"Do not mistreat the stranger living in your land"

I worry for the emigrant children I know. They are working hard in school. What waits for them when they graduate from high school?

Extracts from statement by the Community Relations Council of the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation

We Were Strangers Too: Why We Must Speak Out for Greater College Access

Our Jewish values and religious teachings, coupled with lessons from our history, call us to strongly speak out in favor of allowing qualified undocumented students to enroll in North Carolina's community colleges and public universities, and against the current state community college policy barring such enrollment.

As people of faith and conscience, we believe that our calling is to welcome immigrants, offering them hospitality and justice.

In the Bible, it states: "Do not mistreat the stranger living in your land, but treat him just as you treat the native among you. Love strangers as you love yourselves, because you were strangers once in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33-34).

The Bible also commands us all: "Justice, justice shall you pursue." (Deuteronomy 16:20).

Enabling immigrant students to attend public colleges and universities would give an equal opportunity to those young people who have grown up in North Carolina, and been educated in North Carolina public schools, to continue their education. Justice, and love of the stranger, require no less.

This is also about investing in the future of North Carolina and the people who live, work and raise families here. It is about policies that promote a vibrant economy as well as a cohesive and just society.

These are high school students who have attended elementary and secondary schools in this state for most of their lives, are likely to remain in the state and are high achieving and highly motivated to succeed.

By allowing these students to pursue higher education, the state can benefit from their talents as bilingual and bicultural workers and professionals who will contribute to the state's collective productivity and economic growth.

It is crucial that all people of faith and conscience engage in this discussion regarding access to higher education for undocumented immigrant students. We encourage our Jewish, Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters to step up and welcome the stranger who is also our neighbor.

People of good will must not be silent; they must speak out in favor of legislation that supports our shared values and against proposed bills that sow anti-immigrant prejudice and misunderstanding.

For people of faith, the stranger reflects an opportunity, not a problem.

In the words of Elie Wiesel, who experienced first-hand the unjust enmity of those who viewed him as a "stranger," as "other": "The stranger suggests a world to be believed in, enhanced, or saved. In the Jewish tradition, the stranger may very well be someone important: a prophet in disguise, one of the hidden just men, or even the Messiah. He must be accepted for what he is, the way he is."

Menticia and I become part of Chapel Hill's history project.

Graig Meyer, head of the Blue Ribbon Mentor Advocate Program, sent the mentors an email about this and my eight-grade friend Menticia was game, so we went.

Extracts from
Our Stories, In Focus - A Community Art and History Project
Share your story - become part of Chapel Hill's history!
We invite you to bring your piece of history (a photo, a letter, etc.) to either of our two community workshops listed below, where we will scan or photograph your item to be included in a public art community portrait created by local artists Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman-Blass.

Further explore your personal and community history at these workshops by participating in oral history, genealogy, journal writing and story circle sessions. An art project for children will also be offered during these workshops.

This public arts and history collaboration invites residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro to look more closely at their personal and community histories by participating in workshops that explore two questions: What brought you or your family to this place? and What is the legacy you want to leave in your community?

Art Project

Bring personal mementos you'd like to see as part of the community's living legacy. Artists Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman-Blass will make reproductions of photos, letters, journal entries, postcards, old newspaper articles and more. These images will be printed on strips of translucent paper to create a "tapestry" [which] "tapestry" will become a permanent public artwork to be displayed in the community.

You may also take a moment to describe your memento for the artwork's video archive.

Journal Writing and Story Circle

Join in journal writing and story circle sessions with Debra Kaufman and Grey Brown. These involve exercises designed to trigger images or memories to get you started writing a story, personal essay, or poem about some aspect of your personal or community history.

Oral Histories

Come in pairs to tell your story in an audio-recorded interview under the guidance of The Southern Oral History Program from UNC's Center for the Study of the American South.

The project was lodged in a large space in the mall which used to be a furniture store; the furniture store went out of business and this gaping hole is now available for "events." It was early when we arrived so people at all the stations were happy to see us.

I had brought two photos - one of my great grandparents in front of their farm in 1924, the other of their son (my grandfather) and his two daughters and son (my dad), who had a band called "The Peppler Family" and had a regular radio show in York PA and played for local fairs and picnics.

Menticia had demurred when I asked her to bring something, but I'd badgered her enough so she showed up with two photos of the dusty, lonely looking street where her mother lived in Puebla Mexico. One picture featured a big tree with orange flowers.

The artists at the first station scanned our pictures. Then we went around the corner and were videographed as we told our stories.

I explained: my father's people had spoken Pennsylvania Dutch although the families had lived in this country since the mid-1700s, and that my grandmother had been taken out of school in fourth grade to roll cigars and it was then that she learned English, at the factory, and that the Peppler Family Band had been broken up when my aunts got married because their husbands thought it wasn't proper for married women to play music.

Menticia stood tall and confident, telling the videographer: her mom had explained that, living on such a dusty street in such a tiny empty town, she had hoped for something better for her children, and that's why the family had moved to Chapel Hill when Menticia was one year old. She pointed out the tree with the orange flowers and said it was her mother's favorite climbing tree when she was a little girl.

Next we went to the oral history station, where we were each given a lavalier mic and had a series of questions to get us started. I interviewed her and vice versa. She said all she remembered from the early times was that Chapel Hill was "very quiet." She said it had been easy for her to learn English, in ESL sessions in pre-school, but that her parents had struggled for a long time, and that now all the kids speak English to each in the home but the parents are reluctant.

I asked her, for the interview, what her hopes are for the future. She said she wants to go to UNC in Chapel Hill and become a nurse. I think she'll be great.

Then we went and got copies of the New York Times front covers for the days we were born (the NYT cost a nickel on the day of my birth in late 1953).

Lastly, we were directed to where two women were sitting rather disconsolately alone at a table in the very back of the space. This was the "writing workshop" and Menticia and I were the only volunteers. They perked up a great deal when we sat down, and gave us paper and pencils.

The first woman read us some poems about food, and then we all wrote and wrote about food and then read what we'd written. Menticia wrote about coming home tired and hungry from school and being so excited wondering what wonderful dinner her mother had cooked that night. Her mother truly is a fabulous cook and I drool just thinking about her tamales.

