Friday lunch date

It’s been cold, rainy, windy, and it gets dark so early. Usually by the time we’ve eaten dinner, I want to go to bed. It’s already dark and I’m tired. It’s hard to go out for dinner during the winter months.

I do my best early in the morning and did so this Friday morning. After my usual morning routine of feeding all the cats, having my mocha, exercise, makeup and dressing, I sat here at my desk working on February’s books for second graders. When I asked one class what kind of books they would like to have next month, they were ready with suggestions:

*science

* flowers

*art

*outer space

I have four books that will sort of fit some of the requests:

*Ada Twist, Scientist

*The Big Orange Splot

*I Am Ruby Bridges

*Afer the Fall, a Retelling of Humpty Dumpty

After I produced the lists for each teacher, I went grocery shopping, hopefully buying enough food to get us through most of next week. However, the baguettes I bought were not my usual French bread but rather sourdough multigrain. Not sure how they will go with minestrone soup.

When I got home after two trips, Terry asked if I still wanted to go out to lunch. Oh, yeah, we had talked about that. Sure, I would like a really good hamburger. After some discussion, we decided on a close-to-home place, Triangle Drive In. The spot by us went into our favorite Mexican restaurant’s place when they shut down, so it’s very convenient. Triangle has been around about as long as Terry has been alive. It’s now a retro place, but it started when retro was the current fashion. It’s no longer a drive-in, but more like a 50s diner. There are four of the places scattered around town after being in one spot for decades. It’s that good and that well-known in town.

It was fun to go out for a lunch date with my husband, and now I have all afternoon to get loads of laundry done, write a blog post, and read my latest Louise Penny book, A World of Curiosities. Dinner? I doubt that we will have much after burgers and onion rings AND a Coke for lunch. Perhaps Friday lunch dates should become a “thing.”

First graders and hospital patients

After school on Thursday, when I usually just want to go home and collapse after two days of wrangling first graders, I drove to the downtown hospital, only five minutes from Columbia, left my car at the top of the parking garage and walked down four flights of stairs to see my friend Ramona. You remember Ramona, the one with the traumatic brain crisis. Ramona who is on the ninth floor, in the neuroscience wing.

One of her twin daughters was there with her today. They had just returned from radiation. I’m guessing that Ramona has/had a brain tumor that exploded. She still cannot form words but she can make more sounds so I think the prognosis is good that she will regain some speech. Maybe all. She is well enough to be moved to a continuing care facility on Friday.

I showed Ramona the pig puppet I used with today’s book, “Little Pink Pup,” a true story about a dachshund that adopted a newborn pig when its siblings pushed it away. She took the book in her one good hand and read through the story. I had pig stickers that I shared with her and her daughter. She seemed pleased. Next week’s story has a penguin in it and I told her I’d bring the book to share with her at her new place. There are penguin stickers, too.

This blog post will be boring, written on a PC

All of my photos are on my MAC (which is still in the Apple hospital), and I have no idea how to download photos on this, my husband’s desktop PC.  Oh, as a multimedia and yearbook teacher I’m sure I could figure it out if I wanted to, but I don’t.  It will be 107 degrees here today and I am saving all my energies (physical and mental) to just do the basic chores.  So, dear Reader, you don’t get a photo of my darling granddaughter today.  And I have a really cute one, too.

I will be seeing my darling granddaughter every day next week as I will be working at my daughter’s church, helping with Vacation Bible School.  Although she is only two months old, Leeya is brilliant, and I want to start reading to her.  I went this morning to one of my favorite places, Barnes & Noble, (they don’t pay me to say that, but I wish they would) and bought three books for her.  Two are cloth books, very soft, and the third is a softcover paper book that she will probably rip to pieces when she’s about nine months old.  Or chew to pieces.  All three have rabbits in them.  Seems like a theme I have going there.

I found a book on my shelf this morning that tells stories about familes, with the most wonderful pictures (gosh, I wish I could take a picture and show you) and it’s in English and Spanish.  Leeya’s parents speak Spanish and I hope they are going to teach her to be bilingual.  I’m going to read the Spanish parts to her.  By the end of next week, the child should be ready for school.