I’ve signed up to volunteer at my grandson’s school — mostly for anything involving performances. I’m going to try to get my name in for a kindergarten fieldtrip to see Frogz several months from now.
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off DKos. It's also so we can find other Kossacks nearby for in-person checks when other methods of communication fail - a buddy system. Members come here to check in. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we and your buddy are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!
IAN is a great group to join, and a good place to learn to write diaries. Drop one of us a PM to be added to the Itzl Alert Network anytime! We all share the publishing duties, and we welcome everyone who reads IAN to write diaries for the group! Every member is an editor, so anyone can take a turn when they have something to say, photos and music to share, a cause to promote or news!
*************************
Dreams. Some current science.
This isn’t all that new. I remember eating fried grasshoppers and chocolate covered ants during a lesson when I was in third grade.
Possibly staying in the Paris Accord. Gosh, somebody must have mentioned the potential profits in 45’s hearing.
Consumer Reports is against the newest Obamacare repeal bill.
New information on a long observed oddity in the asteroid belt.
*************************
Like most of us, I’ve been following coverage of the current list of disasters online. The only thing I’ve noticed that comes close to being a mistake is that The Daily Mail keeps calling Puerto Rico a country. It’s a territory, folks — it’s a US territory.
*************************
Wednesday was a late-start day for school, so I got a late start on running my errands. One thing I found out was that the SSA office in town (which closes early on Wednesdays) closes a lot earlier than I had thought. I did get all the rest of my errands run.
On the way from one errand to another, I ended up going through a Farmer’s Market that was happening in the park near the theaters on Broadway. I bought some bread and stopped to talk to the guy selling goat cheese. He also had chocolate goat cheese truffles. I looked at the price, and thought about it, asked him a couple of questions, and handed him the $20 I had. “Oh, you want one?” “No, I want as many as that will get me.” Eight. They lasted into Saturday.
*************************
My adventure on Thursday started before I dropped my grandson off. He accompanied me to the office when I went to make sure of what I needed to do about signing in on days I have volunteered to do something, and when he decided I’d taken enough time about it, he grabbed my coat sleeve and hauled me out to where he thought we needed to be. And this was after we had already been in the library and I had read him a couple more poems out of Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich!
I got to the SSA office about 9:15 AM, on the bus — I won’t run weekday errands downtown using the car. It took me half an hour to get inside and to the screening process, which took another 5 or 10 minutes just in itself. There is now a computerized registration system and I got a numbered ticket when I checked in. I was called at somewhere just around noon. A woman came running up as I got to the window and said she and her daughter had had a 9:00 AM appointment and still hadn’t talked to anybody, so after a few minutes the woman at the window asked me to sit back down and for sure I would be the next one called. About 10 minutes later, I was the next one called. The sum total of my business was to get the W-4V form I had filled out into an actual person’s hands. This took all of about a minute and a half, including every bell and whistle the guy could come up with: entering the information on the computer, then stamping the form as completed, and lastly making a copy for their office records and giving the original back to me for my records.
*************************
I got my new chair put together on Friday. Comfy chair, comfy chair, ooooooh, comfy, comfy, comfy. Just the right height for my desk, too. And no temptation to lean on the arms when I’m typing, either, though they’re exactly where I need them to be to lean back and inspect my work. This is a very good thing.
Friday was my mother’s birthday. She’s 86 now. Her plans for the day included doing whatever she damn well pleased. Which she did with great enjoyment.
*************************
Saturday I saw my chiropractor — she is going back to a full schedule, or trying to, and gave me an 8:00 AM appointment because I like that time and also because I’d make a pleasant start to her workday. It felt good. She complemented me on the bodily changes that have happened just in the past 2½ weeks since I started walking my grandson to school. She also endorsed my plan to start some yoga-based exercise for increasing my flexibility. I don’t hurt as much as I did (and it was never all that bad anyway), but I still creak more than I want to.
After that, two hours of grocery shopping. My chiropractor has her office in Beaverton, so it is possible for me to hit, in order, WinCo Foods, New Seasons Market, Trader Joe’s, Penzeys Spices, Fred Meyer, and Uwajimaya if I make a circle to go home instead of retracing my arrival route. This trip I left out Penzeys and Fred Meyer — but there have been times (like just before the holidays) that I have gone to every single one of them.
*************************
Have I mentioned that my granddaughter seems to be kind of actually liking middle school? It’s hard to tell — she does pissy eleven year old girl even better than her aunt my secondborn did, and my second could win a contest against a very dear friend of mine who enjoys doing the gay drama queen shtick. I was there at the time — he conceded less than four hours into it.