A couple more people came for the second half, when the other writer read some poems about shopping and we wrote and wrote and then read our writing aloud, and then it was over.

Menticia had a GREAT time doing this writing, and did it very fluidly, and that surprised me because she always says she hates to write at school. "It was because of the way they did it - I liked that they read us examples, and that we could write whatever we wanted, and then it was fun to read it out loud." Too bad they can't do that at school.

Menticia explained they never have a chance to do fiction or personal writing at school, and that all their writing is confined by strict rules and requirements. Of course that's important too, but I was a little sad seeing how excited she was to do this free writing and to realize she'll rarely get the chance.

It was late and we were hungry, but we had to stop on the way out and make "wish flags" which were being hung on strings all across the windows, painting fabric ink on squares of cloth and then writing our wishes with Sharpies. Menticia wished people would take responsibility for their own actions! I wished a happier, healthier world for the children than we all have right now.

Then we went and had a fine Chinese lunch.

Why are there so few male mentors?

This is an article written by Graig Meyer, coordinator of the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate Program for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. I think he's a genius, he's the guy that put Menticia and me together. I've tried to get the guys I know to mentor but they all present excuses 1, 2, 3, and 4 as summarized below. I swear it's one of the most fun and inspiring things you can do.

Extracts from
Why are there so few male mentors?
by Graig Meyer for the Chapel Hill News
Across the Triangle, there are dozens of mentoring programs trying to support young men by providing them with male role models. We know firsthand what newspaper headlines tell us: too many boys in our society are failing school and falling between the cracks.

Like most mentoring programs, the program that I run has one challenge that surpasses all others: recruiting enough male mentors.

Twice a year, our program trains a group of new mentors and brings in new students to our program. Last fall we faced a crisis. With only one week to go before our training for mentors was to begin, no men had stepped forward to volunteer.

That's right. No men had volunteered to become mentors. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Recently, a social worker from one of our local elementary schools told me that she asked teachers at her school to recommend students for our program. They recommended two girls ... and eight boys. That's no surprise. There are probably about four times as many boys who need mentors as girls. Unfortunately, our female mentors outnumber their male counterparts 2:1.

Why don't men volunteer? (Are you reading this, men?) They consistently tell me four things:

1. I'm too busy.
   
2. I'm not patient enough.
   
3. I wouldn't be good at it.
   
4. I'm not sure it really works.

Guys, I'm calling you out. Those are excuses that are leaving our young men behind.

First of all, it does work. We have a 100 percent high school graduation rate for our male students, and 100 percent of them have also gone on to some type of post-secondary education.

You would be good at mentoring. You are patient enough. There is no movie-influenced Supermentor role that you need to fulfill. You just need to be yourself. There are boys in our community who need you.

Making the time is something you can choose to do. And I promise you that you will be rewarded.

Men: Step up to the plate. Mentoring programs need to hear from you. Most programs ask for you to give just a couple of hours per week.

You can include your mentee in things you're already doing, like going to a basketball game, fishing, fixing your car or cooking dinner.

Women: Reach out to the men in your lives. The best way to recruit a mentor is to tell him, "You'd really make a great mentor." Give them some information on a mentoring program in your area. Or even better, call the program and give the program a few names of your male friends. We'll call them on your recommendation.

Couples: Sometimes it's easier for a married couple to mentor together. If a husband and wife volunteer together, we can match you with a male mentee. You can split the mentoring responsibilities between you. It's a great activity to do together.

There are mentoring programs throughout the Triangle that need your support. It takes men stepping up to the plate to make sure that our programs don't struggle with this issue and that our society doesn't fail our young men.

Menticia's letter to President Obama

My mentee is in a class called "AVID," which stands for "Advancement Via Individual Determination," here's a bit from their website:

AVID is a fourth- through twelfth-grade system to prepare students in the academic middle for four-year college eligibility. It has a proven track record in bringing out the best in students, and in closing the achievement gap... Typically, they will be the first in their families to attend college, and many are from low-income or minority families. AVID pulls these students out of their unchallenging courses and puts them on the college track: acceleration instead of remediation.

Everybody in her AVID class wrote a letter to Obama, and here is hers:

President Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President Obama:

I am a 13-year-old Hispanic girl, and an eighth grader at Smith Middle School. Getting involved in school is something I enjoy doing, especially when it comes to sports. Being athletic is something I take as a challenge as well as a fun game. Challenging myself is something I like. Being known by my teachers as a great student-athlete is something I appreciate. Just by knowing there is somebody looking after you gives you more confidence and that helps me to achieve more.
I am sure there are many people who will watch you as president. These people voted for you because you will be a good president. Congratulations, I was hoped that you would win. I wish you best of luck on the years that await you. Good and bad things will happen in the next years, but I am confident that you will do a wonderful job.
In my AVID class we are reading a book called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens”. It shows as how to keep organized and how to not let bad habits get in the way of our goals. I would suggest that you, Put first things first. By having lots of important things to do, you can’t do them all at the same time. For a start you can start with the promises that you made in your campaign. We the people have the confidence that you will do the best to make America better place.
Now that you are in charge you may have times that make you frustrated. That happens to me when I play sports. Don’t be a quitter is something I tell myself when I feel like doing that. I make sure I continue to participate and ask tons of questions until I understand everything. Not being a quitter is something I taught myself and it has helped to make me stronger. Believe in yourself.
Once again, I hope you enjoy being president, never quit, and remember that we are expecting you to do what is important to make our lives better.

In which I take Menticia and Itxa to the beach.

Last week, when we were walking around killing time while my flat tire got fixed, I'd asked Menticia: "What did you want to do this summer that you didn't get to do?" She'd instantly answered: "Go to the beach."

My heart sank a little because for months when I'd ask, "is your family doing something fun this summer?" she'd say, "Well, we're going to go to the beach." Whether because of the long, long hours her parents work, or the $60-80 in gas the trip requires, it never happened.

So I suggested that this week, her last week before school starts, we could go to Wrightsville Beach and she could take a friend or two. She chose her sister Ixta.

She wanted to leave at 7 am but I said I couldn't make it that early, so we rolled out at 8 and made it to the beach before 11:00, and we parked in one of my favorite parking lots in the world: The one that's right at the end of I-40 if you make one left turn. The road becomes local, crosses a lovely bridge over the sound past a bunch of boats, and then ends because if you go any further you'll be on the sand and then in the ocean.

