All righty then!
It’s been a long day, and I’m struggling to find that thing to write about, so why not write 5 of them?
#makesnosensetomebutyouarethewriter
*sigh* Again with your nonsense!
Anyway, I’m using my “5 Things” post really early this year! Ugh! 🙂
- Iowa Women’s Basketball represented well in the Big 10 Conference awards, with a 1st teamer, 2nd teamer, 3rd teamer, an All-Defensive Player, and an All-Freshman team member. They were picked 7th in the pre-season, and ended up a strong second behind a TOUGH UCLA team. They are predicted to be a second seed in the NCAA tourney, getting back to hosting the first round in Iowa City. I will check out tickets, but sadly, our free stay is now gone and while I’d love to drop a bucket of money on this, we’ll probably watch them on TV! 🙂
- We’d planned on Paris/Europe this summer. With all the idiocy going on in Iran, we’ve decided to postpone this trip. I’m kind of sad about this, but I wasn’t as excited about it as I was about Scotland and Ireland a couple of years ago. So now, we are recalibrating, thinking about maybe an Alaskan cruise or just spending a month in the trailer traveling towards Colorado and our daughter. We’ll see! 🙂
- Our students tend to take extended vacations to visit relatives. My first year, I had one student go for a month to Guatemala, and another was gone for three weeks visiting Mexico. Last Friday, I had one of my students tell me she’d be gone for a month, visiting family in Texas. I’ve realized that it’s not my place to judge, because right now, construction jobs have not ramped up, so this is the prime “visit the family” time period. My dad would roll his eyes at this foolishness! 🙂
- Our cat might just end of in the basement for life. She’s gotten very naughty lately, jumping up on the counter for EVERYTHING. We use a squirt bottle to keep her down, but when we turn our back, she’s right back up there! Any suggestions (other than a shock collar, which I’m told is “bad”) would be appreciated!
- I’m debating a smaller overall garden, but more trellises. Last year, I used cattle panels (15 foot wine panels) and bent them, putting the ends into the ground, then planted butternut squash, green beans, cucumbers, and watermelon. This year, I want to get peas into the mix, along with either pumpkins or acorn squash, too. This would reduce the overall size of my garden, but allow me to keep growing a bunch of stuff!
Bonus thought: We, as a country, are in deep with Iran. They are expanding who they are attacking, drawing more players into the mix. Sooner or later, we’ll need to deal with the fact that this military engagement was an awful idea, and we just spent enough money to fully fund public school lunches or universal health care or veteran housing or whatever other program we’ve been told there “just aren’t the funds for right now.”
Thanks for reading, and hopefully, my brain will engage tomorrow morning like it should! 🙂
The Life of a Conflicted Teacher 
March 3, 2026 at 11:32 pm
It seems like your brain was pretty well engaged with your five things today! I used to have a lot of long, long absences, having begun my teaching career in a rural school. We would lose the migrant kids (picker families) for 2 months every winter, and then they would return until the strawberries ripened, and then the high school kids would pick berries and/or mind the little ones in the family and be gone for weeks again. Hunters took a week or two off during hunting season, and occasionally, someone took off a week for two different hunting seasons. These types of absences slowly died down until I changed districts and ended up teaching a large number of students with highly paid international workers for parents. Then I started seeing long absences again, for more elaborate trips, tied to family or cultural or religious celebrations in other countries. Just today, and 8th grader told me that he will be gone for a month because he is going to Morocco with his father. It makes me feel like I have led a deeply boring life!
March 4, 2026 at 9:04 pm
See, that the other end of these extended vacations, they make me see just how far I’ve NOT gone in this world. They are traveling to exotic locations and I’m going to Dollar General. Does not seem fair at all! 🙂
March 4, 2026 at 11:12 pm
That makes sense, but you have still traveled more than I have! I somehow ended up being the homebody of my family who has barely left the United States. I have been to Iowa though!
March 5, 2026 at 9:46 am
Not everyone can say they’ve been to Iowa! 🙂 What brought you here?
March 6, 2026 at 11:13 pm
My stepmom was raised by her grandmother in Des Moines for most of her childhood, and when I was a kid, we went for a family reunion in honor of her grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It is a trip that I remember fondly and often, as city girl me (I grew up in Southern California) had never been to a real farm with livestock and tractors and everything. One uncle had a huge working farm and another had what I think of more as a “gentleman’s farm” that was only a couple of acres and more decorative and less hard-working looking. I rode a pony, discovered that pigs are not pink and clean, I rode a pony, was unreasonably scared by an unexpected chicken, and accidentally doused my little sister with ice cold pump water!
March 4, 2026 at 1:25 am
Hi Darin!
I never understood when my classmates took extended vacations. My mom would never let me miss school (even when I was sick), so I was always jealous and confused when my classmates would do this. I never thought about it from a teacher’s perspective. Like what do they think about it? As an adult, I would really love an extended vacation though. Would love to escape this chaos we’re in right now.
March 4, 2026 at 9:03 pm
Hey Manny! We took two, count them two “winter break” vacations where we missed a couple of days of school. Admittedly, my dad was a teacher, but just never happened. And yes, I’d LOVE an extended vacation to escape the chaos! Where do you want to go?? 🙂