I haven’t participated in the Baltimore City recycling program up to this point. In the contest between laziness and guilt, laziness always won. There were two dates each month you could put recycling on the curb. One was cardboard day and one was aluminum day. Wait… plastic could be put out sometime, too, but I don’t remember when. So it was confusing and required me to keep everything around for a month before setting it out… which required organization… which required energy. Laziness always won.
Recently, Baltimore City changed their program. Now twice a month you can leave all recyclable materials out on the curb in the same container and they’ll take it away. Much easier… Guilt wins.
The city offers some nifty yellow bins to hold your recycling, but you can only buy it from certain facilities at certain times. The last time we had a snow day I tried to get one, but no one was there to “take my money”. There were lots and lots of people there, and I could see the bins, but no one would take my twelve dollars. Stupid government. Yesterday, someone was there to take my money, so I got my bin.
I want to put my address on the bin, but it’s super-hard, super-smooth plastic. I have two different brands of permanent markers, and both of them rub right off. I’m considering scratching or melting the plastic with the necessary information. It will be interesting to experiment. A saw? A knife? A hot glue gun? To the laboratory, Igor!
Peggy will soon be going to Italy. Her husband’s family is from Italy and has some business to take care of, and she’s going along. This is Peggy’s first long-distance flight, so we’ve been joking with her about the plane going down. Yesterday we gave her a bunch of travel gifts, and Michele created a whole kit Peggy could use if she were the only survivor and were stranded on some island in the Atlantic. I gave her a can of English sponge cake (so she could get used to eating foreign food), and a Latin/English dictionary (in case she met the pope).
We went for a bite to eat after school, just in case this was the last time we’d see Peggy. She doesn’t leave until next week, but once people get busy with vacation plans, we didn’t know if we could get together. Today and tomorrow we don’t have school, then we’re off all next week.
Here is our “just in case” photo:
I am featured in our Middle School newspaper today.
Last week, one of the newspaper kids asked if he could interview me for the newspaper. For the last issue of the newspaper, I gave this kid some information for an article about Lent. I thought he was going to ask me about Easter. Instead he started asking all kinds of questions about me. A couple days later he mumbled something between classes about “by-the-way-being-an-article-about-teacher-of-the-month” and hurried off.
Well, here it is, in all its sort-of-what-I-said glory: my Teacher of the Month write up. I hope I don’t have to deal with more of the down side of fame… the paparazzi, the endless PR engagements, the marriage proposals from Britney Spears… it’s all so tiring.
I came home to a wonderful-smelling dining room. It really stunned me how good it smelled. It took only a moment to realize it was coming from my orange tree.
I have a little orange tree I got a few years ago. I take it outside in the summer, but bring it in for winter. It is a Calamondin Orange, so the fruits are very tiny. I’ve only ever used them squeezed over asparagus. They’re very sour. But its blooms smell exactly like orange blooms – one of the best smells in the flower kingdom. I could sit in a chair in the living room and smell that smell for a long time. In fact, I did that last night. Mmmm…
Sorry for all the posts about plants, but this is what Spring is like in Brad’s world: always looking for the next sign of approaching warm weather. I don’t need no stinkin’ weatherman! The plants tell me all I need to know.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
One year ago, I was having a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day meal with my family at Ryan’s Daughter, an Irish pub and restaurant nearby. My mom and dad sent me a St. Patrick’s Day card with a little money in it and suggested I go there again, so I did.
After church, I went to the restaurant with Denis. He had corned beef and cabbage. I had fish and chips. There was no live music yet because we were early, but the food was really good.
After the meal, I went on a little quest to find the marigold seeds I hadn’t been able to get from Burpee. I didn’t find them. But it should be fun to spend a day looking sometime next week when I’m off.
P.S. Dad’s getting his first hip replacement today. Please pray for him and his doctors.