My kids and I once stayed at the "Silver Gull," a sort of run-down cinder-block hotel, in a room on the second floor with a balcony overlooking this parking lot. We'd sit out on the balcony and watch tous le monde in action: changing into (and out of) bathing suits with various degrees of finesse and modesty, sorting fishing equipment, drinking beer, having arguments and passionate scenes of all kinds. There are happy kids and screaming sobbing kids and there's excitement and exasperation galore and it's just so much fun. So I like parking in this lot and being part of the scene.

The girls had packed methodically and they unpacked the car at a measured pace which quite surprised me. We set up camp under Johnny Mercer's pier and when they were done, it looked like home away from home. (My kids and I were much more slap-dash than this!)

[By the way, I'm furious at Johnny Mercer for CHARGING CASH MONEY to let people walk on the pier. Cheap @#$#%@#%!!! Well, at least he didn't charge us for the use of the sand UNDER his pier.]

We had chairs, and tons of food and drinks and a cooler, and towels and clothes and stuff, and it doesn't sound like much, but it was a fine bivouac.

And then they slathered themselves with sunscreen and refused to leave the shade under the pier for 20 minutes. I thought that was odd because their chances of getting sunburn were minimal, but sadly, they were deathly afraid of getting "darker."

Menticia told me solemnly that when she gets darker in the sun, she never gets lighter again, that she has been getting darker and darker since she was born.

They spent hours swimming and then more hours searching for shells. Itxa tried to get Menticia to go fetch her one of our zip-lock bags - and Menticia was about to go fetch it (and as you can see we were a long way from the pier) - but subversively I said: "You don't have to go, why doesn't she go for herself?" And I joked with Itxa: "You know, I was an older sister, I know this trick." In the end, we all went.


Under the pier near us were seven or eight Japanese guys. They were there all day, just like us. They were girl-watching very intently, all their heads aligned in parallel reminding me of the gulls that stand in a row facing into the wind, except with the laser-like focus Jethro the donkey shows when I appear with his dinner. These guys and their devoted ogling made Menticia and Ixta fall into endless, helpless fits of giggles.

At one point one of the guys clutched his heart and fell into the sand with a theatrical scream. At another point I started laughing cause one of them was taking pictures of some hotties in bikinis and he saw me laughing at him. Busted! Well, we were both busted! He laughed too and said, "THEY [his buddies] made me do it." They buried one of their members all the way to his head in sand and asked me to take a group picture. I wish I'd taken one with my own camera, too.

Though they squabble a bit, the girls are so close. They look so deeply into each others' eyes, it's telepathic communication. It made me wish I'd had a sister. My life would have been different.


Before we left, Menticia said "I want to take a picture of the ocean." Itxa didn't understand why she'd want a picture of just the water, with no people in it.

Then she carefully filled a zip-lock bag with sand to take home.


The girls were intent on finding perfect shells, but I told them I like broken ones better because you can see inside them, and because they have so much character and reflect time passing. (I didn't say, I like them better because they remind me of me, but that's what I was thinking.) So Menticia found me this one and it's going "straight to the pool room."


Technorati Tags: mentoring

Illustrating for Menticia that "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."

I picked up Menticia this afternoon. We planned to go on a "nature walk" as she calls it, since it was the first nice day in ages, but first I had a small errand to do: I'd made a test cd for Bob of the cuts from our new cd, and I wanted to drop it off at his house.

On the way, I made her listen to our songs of murder and mayhem for "We Did It! Songs of People Behaving Badly." I kept asking: "Do you understand?" She laughed at the jokes and showed horror in the right places, so that was good.

We got to Bob's house and he was home! We popped the cd into his crummy boombox (the theory being that, since most people listen to music on crummy machines, that's how it should be mixed) and took sketchy notes on changes to be made.

Then, to reward her for her patience, a walk to Locopops. I egged her on: "Don't you want to try tamarind pomegranate? Or maybe cucumber basil?" She calmly ignored me and ordered chocolate brownie and we walked back to the car.

The car had a completely flat tire.

I hauled out my tire pump and pumped it up and we drove to a tire place. They were very busy -- we had an hour and a half to kill.

So much for the nature walk - but Menticia pointed out we could walk anyway. We were in town so we headed towards Ninth Street and I started yammering about "best-laid plans" often not working out, as witness this afternoon.

The subject is timely: lately Menticia's been worried she may not have the fortitude for her first-choice profession of nursing, and has been wondering whether going to veterinary school might be best. "You have lots of time to decide, and change your mind many times - everybody's plans change. Look at us, now, for instance!"

(As her mentor, I felt obliged to point out that both nursing and veterinary science will require that she hang in there with science and math - especially with fractions, her bete noire.)

So we walked, and we toured a Third-World bead-and-bangles shop and a craft gallery, and we poked our heads in all the restaurants, and she passed up Mediterranean (shawarma and baba ghanoush) in favor of the Vietnamese restaurant, Banh's cuisine, where the same lady has been on duty every single time I've been there for the last quarter century.

Having now googled Robert Burns' famous line, which I quoted incorrectly to Menticia, I see Burns thinks a wrecked scheme is a bad thing - the mouse's house was destroyed, and Burns feels very sorry for himself - but in real life Plan B is often just fine, in fact often better than Plan A would have been.

So then we walked back to the tire place and watched the young employee behind the desk trying to come up with the Spanish equivalent of "lug nut" as she talked to a non-English-speaking customer.

When it was our turn, she asked us: "Do you speak Spanish?" Jeimy didn't say anything, because she likes to hold her cards close to her chest. I told the young woman I thought her Spanish was good, had she learned it on the job?

"No, I learned it when I was in music school. I'm a French horn player and thought I would tour Latin America with a symphony orchestra, so Spanish would be handy. But that didn't turn out so well, it's hard to get a job in classical music... Now I'm thinking of going into the medical profession."

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Be a mentor!

My relationship with "Menticia" has been a joy and a pleasure for more than three years now. Graig Mayer (see below) is really a genius and the program is run very well. If you live around here and think you could enjoy young energy in your life, if you have two hours a week to spare for a kid, call/email Graig.

Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate is a nationally recognized, award-winning program. Our mission is to help African-American and Latino students reach their full academic, physical, social and emotional potential.

Our groundbreaking model supports students from their 4th grade year all the way through college. 95% of our students have graduated from high school, and 100% of our graduates have gone on to post-secondary education.

We are currently seeking 20-25 volunteers to begin mentoring students in March.
Please consider becoming a mentor and sharing this invitation with others.
Click here to learn more about volunteering.

For more information, contact:
Graig Meyer
Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate
Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools
750 S. Merritt Mill Rd.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
http://www.chccs.k12.nc.us/brma
gmeyer@chccs.k12.nc.us
919-918-2170

Math project: making Mexico out of chocolate cake.

Hard to believe: Menticia told me her final math project of the year was to make a map of Mexico out of cake, with her friend's help. The map had to have landforms and rivers, and it had to have a legend, and everything had to be edible.

At first she insisted we use a "Tres Leches" recipe, but I convinced her such a soggy cake would not be easy to put frosting on. We chose, instead, the "Texas Sheet Cake" recipe below.

Since the cake had to be very large, we doubled the recipe (math!), made two 9x13 pans, and put them next to each other. Menticia and her friend - who had never before cracked an egg in her entire life - each made one cake. Here they are boiling the cocoa with butter and water.

Then we made a whole lot of icing and they went off to play while the cakes baked and then cooled under a fan.


My idea for getting Mexico onto the cake: we printed a map from the internet, drew a grid on it, then drew a larger grid on a piece of layout paper as big as two cake pans put together. I showed Menticia how to copy what she saw in each square and soon we had a large map of Mexico.

Then she and her friend cut out the bit of the Pacific Ocean which would be on the left and put it on the cake and sifted confectioners sugar over the boundary between sea and land. When they took the piece of paper off, there was a clear sugar-dust outline and they put blue icing up to that boundary.

After sifting sugar over the boundary of Mexico with the Pacific, the U.S.A., the Gulf of Mexico, and Central America, and putting colored icing in all those non-Mexico places, everything else got yellow Mexico icing.

Then we fired up the conical icing tube and they squeezed lines of blue for rivers, lines of red for political borders, and then switched tips and squished out little brown mountain ranges. I wanted to do some green tropical lushness, too, but it was all just getting too complicated.



Here it is.


In this picture you can see the legend - we made it on a matzah.

It was WAY past time for them to go home before we got this finished. I put them both in the car, slid the huge cake onto their laps, and drove VERY carefully to Menticia's house. I felt tremendous relief when I handed off this cake to Menticia's mother - if it fell on the floor after that, Not My Problem.

Be a mentor!

Texas Sheet Cake

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 cups sugar
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup butter
* 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* 2 eggs
* 1/2 cup buttermilk or sour milk
* 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1. Grease a 13X9X2-inch baking pan.
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt; set aside.
3. In a medium saucepan combine 1 cup butter, 1/3 cup cocoa, and 1 cup of water.
4. Bring mixture to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat.
5. With an electric hand-held mixer on medium speed, beat chocolate mixture into the dry mixture until thoroughly blended.
6. Add eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla. Beat for 1 minute (batter will be thin).
7. Pour batter into the prepared pan.
8. Bake in a 350̊ oven about 35 minutes, or until a wooden pick or cake tester inserted in center comes out clean.

Icing

10 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup pure maple syrup

1. Using electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter in large bowl until light and fluffy.
2. Add powdered sugar and beat at low speed until well blended.
3. Beat in maple syrup.
4. Chill until just firm enough to spread, 30 minutes.

Technorati Tags: Recipe, Receipt, Mentor, Education, Mexico, Math

Menticia hears rumbles about rumbles

My friend Menticia, a small sixth grader, is changing. Shadows are reaching down from history, from the angry side of human nature, into her innocent world. They're creeping into middle school and darkening her life.

The other day when we were talking about a book report in which she had to discuss the differences between her and the book's protagonist, she was stumped. I said, "well, what are the differences between you and me?" She instantly answered: "I'm Mexican and you're not."

Her brother is in high school and, while it's unclear whether he hangs out with the tough kids, he clearly knows them well. A couple weeks ago he told her there was going to be a fight out behind the movie theater. I said, Menticia, you're not going to go to see that, are you? She said all her friends were going.

Last week she told me that scheduled fight hadn't occurred. "The neighbors saw there were a lot of Mexican teenagers there and called the cops. They don't like to see a lot of Mexicans together." That's what her brother told her. It kind of broke my heart.

Then she said there's a big fight scheduled between the Mexican kids from all the local high schools (she rattled off the schools' names, I wouldn't have thought she'd know them) and the African-American kids. This sounded so much like West Side Story my mouth might have dropped open.

I know I can't protect Menticia from racism, and I can't protect her from the crazy decisions kids make, but I hope to contribute a protective level of skepticism about the grandeur and theatrics of racial conflicts as acted out by very young people.

Just because it might sound cool or look cool doesn't mean it is. Young people, too young to understand what they're doing, can wreck their lives in the blink of an eye.

This is the mantra I'm working on: "Maybe some people have to be stupid, but you don't." I try to remind her of all the good will she's seen among the people around her, people of many colors...

The Blue Ribbon Advocate-Mentor program wisely matches us up with our mentees when they are in fourth grade, before hormones and other complications get overwhelming. But I'm not sure I'm ready for the phase we're entering.

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True bliss: space stations and number lines - adventures with Menticia.

If you've been around Pratie Place for a while you know I've been mentoring a very entertaining chica for 2-1/2 years now. I decided to do this partly for noble reasons but mostly because I wanted some young energy in my life.

Now she's in sixth grade and it's been fun, for instance, watching the hormones hit her. For instance, boys have gone from being invisible - perhaps briefly of note when they provided entertainment with their wild pranks - to being a constant reference point (always accompanied, however, with one of these provisos: "I'm not interested of course but..." or "I like him, no, just kidding").

Three weeks ago I got her mid-semester progress report and was surprised to see a big fat F in Social Studies. She told me she had "forgotten" to turn in a paper punctually - and had also "forgotten" to turn it in during the 1-week grace period. "It's been in my binder all this time."

