77 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-13-16”

  4. Wow, Chas, I have a son that is 47.
    We are getting a good, soaking rain tonight. Tomorrow is Sports Day at the Primary School. prayers appreciated for good times and no injuries. Rain does not usually last too long, but we get a lot of it. My aide did not sleep last night as her roof was leaking.

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  6. If you’re wondering why she’s wearing a scarf in the house, it’s because the kitten likes to climb your shirt and nuzzle against your neck. And she has needle like little claws. The scarf is to protect her neck. Why she has a sweatshirt on I couldn’t tell you. It was like 70 inside, so she wasn’t cold. Who knows? 🙂

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  7. The old cat came right up and introduced herself to the new kitty. She sniffed her a couple of times, and then hissed and walked away. 🙂

    Mouse on the other hand, just went straight to hissing. 🙂

    Later when Elizabeth tried to pet Mouse, she smelled the kitten and hissed at ‘Liz too. 🙂

    We’re keeping the kitten segregated for now, until they get used to each other.

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  12. I saw the photo and thought wow, who is that? Then I knew it was Liz but so much has changed since I saw her that once. She has the sweatshirt (which isn’t called that) on because she likes it and it has those “thumb holes” in it which is what is popular right now. You see them a lot in yoga wear and exercise wear.

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  14. Cute!!! EEEEeeeeee.

    Elizabeth still reminds me of Laura Hillenbrand. 🙂

    And what beautiful orange and black markings on that kitten — calico?

    Cats crack me up when they hiss — I don’t think I’ve ever seen/heard Annie do that for some reason. She’s always been tolerant of the dogs (I kept her in a separate room for close to 2 weeks after bringing her home, she was maybe 1-2 years old).

    Tess still sometimes gives her the business, herding her into a corner and then standing with her head low and right over her like she’s a sheep. Annie just turns her ears down and waits for the moment to pass (I call Tess off immediately, of course). It happens mostly in the presence of food, Tess can’t let the cat be anywhere near what might wind up being scraps or dinner for the dogs.

    When I’m leashing the dogs up for a walk, Annie will come over and get just close enough for Tess to give her the famous “border collie eye” and lunge … Annie then gallops across the room before sneaking back …

    It’s really a game for Annie.

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  15. Elizabeth may be like my former co-worker, the reporter who looked good with her hair at virtually any length, from very, very short to really long — and everything in between. Lucky.

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  16. I like the thumb holes, very practical to keep hands warm yet mobile. 🙂

    So my living room is now filled with cardboard boxes, many of which I hope later to break down and ship out of here for the trash pickup tomorrow morning. I’ve inspected the sink as best I could without hauling it out completely (I’m afraid I’ll drop and break it, it weighs a ton).

    Still a few more things coming (lights, tile and bead board). Then I’ll have to get everything cleared out of the bathroom, of course, before work can begin — which I now anticipate happening before the end of October, maybe in 1-2 weeks from now. Probably makes sense to shift much of that into the spare room where the extra toilet and sink are since that’s where I’ll have to get ready for work during that time.

    Me and all the Christmas decorations & Annie’s litter box. It’ll be so cozy.

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  17. Very nice photo of Liz and Kitty. Liz is growing up, but Kitty will grow up faster!

    I have a hoodie that has those thumb holes on the sleeves. My brother gave it to me as a gift. It is nice to wear.

    My brother just finished his interview. It will be awhile before he hears on this position. It is not in the pharma industry.

    I am suppose to help my friend with her pre-op visit tomorrow. That will take some hours starting early, going downtown in rush hour. Not my choice of location, but it is what friends do, even if the friend is a liberal. We were friends before that mattered so much. My friend admitted respect for Pence. Maybe trying to humor me.🤗

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  18. KIm, from the prayer thread, and others dealing with young people.
    I had to deal with that with Chuck. He wanted to join the Marines. I agreed that it was good, but I had him read a book about basic training. He decided not to do that. (His cousin did)
    He went to work full time at a Three Chefs, a restaurant he worked part time for while in school.
    I still remember the setting for our talk. He was sitting on the piano bench, me in the easy chair. The gist of the talk:
    Everybody is headed somewhere. Do you want to be where your life is taking you?
    What are you going to do when you get there?
    You need to decide now.
    If you don’t like the road you’re on, you need to change now. The longer you put it off means the trip back becomes longer.
    As the preacher says, “This is he hour of decision.”

