The Burrow

Are you are tired of the people you listen to preaching to the choir?   I offer a brief respite. Once again, Vera, my Albertson's connection, filled the back of my car with goodies.    Three carts full, to be precise.   For three hours, I drove the UV up one street and down another, touching all 15 elementary and middle schools in our district, leaving boxes and boxes of sweet treats in my wake. I call it BACK TO SCHOOL LOVE FEaST. I get to spread kindness and a little CTG love.  I get smiles and thank you's. It's my favorite day of the school year.

While some of them preferred a more active recess, others stepped right up and got into the spirit of the day. What started like this turned into this  with just a little bit of encouragement from Grandma Suzi. Even the football kids took time to send some love.  Some took their own sweet time, adding and taping and stamping  until it was just right.  Masks are optional outside; when the work became intense enough for the protection to slip, I took myself to the other end of the table. I didn't want to get sick, but I didn't want to interrupt the creative process.  Some stopped by to write a quick note on a folded piece of paper.  Some hung out with friends for all of recess.  There was lots of giggling.... unfortunately covered by masks.  Even the very sophisticated 8th graders participated.  This ended up on my knee, as the donor scooted away. I hope your day was as wonderful as mine. Listening to the scholars who knew me introduce me to those who didn...

Once again, GRIN  delivered Back to School treats to every elementary, K-8, and middle school in the Amphi District.  This is what my car looked like once everything was loaded.   The blue IKEA bag behind the goodies was necessary - there were lots of cakes and brownies and more cakes and cookies and muffins and fruit tarts and fancy cupcakes and more cakes and cookies and even some Hostess products.   How does this wonderfulness happen?   Vera - a manager at my Albertsons .  She smiles at me in July and agrees to have supplies for me in August. The store provides some, she provides some, and this year other staff members donated, too. Year after year after year she does this. Why? It's for the kids. It's that simple for her.... and for me.... and for every grateful face I saw in every office for 3 hours this morning.  Doing good for the little ones is its own reward. But Vera deserves her own special reward, and this is all she'll let m...

It's my favorite day of the year.  I put on my newly washed coat of many colors, stuff my pockets full of stickers, and leave my house before 7am.  The parking lot in front of the school is filled with families dressed in their back to school finery, colorful hijabs and dashikis of all lengths bumping up against glittery unicorns and sneakers that blink when you run. I miss cries of  Watch My Shoes! as last year's kindergarteners shusss across the lobby, on their way to the stairs up to first grade.  I miss hugs from big kids who were once littler.  I miss admiring new backpacks and hairdos and being introduced to mommies and daddies. Mostly, I miss talking to the newbies, the ones whose parents waited until the first morning of school to fill out the paperwork and who are waiting in an endless line of grown ups and kids who all seem to know where they are going and what they are doing.  It's scary.  But then Grandma kneels down and wonders if you're n...

Days pass and I don't go outside.  The alarm people laugh when I call them to cancel; yes, it's 1:20 in the afternoon and yes it's the first time we've ventured outside today and who would have thought that was possible before we entered the year of the plague, Pandemic 01. I have inadvertantly reserved real, not e-, books from the local library.  They're available now.  Two of them are waiting for me.  The librarians will bring them out to my car; apparently they've been sanitized to within an inch of their lives so they are safe to touch.  I drove around town today, dropping off birthday brownies and healing brownies and visiting with Dr. K and Not-Kathy in the parking lot between the bagel store and the Urgent Care (don't ask).  I drove past the turn off for the library on more than one occasion (okay, I'll admit to driving on auto-pilot and paying no attention to my ultimate destination, thereby necessitating a u-turn and retracing of my tire tracks)...