When questioned, she provided further information: "Well, it was almost finished, but I didn't have glue at home so I couldn't paste in the pictures." "It was all finished except for some glue? You could have taken it to the teacher and said, 'I need some glue,' and then pasted in the pictures and handed it in." "Well, I had to write a few words after I pasted in the pictures." "A few words? Maybe you could have left space for the pictures and written the words and THEN asked for the glue?"

Menticia is linear in her thinking sometimes. She gets to a hurdle and stops, rather than looking for a way around it. ("What can I do? I have no glue, the rest of this will obviously have to wait!")

I gave her some glue to take home and wrote in her assignment book: "Glue in the pictures, turn in the paper, apologize to the teacher."

Seven days later I picked her up again. The paper was still not handed in. So I decided we would finish it together. To my horror, the "few words" she needed to write comprised about 2/3 of the report. Four hours later the project was done. "Are there any other assignments that are about to become train wrecks?" I asked.

Yes: there was a Space Station, part of a team project - they were, uh, a little bit behind - it was due in two days, and since team members 1 and 2 had already done their part - concluding with an approved design for said space station - it was now Menticia's turn, in conjunction with team member 4, to actually do the building.

"What's done so far?" "Well, my dad gave me a piece of plywood to build the space station on." "Is that ALL? There's just a piece of plywood??" "I also took in some green tissue paper for grass."

Setting aside the obvious question ("Why do you need grass in a space station?") I pointed out that there was, in effect, no space station at all. "Well, it's not just my fault - the other kid was supposed to bring legos to make buildings."

OK, a crisis. Involving corrugated cardboard, paper towel tubes, glue gun, clever design solutions... I was in heaven! My own kids Hannah and Zed will know how happy this made me. I sent Menticia home that day with a most excellent space-station dome and a detailed plan.

That was the crisis du jour last week. This week: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of positive and negative integers, along with "simplifying expressions." We started yesterday. Menticia was completely at sea. I was frightened to discover how little she understood, and how randomly she intended to answer the worksheet questions. When things get really tough for her, she regards a worksheet as somewhat akin to a bingo board - write down random numbers and see if you get lucky and hit the jackpot.

Have you ever noticed it's easier to teach something you once struggled with than something that came easily to you? When I was a kid, I loved math. Everything always turned out right and since I understood the material I didn't have to study or spend any time at it. So I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what it is that Menticia isn't understanding.

I have to slow down and look at math problems through her eyes - not fun and easy, with certain victory to be won at little cost, but treacherous! Liable to result in homework covered with dreadful red Xs of condemnation!

I have to bite my tongue to keep from being an obnoxious dweeb chortling: "Look at that! Isn't it cool?"

The time available yesterday made a sizeable dent in her incomprehension, but we finished only half the work. I said, "we can work on this some more tomorrow if it looks hard after you go home."

I didn't expect to hear from her - she never calls me - so I was delighted beyond words when I heard her sweet little voice on the phone today - it's the very first time she's ever actually managed to ask for help.

I suggested we work in the pizza joint near her house. I brought wads of scratch paper (I hate little squinched up globs of numbers), sharp pencils, and - most crucial of all - my wonderful gigantic eraser. We spread her work all over the table. I drew number lines and matrices; she patiently answered my questions while she ate pizza to gain focus.

In deference to her rather somber attitude towards math I tried not to sound too gleeful, but I was in hog heaven. We drank an awful lot of soda while we worked (I'll never stop thinking we in the South get away with something with these free refills).

I loved helping and explaining, cracking jokes to break down her resistance. Listening to her voice pick up strength and confidence as we laboriously worked our way down the page brought me near ecstasy! And it's been WAY too long since I got to draw number lines!

Something Menticia never cares for: any sort of "What did we learn today?" meta-analysis. "Why was this part hard, and that part easy?" "What will you try first, next time you see a problem like this?" "The minus sign in front of a negative number might seem small and insignificant, but there will be red marks on your math assignments if you don't take it extremely seriously!" When we've made our way from the top left to the bottom right, she's more than ready to forget the whole thing and move on.

I don't blame her. I hope, though, that by osmosis she'll pick up some of my cheerful confidence that the right answer is there to be discovered - an enjoyment of laying out problems in a clear, tidy, rational space (using lots of fresh scratch paper) - even, hopefully, some elation when everything comes together.

"Menticia, I want to buy you a treat now because you've worked so hard." "Oh, no, that's ok."

So ended another wonderful session. Are you, too, longing for construction paper and glue, "boys," number lines, bowling, and discussing the relative merits of several ghastly radio stations? Be a mentor!

Technorati Tags: Mentoring, Education, Children, Math

Bowling with Menticia

I took these pictures last weekend when the Blue Ribbon Advocate Mentor program gave us all a bowling night.

First I took Menticia and her friend to the local Chinese restaurant where the two of them chowed down an unbelievable amount of lo mein using chopsticks very dextrously.

 

Because they were extremely anxious not to miss a second of bowling, we got to the alley almost a half hour early. They played air hockey and piled on this motorcycle thing.

 

We were the first to arrive at Lane Number One and the first to have our shoes on. They had already spent quite a while examining all the bowling balls in the joint and discussing their relative merits.

Then we had to wait for some other girls to show up. We ended up with three more. At first these other three were at pains to show us how uninterested they were in the proceedings. They sat way in the back and ate nachos. Each had to be summoned by repeated shouting when it was her turn to bowl.

However, one of the bored three suddenly discovered she was good at bowling. This upped her interest considerably. She migrated away from the table in the back and started hanging out in front with Menticia and her buddy.

Seeing their friend get involved and excited, the last two started to get interested almost in spite of themselves. And so they left the shadows and came up to the front too. And pretty soon all five of them were jostling and shouting and watching the scoreboard above, and having a great time.

My favorite part of the evening was just watching these girls have a great time. Because I am a lurker by nature, I almost prefer being around happy people to being happy myself.

I like bowling too but the best thing is how comfortable the bowling shoes are.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: mentoring, bowling, children

Melina and Melinama on Christmas Eve...

1. She went for a long run. I went on the elliptical trainer and watched "Bleak House" (what a great mini-series it was!).
   
2. Decorated one last present (a book about Sculpey/polymer clay jewelry for Menticia) with hand-made potato-print gift paper.
   