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  19. For me, the couple years spent in community college (completely unplanned) provided me with a niche where I could do the exploring I needed to do. I would never in a million years chosen the field I went into — and it took a couple years of college before I wound up discovering that, with the help of a counselor and some good testing. I’d be typing away in some boring office right now, although I might actually be making a lot more money. Sigh.

    Graduating from high school is a difficult time, I think for most of us it takes some more years of school to find where we might be going, at least in the “next steps” if not ultimately. It’s a process.

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  20. For that reason I’m a big fan of community college — it’s relatively inexpensive and doesn’t require an up-front commitment on a major. You just need to take the courses required for an AA which includes an amazing variety of subjects, from history to English to biology (I even took meteorology which was surprisingly fun), anthropology, political science, math (ugh).

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  21. The whole “where are you going” isn’t something you can just pull out of a hat in your late teens. At least not for most of us.

    For me, community college provided the opportunity to explore things I never would have otherwise been exposed to — it also gave me a needed post high school social niche without a lot of pressure.

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  24. Or tortoise shell cat? That’s I think what I was thinking before when I said calico. But maybe they’re similar.

    When I was looking for a western-y name for Annie (since I had a Tess an a Cowboy in the household), someone suggested Miss Kitty (from Gunsmoke).

    I tried a few Indian names — Pocahontas (too long), but landed on Annie Oakley pretty quickly — it also was fitting as I was getting her primarily as a mouser for the rats that were in our neighborhood. Cat rescue friend who suggested her said she’d already been observed hunting successfully within the feral cat colony that was being fed near one of our large county animal shelters.

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  25. There is a community college right here in town. That has been offered to her multiple times. I have also mentioned trade school and getting certified as an esthetician. Around here a facial will cost between $95 and $115 dollars. I don’t make that an hour!!!!! A lot of plastic surgeons and dermatologist employ them to help people with skin problems and camouflaging scars. If she wants to move up in retail management she needs to take some business classes. She is young, pretty, and is smart although she never applied herself in school. She doesn’t have much self confidence and I can’t give it to her. I have even mentioned joining the military because I figure if a female can make it through that she is bound to come out with some confidence. 😉 I once worked with a young woman who had been in the Marines. I was in awe of her because there was nothing you could throw at her that she couldn’t handle. She was gorgeous and when men would ogle her or make comments she OWNED them.

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  26. I have advised Eldest Niece to take a year or two after finishing high school before she goes to university or college. Not only will she be able to earn some of her tuition in that time (she is proving to be the type that will work at a job – yes, she has a job already – even if it isn’t the most fun in the world), but she will also be able to evaluate her goals. When I got my GED at 19, I took night courses in subjects that interested me, while working as a waitress on weekends and pursuing my Royal Conservatory music training in violin. I lived away from home during the week with relatives so I could take the courses and attend music lessons (there weren’t any advanced music teachers close to where I was). I did that for two years, until I got my Grade 10 RCM in violin and a certificate in French proficiency. Then it was back home for a year, while I tried to figure out what to do next – not having a full high school diploma meant I could not enter medical school, which had always been my desire. It was a bout of pneumonia which made me decide to look into getting nursing, instead of physician, training, and I was accepted on my first application to the nearest college. When I started nursing, I realized that I could handle the learning environment much better at 23 than I would have been able to at 19. I was much more sure of my own opinions and convictions by my early twenties and much less impressionable. I also was sure of what I wanted and willing to work hard and make sacrifices for it – which meant I not only was academically successful, but I had much less debt than most students. So, I’m all for taking one’s time about deciding to do higher education.

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  27. Re the post-high-school years: I knew what I wanted to do from the time I was 15. Well, before that I knew I wanted to write books, but at about 15 I realized editing was a good fit for me, though I didn’t realize it was an absolutely perfect fit until I began doing it. (A fellow editor once asked me if I’d had my Myers-Briggs (sp?) test done, and I said yes, I was an INTJ, and he nodded and said he thought so; most editors are. It’s the rarest category for women, but a perfect fit for an editor.)