Returning kids to school has many components.  The CDC can't decide whether it's better for students to spend hours a day in sanitized bubbles, trying to learn to spell while not infecting themselves or others, or to stay at home without access to the internet, meals, or an actual living, breathing, trained adult to help them. The fact that the need for schools and teachers is being conflated with the need for child care for working parents makes me too angry to type.  Los Angeles is setting up spaces to warehouse these children, sitting them socially distanced in cafeterias and gymnasiums and auditoriums and music rooms, superivsed by aides.  FlapJilly's district send a hundred gazillion attachments  covering everything from the bus to the playground in the emails Little Cuter's receiving. This is not going well. In my little corner of the world, GRIN   is trying to bridge the digital divide (if someone could figure out what's needed we'd be glad to ...

Doing good feeds my soul.  Right now, I'm running on fumes.  Grandma needs her Prince kiddos hugs for fuel.   This is the time of year when I'd contact Albertsons and remind my friend, the grocery manager, that I want all the baked goods in the land.  I'd pull out my list of What to Deliver Where and In What Order, and retype it so that the additions I made last year are available in a big, bold font, readable as I cruise through Tucson, dropping off goodies and checking in with old friends at all ths chools in the District. I won't be doing that this year.  No way I'm going into building after building, exposing myself to others and surfaces and particles floating in the air and landing on me. I don't think I could keep my (now very long) hair out of my face without swiping at it with hands that might be infested with the virus. I know that contracting it from surfaces is unlikely.  But the likelihood increases with the number of cont...

I did not know that today is the only Federal Holiday specifically promoting the idea of service to the community. I find it odd that I, of all people, missed out on this important bit of information.  Doesn't it seem like the kind of thing that would be right up my alley?  Getting people together to do a good deed - that's what floats my boat.  How did this slip past me? I ought to go to the Tucson Village Farm , since it was their article in the paper that alerted me to the call to service.  I could drop off the extra diapers and wipes at the Diaper Bank after I leave the snacks the kids didn't eat when they visited at the ICS Food Bank .  I worked with TBG to go through his closet this weekend; I could drop off his discards at the Amphi Clothing Ban k. I could paint at Ben's Bells , doing good while soothing my soul.  I know I'll take a few moments to think about the man himself.  Flawed, certainly.  But brave and literate and ...

I remember YOU! That was the second most often repeated phrase I heard this morning.  The first was OH! Thank you!! I started the day with Vera, the generous donor at Albertsons, who filled a shopping cart with goodies for GRIN .  She wanders the bakery, picking and choosing that which will appeal to those who are educating our future, then waits for me to come through the door and hug her. Look at how wonderful she is: I filled the coolers I remembered to bring with those delicacies which would melt in the desert sun, and drove off the the first of my 13 stops.  It was supposed to be 12 stops, but one of my favorite principals moved down the road, so I added his new middle school to my route.  He was busy when I dropped off their treats, but several staff remembered me enough to hug me and thank me for everything.    I knew they were thinking of Christina-Taylor.  So was I. I left donuts and strudel and cakes and pies of all kind...

School starts this week..  The parking lots are fuller than they've been since May. The front door is unlocked, to facilitate the importing of band instruments and bulletin board accouterments and plastic crates filled with the things that will fill a 9 year old's own, personal, Fourth Grade Classroom. Parents are still registering new students with Miss Mercy, but most of the activity is generated by the teachers and staff.  No, but thank you! , the band doesn't need any more yarn with which to reward progress. Did your daughter have her baby?  and there was the ever handy photo that's my phone's screen saver. Why was I there when there were no little shoe laces to tie, no ears eager to hear about Caps for Sale, no small gardeners to advise?  I was participating in  GRIN 's annual Back To School Love Fest.  It was a morning filled with smiles and hugs and Thank You's .   We collected a cart filled with sweet treats   donated by my ...