3. Stopped off at Menticia's house to drop off the present. Her mom had unfortunately just burned chile peppers in the microwave, filling the neighborhood with toxic, acrid fumes. The girls were alternately coming out on the porch, choking, and going back in the house to watch tv. We beat a hasty retreat and coughed all the way down town.
   
4. Using one of my numerous gift-cards to Whole Foods Market (earned by playing British Isles music there every month) we had a fun little shopping spree.
   
5. Went home, made two batches of peanut brittle, ate way too much of it.
   
6. Packed up the rest of the peanut brittle - one batch for Melina to take back to Manhattan and one batch for Menticia's family.
   
7. Read in the sunshine.
   
8. Painted a still-life. Melina set it up, so her end had the pretty colorful peppers. The rear end, where I was stationed, was darker and prominently featured a brown tape dispenser.
   
9. Melina dismantled the still life since we needed to consume it. She cooked us spicy turkey sausage and roasted vegetables for dinner.
   
10. We watched "Frequency," a slightly corny but most enjoyable dvd.
    

All in all, a very satisfactory day.

On the second night of Hannukah...

I picked Menticia up again and we worked on her Christmas presents some more. First we wrapped up the soft furry blanket with her sister's name blanket-stitched on it in blue felt.

Then we made "salt dough" (2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, less than a cup of water, a tablespoon of oil) and, per instructions in the craft book I bought her, rolled it out and made a plaque with a raised edge and a raised heart with wings. (Don't ask, this is the picture she chose.) It's going to bake all night.

Then we made sculpey earrings (fun!) - I overbaked the first bunch so they looked like gingerbread, but all was well, we had plenty of sculpey so there were more successful batches later.

We went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner and I saw that a couple years of coaching have resulted in her being able to eat slippery Lo Mein noodles with slippery ivory (well, ivory plastic) chopsticks with quite a bit of grace.

What I did on the first night of Hannukah

My kids are away; Zed's friends at the Bayit (Jewish house) at Wesleyan grated 47 pounds of potatoes for latkes - not nearly enough latkes, I suppose, given the way college kids eat. Melina, too, was on her way to a latke party tonight when I called to wish her Happy Hannukah.

Luckily I was not alone. I usually spend Friday afternoons with Menticia, so she was with me when I lit the candles.

Then we got to work. Today we were beginning her Christmas presents. This is the third year I have been noodging away at the concept that hand-made presents are preferable to easily-broken trinkets from the dollar store.

Hurrah, Menticia finally seemed enthusiastic this year! She had the idea we could work on a blanket for her little sister. (Evidently there are not quite enough blankets among the three girls and there is testy sharing going on.)

We got a fluffy, furry red throw with big snowflakes on it - we bought blue felt and golden embroidery thread - we drew the letters of her sister's name on the felt and cut them out and pinned them across the throw.

Menticia started at the beginning of the name, I started at the end, we blanket-stitched our way toward the middle. When we were stitching adjacent letters it was a bit like the game of twister...

The sewing got a bit break-neck towards the end, not just because of the twister situation but because Menticia had a social engagement and we really wanted to finish before I had to take her where she was going.

Next up: Sculpey earrings.

Technorati Tags: Hannukah, Crafts, Christmas

My two thanksgivings, part two.

My strategizing this year focused on one problem: how to have a nice Saturday Thanksgiving dinner for four and not be overwhelmed with leftovers when my kids were leaving the following day!

When I called Whole Foods to reserve a turkey for Friday pickup, I was reassured: "A number of our customers are having Saturday Thanksgivings." So is the world changing with all our broken homes...

Melina and I were delighted to find that, as we'd hoped, the Friday morning after Thanksgiving is an excellent time to visit Whole Foods, it was almost empty. I had a big fat gift card (because Bob and I play there every month) which made paying $2.99 per pound for our turkey breast less painful. We also bought 1.5 pounds of halibut (for Friday night dinner) for $26.78. After tossing a (very few) more treats into the cart, the total was almost $150.00.

Melina baked us two wonderful challahs (using our family recipe). We ate it for Shabbat dinner with raw sugar snap peas and halibut with lemon, pecan, and parsley sauce.

In order not to be left with two much pie, we employed strategy number one: we cooked our pumpkin and lemon meringue pies Friday and started eating them immediately.

Strategy number two: don't cook any foods that nobody needs to eat. I bought one sweet potato but the person who was going to eat it unexpectedly bailed, so I didn't cook it.

Note to self: an eight-pound organic turkey breast, stuffed, turned upside down (Melina noted: "Actually, that's right way up as far as the turkey was concerned"), loosely tented in foil, cooks in 2-1/2 hours at 350 degrees. If you don't eat the skin, you don't have to worry about what it looks like. I.e., no basting.

Mike the neuropsychiatrist-welder graciously accepted a last-minute invitation to come help us Hoover up the meal and was perfectly on time. We ate sumptuously, listening to Stan Freberg's "The United States of America," our holiday classic.

As we started working on the pie course, the doorbell rang. It was Menticia and her sisters and mom! They were selling jewelry out of a catalog to raise money for the cheerleading squad. I invited them in and all ate pie! An excellent strategy: have unexpected guests.

We had all been about to head into the living room for a brief concert by Mike, who is also my singing student, and who has been "hired" to sing an evening of rag-time songs in a month or so but who has never sung in front of anybody before. So Menticia, her sisters, her mom, Melina, and Zed sat and listened while I banged on the piano and exhorted and Mike sang. "What do I do with my hands?" he asked.

Then our unexpected guests left and we became, unexpectedly, a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting - Zed sang, and Melina sang and played the guitar, and then all four of us sang "Ain't We Got Fun?" and we really do got fun, and then we had to rush out the door cause I had a gig at the Celtic Cafe in Winston-Salem.

Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving

How Melinama spent her Friday and Saturday nights.

Friday I picked Menticia up from school and took her on an errand.

Several years ago I planted two bushes I'd bought, with high hopes, after doing a lot of research. The particular viburnum cultivar, "Blue Muffin," was supposed to grow LOW and have FLOWERS and BLUE BERRIES which birds would like.