    But I graduated high school early, 16 1/2, and had no way to pay for college. So I worked. Those pre-college jobs were so helpful in being mature enough to get a lot out of college when I went, besides of course offering me the ability to have cash for my first semester of college and a little bit toward the second semester. And when I look back, I realize they also helped when I graduated. See, when I graduated college I wasn’t a 22-year-old new graduate with only theoretical knowledge. I was almost 26, I’d already had full-time jobs (before college), part-time jobs relevant to my career (in college), and some maturity that probably gave me an advantage over a 22-year-old who might be applying for the same job, but also over a fellow 25-year-old who might be applying with a master’s and an expectation of more pay but with no job experience. I had the disadvantage of being older than nearly all my fellow students, which effectively put me out of the dating scene and also was initially a bit awkward since I was more accustomed to having my friends be older than me than younger than me. But I think that working for a while and not going to college right away proved to be a huge advantage to me in the long run. And now especially, when many college grads graduate with a lot of debt and take jobs that don’t require college and never do “use” what they learn in college . . . better than doing that is entering the job market, and taking college classes as you have an interest in something. (I think college should be primarily to learn and not to “prepare for the workplace,” anyway. But certainly if you are going to take career-track college, it makes more sense to begin it with some idea of what direction you are headed, or if you even need college at all. One may decide to take only a few classes, not to pursue a degree.)

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  28. By the way, the girl in the header and Eldest Niece are just a few months apart in age. Eldest Niece recently got her hair cut too, though not quite so short. Must be something to do with entering high school 😉

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  29. We agreed to give her a year. I think it will be good for her, but I SOOOOOOO wish I could get her away from here. I chose to come home, but I know there is more to the world than the community in which I live. She isn’t far enough removed from high school yet.

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  30. It looks like Roscuro and I are on the same track.

    Also . . . when I entered college, I had worked for more than a year at McDonald’s (at the busiest one in the state, the one with a really horrible head manager who had a reputation all over the city, at a location that had a three-month average turnover rate . . . in other words, I worked there more than five times as long as the average employee did), and I had worked full-time (with benefits!) for two years at a drugstore. I had lived on my own, with my own car, saving money for college, for two years. I was a full adult. I’d told people back in Arizona I planned to work for the bookstore while I attended college.

    I got to college and applied at the bookstore, and really thought I would be hired. It made total sense to hire me, and I’m actually surprised I wasn’t hired. I’d had two years of retail experience, and I was in college to study writing, so obviously I was interested in books. But I wasn’t hired. I checked back with the manager a couple of times to see if she had made a decision, and didn’t apply at any other jobs until she finally told me she had hired someone else. (Later in the semester I found out about another freshman who got hired at the bookstore and quit halfway through that first semester, and I wanted to go back to the manager and say, “See? You should have hired me!”) Few on-campus jobs were still available by the time the bookstore made its decision (as I recall, we weren’t allowed to apply at more than one on-campus job at the same time, so unless I decided to pull out of consideration for the bookstore job, I had to wait to hear). I then applied to work for the kitchen, though my time at McDonald’s made that an extremely distasteful prospect (no pun intended). Students were allowed to work 22 hours, so I was applying to work 20 hours. The kitchen was interested in hiring me, but wanted to give me 10 or 15 hours. I said I needed 20. He said they had learned to give freshmen no more than 15, since they couldn’t handle 20. I was already 22 and an adult, and I knew I needed 20 to make ends meet. I said no. The only job left was the cleaning crew–a job I wanted even less than I wanted to work in the kitchen. But I applied. That was five-hour evening shifts, and students could have their choice of two, three, or four nights a week. I chose to work four nights (twenty hours), which no one else did; everyone else worked 10 or 15. Once again, I beat the naysayer who said freshmen couldn’t handle 20 hours. All year I worked 20 hours at that job I detested, and I worked it full-time over all school breaks for the first year and part of my second year. My second to fourth years I worked on yearbook during the school years, other jobs during the breaks. By my senior year (my second year as editor in chief), I was working 30 or even 40 hours a week on yearbook, and I graduated with honors (barely). So the assessment that no freshmen can handle 20 hours a week really should have taken into account that a 22-year-old freshman with job experience (putting herself through college) is a whole lot different from an 18-year-old freshman without.