It started on Monday, with a Costco run.  Two sheet cakes later, I was driving my propped open cooler across town to Prince Elementary School and Amphi Middle School, the places where I hang my hat.  They were busy getting settled; I left the cakes in the refrigerators, with a love note pinned to the long long tables that are characteristic of faculty lounges nationwide. I've given up on providing knives and plates and napkins; this is an eat and run environment which comes equipped with all the tools necessary to dig in and get out fast.  I spend GRIN's money on the food itself and everyone is happy. Tuesday found me at Albertsons, watching the bakery clerk fill a shopping cart with goodies.  Each and every year a young woman smiles at me from behind that same counter as she fills my basket to the brim with goodies that Vera, my favorite manager, is glad to share.  Vera says it makes her happy to provide the donuts and crullers and layer cakes and...

https://tinyurl.com/lelwng9 Remember the first time you saw this? You saw what you saw.   Then, someone said she saw something else. Really?   Yes, really. Hmmmmmmm..... I worked in the Reading Lab today with a young man who zipped through the assignment in record time.  We looked on the bookshelves for inspiration. The O Volume of the encyclopedia was of marginal interest (notwithstanding the orangutan and the optical light telescope). The Book of Minerals made for interesting reading (aloud, by me, which was hardly the point of our time together) and picture gazing and a semi-scientific explanation of prisms. The Science Explained book brought it all together in the section on optical illusions. He'd never seen the Rubin Vase before.  Ours were blue and gold, but he saw the faces and I saw the vase and neither of us were quite able to see what the other saw.   It got better. brucepurdy.com There was a ruler in the cadd...

"I learned something right now.  I don't usually learn something but I learned something right now." Thus spake a 2nd grader, a young man who was working on distinguishing between the long and short vowel sounds.  We read the often used words as I tried to find examples of that-which-passes-for-rules in spelling the English language.   Two consonants after a vowel make a short sound (except when they don't) was simple enough, and so was an e at the end of the word makes a long sound. It got tricky when we got to cage and case and mice and nice.  That c  is quite a problem (as was quite,  but we'll get to that later.)  If it's cage and case why isn't it mike and nike?  The e at the end of the word was the clue, and his face when he realized that the e at the end makes the c an s  lit up the classroom. That's when he decided he'd learned something.  He went on to zip through the ce  words, and enjoyed the story to which they we...

GRIN 's legwork and Body Works Pilates 's teachers and Balanced Body 's equipment have given the girls' Sports Fitness Class at Amphi Middle School  professional Fletcher Pilates  instruction, within the curriculum. That may not seem like much, but I am here to tell you that it is a monumental achievement.  Without the support of the school's administrative staff, without their determination that the program would succeed, without their fearlessness in the face of insurmountable (to me, anyway) obstacles, they tweaked and poked and prodded and together we came up with a solution that worked for everyone. It's been going on since April 13, 2012 .  That's 9 semesters of work, 9 semesters of girls who've gained strength and control, noticed by their Coach and classroom teacher, verified by those who've gone before them.  We've done research and measurements on physical and psychological dimensions over the years, and now, with the help of the f...

GRIN , the not-for-profit foundation I started after Christina-Taylor was murdered and I was shot at Gabby Giffords' Congress On Your Corner event, is intertwined with the Amphi School District.  It was CTG's school district, it's the district which invited me to judge children's photographs, it's the district to which I pay taxes and which educates the people who will populate the world I inhabit. I have a vested interest in its success.  I'm going to need the doctors and lawyers and plumbers and electricians and clerks they are teaching.  If they don't do well - on both sides of the equation - my quality of life will suffer.  That's the practical reason, but not the most important one. The average salary in the District is $38,662; it took a state wide election to give them a raise.  They buy their own crayons and stickers and markers and books for the classroom library.  They come early, they stay late, they act as nutritionist and fashion consult...

GRIN went to the cafeteria on Friday. We set out the supplies on the wrapping paper. We had four table tops instead of our usual two, we had students on both sides of the tables,  and still they were shoulder to shoulder.  They were cooperative  and eager to share.  Many of the boys were as willing as the girls although some preferred to supervise.  There was much admiration (see left, below)  and much kibbitzing (see right, below)  and there were tutus. Many,  many tutus. The GRIN volunteers were fascinated by this homemade creation.  and with the elephant. With some help figuring out the heart shaped punches  and some time spent pondering the state of the world they went to work stamping  and stickering and peeling the backs off those delicious foam hearts. Did I mention that they were delicious?  There were crowns worn proudly and happil...