Points to Ponder

“When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow

“A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour. “

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”
– Jane Austen

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill

“Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.”
– Anonymous

“I’m not overweight, I’m just nine inches too short.”
– Shelley Winters

“Normal: what the average person can accomplish with little or no effort. So why be normal?”
– Bob Seay

“Today I feel like the meat in an idiot sandwich!”
– Anonymous

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”
– G. C. Lichtenberg

“Walking Eagle: Person who is too full of crap to fly.”
– Athabascan Tribes saying

“May you have enough happiness to make you sweet,
enough trials to make you strong,
enough sorrow to keep you human,
enough hope to make you happy.”

“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”
– Erica Jong

“It is not true that life is one damn thing after another…. It’s one damn thing over and over!”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”
– Mark Twain

“Nothing so much needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
– Mark Twain

“If it weren’t for STRESS I’d have no energy at all.”

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they are going to have some annoying virtues.
– Elizabeth Taylor

Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
– Assyrian clay tablet 2800 B.C.

Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing.
– Michael LeBoef

The problem with the designated driver program, it’s not a desirable job, but if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house.
– Jeff Foxworthy

A smile is the lighting system of the face, the cooling system of the head and the heating system of the heart.

Do all the good you can, …
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.
– John Wesley

Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity.
– Erma Bombeck

I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don’t know what to feed it.

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
– Booker T. Washington

Hoppy Easter!!!

We had a good weekend, even though I felt like I was running a marathon. We went to Disney on Ice Saturday, and the kids loved that. Sunday we went to church and they had a little Easter Egg hunt. I should have taken pictures, the girls were so beautiful and Tyler looked so handsome and grown up. Then we drove out to Surprise to visit my nana at the hospital. She’s finally out of the intensive care unit, and is in the part of the hospital where they do physical therapy. She told me yesterday that she’d just found out that she was going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair with a urine bag. My mom didn’t know anything about that so I don’t know if a doctor told my grandmother that after my mom had left, or if she’s just afraid that’s what’s going to happen and has blown it up in her mind. I couldn’t get to the store by myself this week to get the kids’ Easter baskets, so my mom went and got them and left them in my nana’s room for when we got there. That was really nice, my nana enjoyed watching them eating their candy and it gave the kids something to do other than mess with all the electrical equipment.

Not much in the way of updates, but…

I’m trying to get it together at work since I’m out next week. Taking the kids to SB Sunday and coming home Wednesday. My grandma went into the hospital last Saturday night because she couldn’t breath again and was intubated until yesterday. I’m not sure when she’ll be able to go home. Ro left Sunday night for England again. Oh, and he called last night because he is supposed to say something at the wedding, congratulating his sister and welcoming her husband to the family. He is clueless what to say and asked for my help, so I’m trying to think of something manly.

You may call me Madame President!

OK, not of the country or anything, but of my kids’ PTSO (parent teacher student organization). Kinda operates like PTA, but independant from the state/national association. I kinda got it by default – I’ve been asking the principal about PTSO for the two years Tyler has been there, and when they held the informational meeting to form a PTSO, I was the only parent there for the first 30 minutes. So I found myself confirmed on Wednesday, and manning an information table and speaking at a literacy carnival on Thursday. You can imagine, between writing the speech and designing an informational flyer to hand out… didn’t get much sleep wednesday night. Actually, I haven’t gotten much sleep in the last week period.

I’m really excited about this… and nervous too. The school hasn’t had an active PTSO in about five years, and IMO, it was probably because they weren’t well organized. Apparently, the parents involved moved on over to the middle school and there wasn’t anyone to replace them, so I’m guessing they may not have done much in the way of recruiting new members to take over. In a K-3 school that’s really important, since each student is at the school only 4 years, rather than 6 to 9 years as they are in K-5 or K-8 schools. You know how I am with a new project… I’ve spent so much time doing research, and to have a really successful and effective PTSO you have to do a lot more than just send home flyers occasionally. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way most PTSO’s operate. And on top of that, there were four principals in the last five years, and resurrecting PTSO just never happened. So I’m starting from scratch. There is some money in the PTSO account (how much TBD), but there are no bi-laws, no minutes of past meetings, no records whatsoever except the bank statements (the treasurer is an employee at the middle school across the street; she also used to work at our school and she’s just continued to act in that capacity despite the PTSO being defunct).

So I’m researching how to write bi-laws and trying to figure out what committees I’ll need and recruiting members and volunteers. I found some really great resources, one of them being the Three for Me Promise www.three4me.com, and I’ll be using that to launch our volunteer drive. We’ll be pooling for committee chairpersons from that. I’ve got lots of great ideas for events from my research too, and I can’t wait to get those started.

Well, I should get to work, I have potential volunteers to call from the sign up sheet we put out at last week’s literacy fair.