    And the bookstore manager was silly not to hire me.

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  32. Kim, if she’s working a job where she is happy and welcomed, isn’t that all she needs? Why go into debt for something else if she doesn’t want something else, or doesn’t want anything else right now? She can take classes as she develops an interest in something, or not.

    My daughter with a college degree loved her college years, and I can’t say whether she’d choose differently if she were choosing today. BUT financially she’d have been a lot better off not going to college. She could have worked full-time all those college years, and instead of taking debt into marriage she’d be taking savings into marriage. Again, she found college beneficial for things other than job training, and she might have chosen to do it anyway. But as job preparation, she would have been better off just getting a job. (She works mostly-full-time at a job without benefits, which she could have been doing all this time without the need for college at all.) She isn’t a career-focused woman, and I suspect marriage will make her even less so.

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  33. I was so lucky to go to college at a time when it was relatively affordable (by using the then-free community college for 2 years and then transferring to a state college which back then wasn’t prohibitive cost-wise). Can’t imagine having college debt to pay off right away. 😦

    Everyone has their own path — I was never one of those who knew how to answer that question “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” 🙂 I needed to travel the road to figure it out as I went.

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  35. I’m not advocating college here. I didn’t for Chuck. He chose that path. But everyone should realize where the path he’s traveling leads.
    Do I want to go there?

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  36. there is money for her to further her education without debt. My father fixed it when she was a month old.
    She wants more than what she is doing right now. She is finding out that she can’t afford herself on what she is making and the Bank of Mama has shut down unless it is a necessity that I would have paid for anyway.

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  37. PS I read it because I’m procrastinating about editing while my husband cleans house. In other words, I have two other things I need to be doing, but . . . (Actually, my husband and I tend not to clean house at the same time. He does some stuff, and I do some stuff, but usually one of us at a time.)

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  38. Kim, if she likes American Eagle and they like her, that may be answer. She needs to notice her boss’ boss and ask, “Would I like that job?”
    Chuck opted out of Three Chefs because he saw that his boss didn’t have a great job.
    If you don’t like your boss’ job, that tells you something.

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  39. I have been driving since 1948 and never encountered this before; A lesson for you.

    A couple of weeks ago, I backed my truck (’01 Ranger) into the driveway and offloaded some stuff. I let it sit there for about two weeks.
    The battery is fully charged. It is new-two months old.
    When I went out yesterday, it wouldn’t start. Radio wouldn’t even play. NOTHING.
    No hurry, but today I called AAA. They sent out a guy. He hooked something to the battery and IT STARTED.
    The battery was drained. Completely drained. I’ve never had a battery so low that the radio wouldn’t play.
    He said that new batteries do that. He said I need to run the car every couple of days to keep it charged.
    The alternator checked out OK.

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  40. More advice. This doesn’t apply to everyone because there is no such thing as “enough money” for people like the Clintons. But it applies to most.
    When you’re as poor as I was, you don’t care much what the job is as long as it plays well.
    There is a point where you are capable of making decisions based on other factors, especially, “is it worth it?” When I was mid-level, I often didn’t apply for positions I thought I wouldn’t like.
    You notice I didn’t run for President this time around.

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  41. She’s a calico. And she’s a cutie. She was purring and loving us this morning, in between bouts of hissing of course. 🙂

    She’s the offspring of a dropped off barn cat, so she’s not well socialized yet. But when she hisses at you, and then nuzzles against you while purring, she doesn’t really mean it. 🙂

    They were supposed to be eating already, but who knows, since there were several adult cats around too. She has been eating wet food though. Quite a bit really. She’s eating now actually. We built her an enclosure off the bedroom and she has her crate, blanket, food, water, and of course, a litter box. She’s been in it, but hasn’t really used it much yet, which leads me to believe she was still nursing, at least somewhat. Being outside, I suspect this is her first time with a litter box. She can’t have the run of the house until we’re sure she is using it, for obvious reasons.

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  42. Chas, the “would I like my boss’s job?” only goes so far. For me, I had no interest in store management when I worked for the drugstore, but I loved the job I myself did. It just didn’t pay enough for the long term, and I wanted to be an editor more than I wanted to do that job. Today I might be OK being a store manager, but as a 20-year-old kid I had zero interest or skills for that.

