue their educational path without milestones. I am so proud of each of them and so excited to watch their progress this year. But a part of me is a bit frightened, and I pray for my family. The church service this morning brought that home to me.

At our church after summer absences, we had most ministers back and an almost full choir, a sure sign that the new year begins. The service was highlighted by dozens of youngsters, maybe pre-K to third grade, who crowded the chancel steps and the floor in front, most with their backpacks, to be blessed. Perhaps this should be called Backpack Sunday.

There they were, with a few anxious parents hovering about.  Be still my heart! It has been ten or twelve years since Jacob was in that crowd, but it seems like yesterday. And those children looked so young and innocent and vulnerable.

It suddenly hit me about those sweet youngsters—and my grands. They may not only be nervous, which the minister acknowledged, but they may be downright scared. Is this the year a shooter will visit their school? Will they survive the year? Texas has done nothing significant to protect them or control guns since the massacre at Uvalde. You can stil buy an assault rifle at eighteen with no license, no training, and only a cursory background check. Schools will have armed personnel, which may well lead to more deaths, not fewer. I suspect more than a few schools, desperate to conform to the law, are hiring untrained personnel. And more guns just mean more shooting and more chance of accidents.

There has been one special session of the legislature, at Abbott’s call, to deal with taxes, and apparently, he will call another to try once more to push through his pet idea of school vouchers, which will render public education more ineffective than ever. But no special session on guns. Legislators were busy during regular session banning books and outlawing drag queens. The argument, of course, is that we must protect our precious children. But don’t dare come for the parents’ guns! Somehow too many Texans don’t feel their children are threatened by guns, despite the numerous school shootings our state has seen under Abbott’s governance.

Abbott, whose firm hand controls what goes on in this state, is not a man known for his compassion. And he makes no exception for children. In addition to nearly turning a blind eye to school shootings, he is allowing children to be killed at the border by razor wire and by neglect on buses illegally transporting asylum seekers to “safe” cities. He has issued not one word of regret about the child’s body found floating in the Rio Grande nor about the infant that died on a bus to Chicago. He may, however, have gotten too big for his britches: assaulting asylum seekers violates the Geneva Convention, which theoretically could leave him liable for charges from the World Court at The Hague. And now, Texas twin politician brothers, the Castros, are asking President Joe Biden to halt Abbott’s forced bus trips. Abbott’s entire handling of the border violates Federal law and is now in the courts, but for asylum-seeking parents with young children, the courts move way too slowly.

You may think it’s a leap from those earnest little kids on the chancel steps this morning—some did look a bit bored—to immigrant children dying at Texas’ hands, but it’s really not. Those deaths—and pray there are not more—speak to what kind of state we live in, what kind of people we are, because we tolerate them. We elect the men and women who pass harsh laws without a trace of humanitarianism, who tolerate the far-right demands for guns, including assault rifles which no civilian needs. If we want to protect the kids at my church, where my grandson was not too many years ago, we have to protect all children. We have to extend our love.

“Three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and of these love is the greatest.”

Back to school and not much else

 

This is Jacob, ready for high school, even though it will be remote. He's had his picture taken on the first day every years since kindergarten. This year is a first in several ways.

The first day of school but in such a strange year. My Austin grandsons and my local grandson started remote school today; I am still unsure if the Tomball kids are in the classroom or working form home, but I’m pretty sure their mom, a seventh-grade math teacher, is back in the classroom. Whether it’s remote or not, I don’t know. And the younger of my two Frisco grandgirls started her senior high school  year today. I think about her a lot—your senior year should be one of great adventure, lots of parties, lots of excitement, and I wonder what this year will be for her. I’m not sure if she’s in the classroom or not. Her sister, a senior at Colorado University in Boulder, is taking all remote classes except one lab.

Jacob told me tonight that his remote classes were not a good thing—I forget how he phrased it, but I had read that the Fort Worth ISD had “technical problems,” as did Dallas ISD. Jacob liked the golf team which is new for him this year (I don’t think golf is offered in middle school.) He’s been taking lessons all summer and playing as much as he could. With the high school team, he goes to a golf course some distance from the house for team meetings and practices. Tomorrow is supposed to be his try-out for the team, and he tells me he thinks he’ll do all right but he doubts it will happen. It’s supposed to rain.

