Category: Journal (Page 1 of 815)

One of my students has been working on her pencil box for many days.

She painted one of the squares with liquid correction fluid. Then she painted it again. And again and again and again….

What a testament to persistence!

I’m playing for church every Sunday now, and my collection of “incidental” music is just too small. I play a prelude and some music during the offering each week. I just don’t have enough in my little collection of books.

The balcony at my church has boxes and boxes of music in it. Most of it looks like choir music. I will need to organize and catalog that some day. But I went up there to poke around a little and found this:

It’s a whole bunch of music based on hymn tunes! Yay! I haven’t put them in order, but I think it’s the whole series. I’ll have music to play for ages!

One of the boys at my school had planned to get baptized before our pastor took a Call, but it didn’t happen. Yesterday in chapel, he had me do it.

This is a third grader, so I don’t know him as well as the seventh grader I baptized. But we did have a long conversation about gardening, because he planted a pumpkin seed that had grown so well it was making a pumpkin.

The baptism went well. I was honored to do it. His classmates all came forward. It was cool to have them all around.

The eighth graders didn’t have to go to school yesterday, and I am so glad. I slept as late as I could, then went out to the couch and continued to rest.

I got caught up with school emails, unpacked my luggage, and cleaned my garage a little, because I’m going to do video-call training with my old trainer. Yay! I really need the exercise. I had an organizational meeting with her yesterday. We’ll start for real on Monday.

I’ve been trying to get some equipment. At first I got kettle-bells from a sporting goods store. I saw some for sale at Ross, and they were so much cheaper I took the sporting-goods-store ones back.

Today will be another rest day. And maybe an errand day.

We started the day yesterday by stopping at a souvenir store. The people inside were kind to us mobbing their store. It was early, so we were the only ones there. They gave us 10% off! Cool!

Our main stop for the morning was the 9/11 memorial museum. It was quite well done, and great for the kids to learn more about, but I didn’t like walking through it. It was difficult.

The museum is deep underground, down where the building was anchored into the ground.

They talked a little about the construction of the building.

But it was mostly about the events of 9/11. It was a little dim in there. I had some trouble reading the placards. Here’s the metal cross from the rescue site. I recognized it, so I took a picture:

These tissue dispensers were scattered around. I could understand why. It was an emotional place:

The old footprints of the two buildings are inverted fountains now. We looked at them, but only briefly, because it had started to rain:

After that, we got back on the bus and headed to the airport. It was a difficult check-in, because we had to pay for checked baggage, and there was a problem with the computer, and when we went through security, they didn’t just have the kids go through the metal-detector, they went through the scanner, and a bunch of them did it wrong and had to be searched, and one girl was crying because she got searched extra-thoroughly and felt weird and scared about the person’s hands all over her. Stupid government.

Our flight went well (and fast it seemed) and we were back in California again. What a crazy fun trip. I’m glad we don’t have school today. I will be sleeping as late as I possibly can.