    I went to college and became an editor straight out of college. (None of my colleagues went straight into editing, nor did any of my fellow students with the possible exception of one.) When I’d been there two or three years, my supervisor asked if I was interested in management. I suspect she might have given me some tips to get there, if I was interested. She went freelance in a year or two, so perhaps she saw me as her replacement to be trained. I don’t know, I didn’t ask–I told her no, I wasn’t interested. Because I got into editing in order to edit books, not to manage people who edit books.

    I suspect that might be more true of women than of men, at least some of us. If you like the job you’re in, then stay there rather than go for a promotion just because you can.

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  43. Re: My 1:55. I went out and unplugged the SPS system. It uses power all the time.
    But I’ve never had one drain the battery.

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  44. I took 5 years after high school, went for a two year certificate in electronics, then worked for a few years and started my BA with three children at home at the age of 30. I agree that most young people need a break from school before going on to higher ed.

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  46. Posted by one of our elders on FB today:
    ________________________________________

    The country will survive whatever happens. We will survive it too. Our God is a lot bigger than our circumstances – and it’s not like His ways of guiding and shaping history haven’t always been mysterious and beyond the bounds of our finding out. So trust Him and know that whatever He’s doing – He is doing well. In the short term though, it might be a bit of a bumpy ride
    __________________________________________

    Busy day for me, there was a 6-year-old bitten (and was being dragged off until dad rescued him) by a coyote — not directly in our area, in Orange County, so our sister paper there is covering it but we’re running the story of course as it’s of very local interest.

    Meanwhile, I’m about to interview the family of a 61-year-old restaurant owner who was inadvertently shot and killed yesterday (intended victim also was killed, he was at the counter, 23 years old).

    Suspect is in custody, 18 years old, a gang member, probably some kind of gang-related dispute.

    But the family of the restaurant owner is completely distraught. 😦 😦

    He was getting ready to retire, had owned the restaurant for many years (a local burger joint) and often gave out free food to those in need. Family is at the mortuary now but promised they’d call me afterward, they want to pay tribute to what a great guy he was.

    Say some prayers for them.

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  48. My calico was named Callie Leigh. She loved me but she was a horrible cat. Refused to use a littler box. If she was in she wanted out and if she was out she wanted in. She destroyed the weather stripping on every door in the house. She hid from me when I left the house. She tore the covering from the bottom of the box springs on my bed so she could hide. She was a threat to climb in the Xterra if I was unloading something then get herself locked in. At night she would root up next to my shoulder. If I allowed it she would sleep on top of me. She went to live at the farm. She terrorized everyone at the vet’s office. They called her Sybil.

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  49. Donna, That poor coyote was hungry and the child was fair game. After all humans invaded the coyote’s territory. We humans are parasites on the earth. Just ask any envirowhack.

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  50. Wow, crazy morning with urgent deadlines — done for now, more to come later though.

    (I was in such a hurry I wrote public right a way as public “write” a way 🙂 Good thing the editor caught that one).

    The coyote must have thought he’d hit the jackpot, a whole 6-year-old kid, food for days!

    It would be like finding a random rump roast just lying in a field I guess.

    Unfortunately, rabies treatments ahead for that little one, which won’t be pleasant. So scary.

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  52. When ex husband was a small boy probably somewhere around six a friend’s Poodle bit him on the face. Even though the dog had been vaccinated for rabies, because it was on the face (close to the brain) Ex-H had to go through the series of shots. He will still shudder telling the story of going to get them. That poor little boy,

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  53. Yeah, a single coyote taking a child as old as six is a pretty menacing situation. Is that coyote considered shootable?

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  54. Yep, Cheryl. I haven’t quite gotten to the writing today . . . or laundry or cooking dinner or anything else on this list! I haven’t even ordered the Bonhoeffer Bible study–I think I’ll go do that right now . . . . then maybe I’ll write my blog post! 🙂

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  55. Hummus and pita chips are quite the lovely dinner
    Or I bought this really good cheese with cranberries in it last night. That on some water crackers was quite tasty for dinner (BG cancelled on me for dinner and Mr P had class)

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  56. LA city officials would put their fingers in their ears and close their eyes, but, yes, they’d probably allow humane trapping and euthanasia for that coyote.