MY two bushes, however, turned out to be coarse, vigorous arrowwood viburnums with thick stems shooting straight up in the air to more than six feet virtually as I watched. I kept cutting them back, hoping they'd somehow revert to the pleasing little "mounded shrubs" in the picture, but that was never their intention. I've grown to loathe them.

So I took Menticia to my favorite nursery, run by Jim Rives, out in the country. He ambled with us through his rows of plants, talking about his favorites, and we chose a couple and brought them home.

Menticia wanted a snack. Last week she was in the mood for almonds, so we went to the grocery store and bought them, and then she ate almost the entire pound while we were working on her math homework and I wasn't paying attention, so later - in the middle of the night (she gleefully reported) - she threw them up all over the bathroom! Gee, her mother must have loved me at that moment! This week's snack was a modest peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk.

Then we took our shovels out front and attacked those arrowwoods. I think I sounded a little like the soundtrack to a Ninja Turtle movie as I tried to chop and pry my bush out of the ground. Menticia, of course, was silent and calm, because that's always her preference. I got mine out, I finished getting hers out, we dragged the corpses out into the woods, and we got more dirt and planted the new bushes. It's satisfying to begin and complete a project in one afternoon. Then we read, ate some more, and I took her home.

Saturday night I played for a 95th birthday party. Last year I wrote about the same event:

I trucked over to Raleigh to play, with my bandmate Jim, for our customer's mother's 94th birthday. His mother, and his wife's mother, were each about 4' 9" tall and were native Yiddish speakers. He had told me: "Mother can't walk much any more but she can still dance" and it proved to be true. I haven't been singing much, lately, so belting out 3+ hours of Yiddish songs one after another was quite the workout. We also played Israeli dances and klezmer tunes and people sang along, danced, clapped, played drums (and a home-made digeridoo), and treated us like royalty.

It was a similar event this year, though the mom was strikingly less lively. I took Glenn Mehrbach to play piano this year, because I didn't want to have to turn my back on the guests. The birthday girl, too, was treated like royalty by everyone present, and in fact was wearing a tiara and carrying a sceptre. I tried out a bunch of new songs and everybody was wowed by Glenn. One of the grandsons played his trumpet and one of the sons got a bunch of movies of his mom singing along with "Oyfn Pripetshok" and "Mayn Yidishe Mome" and some other excellent chestnuts.

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Menticia does Illustration Friday: "Change"

This says "CHANGING ROOM" at the top, but it was so dark when we finished painting last night that I couldn't get a good picture before she took it home!


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Menticia at University Lake

Yesterday was a spectacularly beautiful day, so I took Menticia rowing on University Lake. We saw these cool birds.



Menticia's been in middle school for one short week, and already she's a different girl. She's talking about boys (but only how OTHER girls like them) and she wants to listen to bone-rattling stations on the radio.

She wanted to play what she called the "Game of What If ...?" and it goes like this.

"What if it started to rain?"
"I'd row us back to the dock?"
"What if it rained so hard the boat filled up?"
"The boat couldn't fill up that fast."
"But what if it did? What if there was lightning?"
"Then I'd pull the boat up on shore and we could hide under it until the rain stopped."
"But what if there was a sudden tornado?"
"The sky would get ugly long before the tornado appeared, and we could get back to the dock."
"But what if it came up very fast, without warning, and the boat was stuck, and full of water, in the middle of the lake?"
"Well, you're wearing a life jacket, and I'm a very good swimmer. We'd get in the water and I'd swim you to shore."
"What if the water was full of snakes?"
"Poisonous snakes?"
"Yes."
"There aren't any poisonous water snakes in North Carolina."
"But what if there were?"

This went on for a very long time.

It got hot on the water so we rowed close to the shore, tethered the boat to a fallen tree in the shade, and lounged in it, listening to the water lapping and the birds chirping, reading Harry Potter.

You can see from this picture that the book is very fat, and we've barely begun, relatively speaking, but I remind her not to be disheartened: finishing the book is not the only pleasure - actually reading it can be be fun too!



We were the last ones to get our boat back, a few minutes before closing. We drove into Carrboro and had dinner at the Jade Palace, where she put away almost an entire plate of shrimp lo mein. She'll be a teenager soon if she keeps this up!

Technorati Tags: Mentor, Mentoring

Sweet evenings with Menticia

I've worried about being away from my mentee, who starts sixth grade in a couple weeks, so even though I was tired and cranky last week after my long trip, I saw her the day after I got back from Paris.

We went to dinner and she wanted to talk about "The Da Vinci Code," which her older brother is reading. She was convinced, of course, that everything in the book is true, because that's what her older brother told her. I'd neither read the book nor seen the movie, but we had an excellent discussion anyway about these two words:

1. Gullible
   
2. Skeptical

When we got back to my house we sought websites on this theme: "Dan Brown's assertions: Truth or Fiction?", and we talked about how believable the websites themselves were. And I pointed out there are some things which she, Menticia, adamantly believed in a year ago (like trolls, for instance) which have now fallen off her map of the real world.

Last night was my last chance to see her before I leave for Massachusetts on Wednesday, so we had another date.

I'd somewhat underestimated how much time the afternoon's wedding gig would take ("Twist and Shout" was, by the way, our last and most popular number - to our delighted astonishment, many elderly people of all sizes and shapes got up and danced with enthusiasm) so I had to go straight to Menticia still dressed in my work clothes.

When she told me her mother had remarked this was the first time I'd been late to pick her up (seven whole minutes) in our almost two years together, I felt absurdly proud.

I wanted to walk - after sitting and sawing away at the fiddle all afternoon - but Menticia said it was still too hot. So we went down to Chapel Hill, to the Kurama Sushi & Noodle Express, a Japanese dinette that has a conveyor belt (well, the review calls it a "mechanized sushi-go-round") trundling around the room carrying little plates of delicacies past waiting customers seated at the counter.

Since this is the sort of thing for which I have great enthusiasm, we talked about "real" conveyor belts, which are straight, and what an assembly line is, and then we talked about this sushi-go-round, which was made of little circles of metal so it could go around corners, and we speculated on how it was driven. It was like watching suitcases go by on a baggage carousel.

Menticia methodically scrutinized the foods as they circled past us, several times around, before making her first selection. I absolutely loved this setup and was reminded of how I admired the Horn and Hardart Automat when I was a kid.

