Things I'm Thankful for This Thanksgiving

Things I'm thankful for today as I prepare for dinner for 15 or 16:



I am thankful for my family.

Some people refer to them as "the lights of my life." Some as "the apples of my eye." I kind of prefer, "The free labor to clean the house before the company descends."

I am thankful for Scumblaster shower cleaner.

You know how most soap scum removers are like that "friend" who, when you ask for her help, will kind of roll her eyes and say, "What, you let the shower go four months again?!? Okay, I'll help you. But not too much. Because then you'll never learn."

Scumblaster is the friend who says, "Oh! Your mother-in-law is coming? You're stressed out, aren't you? Why don't you kick back, grab a cup of tea and relax while I do all the work?"

Seriously, when my local store stopped carrying it, I started buying it through mail-order. It's that good.

I am thankful for strong lungs.

The kind that can withstand Scumblaster, Soft Scrub, Pine Sol, Lime Away plus little dabs of bleach on the mildew spots in the caulking. All in one (admittedly well-ventilated) bathroom.

Don't try this at home, kiddies. It's for emergencies only.

I am thankful for the Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving ritual, where Sarah comes home from wherever she's living to make apple pies with me. I remember spending the years when the kids were little, doing this all by myself. This is much, much better.

I am thankful for wine discounts.Because at our local grocery, if you want 10% off, six bottles is the minimum.

And if the gang of twelve who are over 21 don't finish them, I'm sure we can put the remainder to good use after everybody leaves on Saturday.

I am thankful that my situation is unlike that of my fellow ESL teacher, in that my mother-in-law who is visiting for the holidays is NOT my former home ec teacher.

And finally, yes, I am thankful for holidays and the chances they give to reconnect with extended family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Odd Thing Is, I Know Just What He's Talking About

So I was skyping recently with a friend who is also a diehard fan of my favorite soccer team. His children are much younger, and we somehow ended up on the topic of what it's like to have a kid with cancer.

Him: don't know how i would handle it if one of my little ones got cancer... can't even think about it.

Me: At first it's really surreal, but then you realize that crying for more than three days is really boring, and it just kind of becomes the new normal

Him: yeah, i can see that.
Him: kind of like when arsenal lost to barca in the champs league final in 06

Me: hahahaha! I'm one of the rare moms who would not be offended by that analogy. :)

Him: that made me laugh out loud.
Him: i won't be using that analogy publicly.

And oddest of all? Any sports fan who's seen his/her team lose a huge game and had a kid get cancer (because surely it's not just me?) will probably tell you it's a pretty apt comparison. Not that anybody would consider the two situations equivalent. Just that, eventually, life has to go on.

Y'know?

Now THAT would create an interesting class...

Conversation in the car with my 14-year-old as I'm heading home to write up my ESL lesson plan:

Me: I need some kind of fun activity using the -ing verb tense. Like, "I am running, he is walking" kind of thing.

Him (not quite serious): Oh! You should do "Duck, Duck Goose!"

Me: So you're saying we should play the "Ducking and Goosing" game.

Him: Yeah! It would be awesome!

I only wish I had the guts...

The Best Inappropriate Way to Spend Halloween

My daughter has some friends who plan to spend the night tomorrow driving through Greek Row by the nearby university and playing "Slut Bingo."

You know:

"Slutty nurse!"
"Slutty animal!"
"Slutty comic book character!"
"Slutty playboy bunny!"
"Slutty Disney character!"

"BINGO!"

This is inappropriate and sexist and shouldn't make me laugh. But it does.

I am a horrible person.

Squirrel Humor and Other Things That Made me Smile. Or go "Hmmm..."

(I'll get to the squirrel humor in a minute. The best things can't be rushed.)

First, though, I spotted this is from Readers' Digest's humor issue. It made me laugh out loud. (Because I have the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy.) It was in a section on the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the most intentionally bad opening paragraph. (Named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, oh he of "It was a dark and stormy night..." fame):

"As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the sound chamber, he would never hear the end of it."

Giggle.

Next, this isn't a joke. It's an actual news item. Remember Carrie Prejean? The former Miss California who feuded with Perez Hilton over gay rights? And who is now suing the Miss California pageant for violating her right to freedom of religion?

Apparently it goes both ways:

ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — The organizers of the Miss California USA pageant sued former beauty queen Carrie Prejean Oct. 19 to get back the $5,200 they gave her in January for breast implants.

Even better? When I first read it in the Seattle Times, I misread the amount as $52,000. I was thinking that for that amount of money they'd have to be magical breast implants. Like, y'know, they allowed her to fly. Or had built-in invisibility cloak properties. Or something.

(Maybe even so magical they'd make this woman shut up, go away, and realize that her fifteen minutes of fame are long over.)

Oops, sorry. Too snarky? To fix that, I'll close with my squirrel theme, with a couple of posts taken from that great website My Life is Average:

Today, I was walking home from class when I saw a squirrel bury an acorn and cover it up with dirt. Then the squirrel started picking up leaves, examining them, and tossing them aside. He finally set one down on top of the dirt mound. I walked over and saw that it was the absolute perfect autumn leaf. Animals can have OCD too, apparently. MLIA

and:

My Biology teacher always uses squirrels as examples. Today we were going over ecosystems, so he asked "What do squirrels need to reproduce?" One guy in the front, without thinking, responded with "Nuts." The class cracked up. MLIA

Like I said, I am SO immature.

So What Do You Write About When Nothing's Happening?

Forgive my long silence. It's just that nothing is happening in my life. And this is probably a good thing.

My son's back at school, and he's got a cute little bit of peach fuzz on his head, his hair growing back at last. My beloved Seattle Sounders have made the playoffs. And I've started another ESL class.

I walked into the first class a few weeks ago to see three of my favorites students from last year in the next class level up. (They are all Asian and over 65 and moved here to be with their tech-employed kids. I love them to pieces. They tell me they miss me as a teacher, which makes me feel all kinds of good.) The other three students from the class aren't anywhere in our group of classes, which means they've tested out of our non-profit agency and will now need community college classes. Which kind of makes me feel good, (I taught them! they learned!) but is still a tiny bit bittersweet.

My new class is slowly bonding and connecting. As always, I am amazed by their guts, by the fact that they came here knowing nothing and just leapt into a new life. I think about how exhausted I was after ten days in France a couple of years ago, even after five years of studying the language. The differences in everything from language to culture to food... (Remember when I assumed that "marinated salmon" meant it had actually been cooked?) By the tenth day, after a long train trip with surly French people, I was so thrilled to find an Americanized hotel by the airport (a bathtub! a blow dryer! cable TV!) that I wanted to a) curl up in my americanized bed and never leave, and b) cry from joy.

And yet these people throw themselves into life here amongst so many people who wish they'd never come, and they keep getting up and going back for more, day after day. They amaze me.

I love teaching ESL. Have I mentioned that before? It hits so many of my hot buttons, from my language nerdism (it is such joy to explain things like pronunciation and syntax) to my love of foreign language to my lefty liberal "everyone who works hard deserves a chance"-ism.

And every Wednesday I say a little prayer that the class will go well and I'll be able to teach in a way that helps my students learn. Oddly, the days I forget the prayer are the days things don't go well. And this is something I don't realize until the next week, when it's time to say the prayer.

God, (my own personal lefty, liberal, I-love-everybody God) is here in these classes. I feel him. I'm sure of it.

And did I just say, up above, that nothing is going on in my life?

I guess I lied, huh?

You Will Love This

I thought this was one of the sweetest videos I've seen in a long time.

(My family just saw "Wicked" a couple of weeks ago, which makes it even sweeter.)