    Luckily, this happened in Irvine, a city that’s had human bites from coyotes in the recent past and, as a result, has developed a much more rounded (and no-nonsense) approach than LA’s entrenched, no-kill “coexistence,” learn to live with them program.\

    Each city has their own program, some are coexistence/education + trapping/killing as an option when needed; others, like L.A., is coexistence/education only. They are convinced this is something we can all learn to live with — all we need to do is make a few little lifestyle adjustments. …

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  57. I passed another house in our neighborhood that had a sign posted, “Drive As If Your Child Lived Here.”
    I hope I will not seem heartless, but those signs irk me. I want to post one beside it that reads, “Watch Your Children As If You Live On A Busy Street.” People want to put responsibility for their children on others. The cars are rushing by outside right now. I always watched our son carefully so he would not tangle with a passing vehicle. I know many people travel faster in the neighborhoods than they should.

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  58. I made a quick and easy meal that Art enjoyed. I made cornbread earlier in the day. For dinner I cooked some diced onion in olive oil and would have added diced celery, but it had gotten too old. When the onion was softened, I added chopped chicken breast from leftover deli rotisserie chicken. I used some ground rosemary, turmeric, celery seed, and Natures Seasons to taste, and mixed in a can of Cambell’s Creme of Chicken soup. On a plate, I cut the cornbread up into little chunks and served the saucy chicken over it. It tastes very similar to chicken and dressing.

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  59. Kitty looks so tiny next to Nosey (isn’t that the name?)
    A friend suggested that I change Bosley’ s name to Kitty Bosley when we found out she was a girl.

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  60. Hummus and pita chips! a lovely dinner. I have everything, the store even got pita chips.
    BUT, when I put all the hummus ingredients in the blender it wouldn’t blend!
    I will be buying a new blender at Christmas time in Australia.

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  61. Irvine got to it.

    http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/10/13/65590/boy-6-bitten-by-coyote-at-orange-county-park/

    ______________________________________

    Officials have euthanized at least four coyotes around an Irvine park where a 6-year-old was bitten and dragged by a coyote last weekend.

    Andrew Hughan with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife said on Thursday it’s unclear if any of the coyotes was the individual that attacked the boy at Springbrook Park.

    The boy had been playing in the park when a coyote bit him in the arm and tried to drag him away. The child’s father and others were able to get the animal to let go and scare it away. The boy was treated for bites as well as cuts and scrapes.

    Hughan said the coyote responsible for the attack didn’t leave enough DNA on the boy to match against the euthanized animals. But the four killed coyotes did not have rabies. ..
    __________________________________

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  65. Janice, I have seen those signs and they do not bother me. I have seen people drive too fast on residential streets. Yes, parents should watch their children but any parent and any conscientious driver knows that children dart out in front of cars in a millisecond. I would rather see those signs and slow down than live with the guilt of hitting a child. As it was, one of those speed demons almost hit Amos when I lived on a street with a back alley. That was the first time since I was 18 that I lost complete control of my temper. I doubt that kid wanted to ever see me again.
    Please, reconsider your thoughts on this. You had a small child once too.You and I are different from parents with more than one child. How do you keep your eye constantly on two children?

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  66. Good article, Cheryl. I’d read of Carol Dweck’s work before, and found many useful applications in my roles as a mom and piano teacher.

    Young adulthood: My oldest two went to community college — 2nd Arrow immediately after high school, 1st Arrow, several years after entering the work force. The timing of their post-high-school education worked out well for both of them. 2nd Arrow knew before she was finished with high school that she wanted to be a vet tech, so she jumped right into it. (And she had started working at an area vet clinic when she was still in high school, earning money for school, and gaining job experience in the field she wanted.) She got her current full-time vet tech job immediately after graduating. Finished her apprenticeship on a Friday, and started work the following Monday.

    1st Arrow did not know what he wanted to do after high school, but he got a job at a reputable chain of convenience stores in our region, and continued working there through his community college years, studying for his degree in an IT field. It’s been a little over a year since he graduated, and, as I pointed out recently, he appears to be very close to getting hired in that field. (And he still has the job he started right out of high school.)

    3rd Arrow is 19, and her post-high-school trajectory is not like her older siblings’. I don’t really want to go into detail about that here, but Kim, I can relate to a lot of what you share as the mother of your own 19-year-old, and that helps me.