Do you remember automats? A suburban kid on a rare outing to the Big City, I'd come through the revolving door (a mystery in itself) and be immediately dazzled. Every wall covered with rows and columns of gleaming little aluminum doors with little glass windows, and there was food behind those windows. You put in your nickels and opened the doors and took the food out and, after a while, the food would be magically replaced.

I wasn't so good at looking behind things when I was little, so, since it never occurred to me that there were actual people walking around behind those walls of little doors, the place seemed miraculously futuristic. The food wasn't very good, but the fun more than made up for it.

It wasn't hard to amaze me back then.

I found a 20-Euro-cent coin in my purse and gave it to Menticia. I wrote down the exchange rate on a napkin and challenged her to figure out how much the coin was worth in "real" money. As usual, though she's "studied" decimal points in school, she had absolutely no idea how to tackle the puzzle. That was a bit discouraging.

Then I took her to the home-made ice-cream place near her house (it used to have a smallish arty cow outside made out of buckets and other found objects, but somebody has stolen it). It was my plan to get her hooked on Harry Potter #5 while her mouth was full of fudge sauce.

This place, generally staffed by teenagers who are either high or permanently befuddled, had a scrawled sign on the door which said "back at 3:30." Since it was already 7:30, the sign's credibility was tarnished (see "skeptical," above), and we decided to go elsewhere.

I drove her out to Mapleview Farms and she read to me on the way. We sat on the porch and watched the sun set beyond the meadow, silhouetting the hormone-free cows (silhouette was one of the new words in Order of the Phoenix, Chapter One).

Technorati Tags: Mentor, Mentoring

My day

Yesterday started with a bat bouncing around my room at 5 am. Perhaps she was the founding mother of this year's maternal colony.

Bob came over at 9:30 and we practiced till noon. We are trying to make the shift from reading our music off charts to having it all memorized. In the 1980s we had about four hours of music down pat - and, happily, some of it stuck through the intervening decades - but there's a lot to pack back in there and some of it keeps falling out. Kind of like the stuff on my closet shelves.

I went to school earlier than usual so I could show "Duncan y Dolores" to Menticia's teacher. Last week I got Menticia to translate the book into Spanish (she did it fairly casually while eating french fries at MacDonald's). I posted a page from this book earlier, and here's another:



Menticia looked calm as her teacher exclaimed, "This is awesome!!" but I've learned to read that calm face and I know she was pleased as punch.

Then we went to an Italian joint for snack. There was only one other customer, an endomorphic young man sitting in a nearby booth with an entire sausage pizza. Menticia ate two pepperoni slices while she explained the algebra game they've been playing in math class, and then we played and she bounced up and down with excitement and hid her own equations (the ones I had to figure out) by writing them very small on her napkin and hiding them with her hand...

Then the talk swung around to telenovelas. She's enjoying La Fea Más Bella, a comedy about a secretary who's too ugly to get a good job. The pretty bimbo idiot girl in a skintight miniskirt gets the good office, and Lety, the ugly one, works in a closet. (Let's see, do you think in the end Lety will lose the braces and the glasses and the ugly clothes and turn out to be pretty?)

I said, "This isn't entirely invented - I've read that pretty people make more money and have more success - and that ugly and overweight people suffer discrimination at work."

To my surprise, the endomorphic gentleman across the way piped up and said, "I did my research on that topic." So naturally I just took Menticia and we plopped ourselves over in his booth and I started pumping him for info. Menticia is so short she could barely see him around the pedestal which supported his pizza.

He is now a law student, but worked with a researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill as an undergraduate. They interviewed people about their success or lack of success at work - and graded them as ugly or beautiful on that quantified scale developed by countless people voting on random faces.

He said: In fields where brains are most important (according to him, the hard sciences and computing) obesity is not an impediment, but in fields such as marketing and sales, it is very damaging. He said: The richer people are, the more thinness matters to them. He said a lot more but I've forgotten most of it now - he may send me a link to his research and if he does I'll share it with you.

That was a serendipitous meeting! Menticia was quite interested (though she maintained her calm, of course).

We went home and finished the algebra. Negative numbers made their first appearance in our work -- thus it was that I found myself drawing number lines for the first time in a long, long while. That was fun, I like number lines... Menticia can now multiply fractions, though she still can't tell me what half of a third is.

This is the first picture I ever took of Menticia in which I caught her laughing! Success! I snapped it as she worked on her South Carolina report. The way they do it, these days, there's a long list of required data, for instance:

1. State Bird
2. Agricultural Products
3. State Senators

So this is what you do: put "South Carolina Senators" into Google, and out comes the answer. So you cut and paste it into your file, and on to the next question.

I don't want to be a fuddy duddy, and I realize the method used when I was Menticia's age was not so great either. We did our research using ten-year-old encyclopedias and patronizing, dumbed-down books for juveniles. But with the modern method it's pretty easy for information to pass from window to window - via cut-and-paste clipboard procedures - without coming anywhere near the actual brain.

There were a zillion South Carolina questions (far more than we could have been asked to answer in the old days, when we actually had to write the words down ourselves, with pencils, on pieces of paper) so we were at it till pretty late.

Luckily, we had suitable music as we worked: we'd discovered, via Google, that the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast fall notably into the required "other landforms" category. (At least until global warming submerges them.) So I dug up my cd of Georgia Sea Islands Songs and Spirituals and Menticia really liked this rhythmic, mostly a cappella music.

We had some spaghetti and baby carrots, and Menticia read Redwall to me as I drove her home.

Then I watched half of the new 9:00 telenovela, Barrera de Amor. This one stars a laughably unlovely guy I call Unibrow as the love interest, but the real star is the evil mother. Beware of telenovela mothers who dress in black and carry canes! The last one (in Alborada) poisoned her own son; this one is poisoning her daughter-in-law, and just tonight burned two women alive while calling to God, "You are guiding my hand! Your daughters are already standing before you!" She also killed her husband - who had the hots for another woman - by siccing a giant ravening bull on him. If you want to know more, you can of course visit the new telenovela site, Caray! Caray!.

UPDATE: after I finished writing this and turned off the light, the bat started bouncing off the walls again. It was in here all day! Now I'm creeped out. Might as well just get up and start the next day already. Caray!

Technorati Tags: diary