I foresee a cutting back on the family dinners we’ve enjoyed ever since we began quarantining. Jacob will have golf though I don’t know how many nights a week, and Christian has begun to have occasional evening meetings for various charitable committees. Perhaps the world is creeping back to some kind of normalcy, even as we still keep our distance. But I will regret losing those family dinners. Tonight I ate alone and had leftovers—a bit of salmon too dry to be eaten alone, so I made it into salmon salad and sided it with cottage cheese.

Tonight in Texas, we are expecting dramatically cooler temperatures—like a high in the eighties tomorrow. Today’s high was ninety-three, and when neighbor Mary and I sat out for happy hour tonight, it was downright pleasant. As I write tonight, at 10:30, we are awaiting rain which was initially supposed to arrive between two and five, then got pushed to eleven. It’s very still tonight and very dark, so I expect the rain is coming. Christian just told me the heaviest rain will be tomorrow. Meantime, we’re seeing pictures of heavy snow in Wyoming, and Denver is under a snow warning. On September 8? Really? The world is really out of whack. But then, we all knew that.

At home the only other news is a couple of small happenings—tonight, Sophie nearly caught her tail on fire. Mary is a magnet for mosquitoes, so Jordan had put a citronella candle right next to her feet. Sophie, being her usual sociable self, came too close and in a minute, we smelled burning hair. I haven’t examined closely, but I suspect there’s some singed hair on that full tail that she wags around.

I have decided I will never master curbside pick-up for groceries. Jordan picked up an order yesterday and came home with four—yes, four bottles of maple syrup. I had been so intent on posting a note to the shopper that I didn’t want the brands online but wanted Central Market’s Organic syrup (from Vermont, I think). We thought the four bottles were a mistake (not a cheap one) and I was prepared to object, when I checked my order and it said four. All I can think of is that I upped the number of lemons to four and somehow got it mixed up. I’m hoping Christian will find lots of maple recipes for grilling salmon.

I’m ready for a change in the pace of life. Maybe the back-to-school feeling in the air gives me the jitters or maybe it’s the increasingly tumultuous political scene, but I have this sense of waiting for something to happen. Something big. Not a completely happy feeling.

Tomorrow is bound to be a better day! Stay safe.

Was the eclipse a jinx?

Eclipse be darned. The important thing around here is that it was Jacob’s first day at middle school. Looks ready to take on the world to me.

The consensus in the Alter/Burton household is that, in Texas, the eclipse as pretty much a bust. Jacob and his classmates were issued glasses and ushered outside, appropriately during science class, but he said it was one of the most boring things he’s ever done—ah, young exaggeration. Jordan and friends went to a restaurant with a patio, and she said she should have stayed home and worked, but she’d have felt she missed something if she didn’t go look. A friend came for lunch with me, and we kept looking outside but really didn’t see much darkening. Apparently, Texas only had 70% whatever that means.

I’ve seen places in the central path where it got dark, and from reports of people who were in Oregon, Wyoming, Carbondale (IL), it was an awesome experience. All it meant here, far as I could tell, was a jinx. I had a lot of work on my desk, but everything I touched turned to mush. I was trying to put together the neighborhood newsletter, but files acted funny, others were formatted in ways that made them so difficult to deal with I threw my hands in the air.

I had to straighten out an insurance matter and none of the options on the automated menu covered it. The robot on the other end didn’t understand what I was saying. So I went online and tried the ”chat” option but when I tried to respond it froze. Finally, with help from the broker who arranged the insurance (through TCU) I got a real person at the insurance company. Of course, it turned out that I really did owe that overdue payment I was challenging.

Then I tackled the problem of an eye exam. My insurance doesn’t pay my doctor of 30 years because he’s an ophthalmologist—that comes under medical, so I have to go to an optometrist. It took literally a half hour on the phone to get the name of the area optometrist my doctor recommends.

Anybody want to calculate the amount of time I spent on the phone, mostly on hold? I don’t even want to think about it.

One bright spot: Teddy came and walked with me. I determined to be confident and to take it slow. Thought I did really well. Pleased with myself, and he, eternal cheerleader, was complimentary.

Tonight the world looks a bit better. I finished all of the newsletter I can do with what I have on hand—waiting for late submissions. I got the medical insurance straightened out, and a mammogram appointment made, with a note on the calendar to schedule an optometrist appointment (got to space those appointments out). I finished the mystery I was reading. No work on my own novel today, but that was pretty much a given.

Whoosh. I deserve wine and supper.