    As for me, I got a job right out of high school, working full-time for a music publisher the summer between high school graduation and starting college. I stayed on, but only part-time, during my freshman year, then (after getting fired — that’s a story for another day) I started teaching piano and organ lessons at a music store. The pay wasn’t very good — the store collected $3.50 per lesson from the students, and my portion of that was $2.50. Canceled lessons were never charged, and people tend to cancel for all sorts of reasons, sometimes at the last minute, so I’d be there sometimes and not get paid. I don’t think I ever got a paycheck for over $75 (for a whole month of lessons) all the years I was there.

    My parents paid for my tuition and books for all but my last year of school (I lived at home for the first five of my six years of college, but moved into apartments for my last year, at which time my parents said they wouldn’t pay for my college anymore). But by then, my boyfriend had become my fiancee (and would become my husband just after college graduation), and he paid for my college expenses and helped with my rental costs. But I wanted more income than I was getting through piano lessons, so that there was less financial burden on my guy, so I took an extra job, working on campus for the art department.

    The six years I spent in college could have been done in less time if I’d had a clear idea what I really wanted to do. I changed/added on to my major a few times. I started out as an Elementary Ed major and Music minor, then switched to a Music Ed major, with piano as my major instrument and viola as my minor. Then I added more credits in viola to make it my second major instrument, added in a cello minor to complement the viola major, and took on a vocal major and added Choir, so that I could become certified in vocal as well as instrumental (strings) teaching.

    I never did teach strings in a school setting after getting my degree, and taught general/vocal music for seven years, after which time I came home to be with my then two kids and teach piano from home.

    If I had it to do all over again, I would have skipped the whole public school teaching emphases, and studied piano pedagogy/performance. It’s what I’m doing now (along with homeschooling, of course), and I find performing and teaching piano very fulfilling.

    And I could still seek further education in the piano pedagogy field, too, if I want to, or possibly get a music composition degree, which of late has been an interesting thought I’ve entertained as a future (albeit probably not near-future) possibility.

    All that to say I don’t think our youths need to be rushed to make a career decision, or hurry and get to college while they’re still thinking about what it is they might want to do. There’s great potential for time- and money-wasting when youth just aren’t sure, and a lot of us end up on a different path, anyway, from what we may have envisioned for our future careers.

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  70. Michelle, do you mean they take it out of the fridge and eat it, or that you’re planning to make spaghetti for dinner and they all have pasta for lunch?

    Liked by 1 person

  71. We had a nice pizza/birthday party for Chuck.
    Elvera gave him a birthday card with a picture of her when she was about 7 months pregnant with him. She was at the door of our trailer getting ready to fly to SC to see parents.

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  72. Animal crackers and milk to drink
    This is the finest of dinners I think
    Ogden Nash

    Hummus and pita chips
    It beats nothing
    Kim

    Oh and Amos thinks he has scored big to get pita chips.

    Liked by 1 person

  73. Kim,

    Has he had sour cream and onion Pringles? Misten would start drooling as soon as my husband picked up the can. The last day of her life, she turned her head away from offers of cheese and of beef broth. When I offered a Pringle, she turned her head away, but then her brain said, “Wait! Did you smell what she offered you?” and she turned back to get it. So I pushed my finger on to it and broke it into four pieces, which I gave her and she ate. The girl was an addict. She got at most one per day (usually one every several days), but I never saw her so focused on anything.

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  74. Dogs are hopeless beggars (although mine are pretty much trained as they rarely get anything from my food while I’m eating it 🙂 )

    The cat pesters me whenever I’m drinking milk, she tries to dip her paw into the glass.

    Interesting newcast video on the coyote attack with some interviews of a witness and a couple residents (and footage of a coyote in their neighborhood taken in August)

    http://abc7.com/news/6-year-old-boy-attacked-dragged-by-coyote-at-irvine-park/1554303/

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  75. trained NOT to beg.

    But all it takes is the slightest hint and there they are, staring at me an swiping their tongues over their lips and noses …

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  76. The Grove, one of our shopping centers in the Hollywood area — I was just there a few weeks ago — has banned Donald Trump from going there apparently. How weird is that?

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