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Noah is running in the Notre Dame National Catholic Cross Country Meet today. He took a bus with his teammates to Indiana last night and will run sometime today. He seems to have realized that he only has two more years of college running and has decided that even if he can’t be the best of the best (those guys are running sub 4-minute miles) he can be the best HE can be. One of his goals this year is to start running 100-mile weeks. His other goal is to enjoy this experience.
2.
I asked him to try to get some pictures of St. Mary’s College, at least a sign, while he’s there. After my mother converted to Catholicism, she attended St. Mary’s. She would be so pleased to know that her grandson is also attending a Catholic College.
3.
Calvin and Sarah are in Charlotte, NC awaiting Hurricane Florence. They live on a hill, and the power lines in their area are underground. They don’t have a lot of big trees around them either so I think, for the most part, they will be fine. They stocked up on some food. However all week they had trouble getting gas for their cars because the stations were sold out. I hope they have that figured out. Sarah will be riding it out alone for the most part. Calvin is a first responder and he will be working all weekend. I think this will warrant some extra rosaries this weekend.
4.
I had a fun discussion with my goddaughter. Her husband is a band director at a Division I school. She was writing on Facebook that she was feeling like a band widow. As the wife of a musical instrument repairman, I feel her pain. This time from late August to mid-December has been a time of great loneliness for me over the past 30 years. Mr. Pete leaves at 7 a.m. and many nights he doesn’t get home until after midnight. Since my kids are older now it’s not as bad. They are more company for me now instead of dependents, although I still need to drive Rosie to her activities.
Nonetheless, I was commiserating with her. “Yep, I understand. I am a band widow from band camps in August until the end of the Christmas Concerts in December.”
She replied, “For me, it’s making it through to the Bowl Games in January!”
Jon Fravel via www.flickr.com/photos/jfravel licensed cc.
And she has a 1-year-old!
So when you go to your football games and enjoy the halftime shows this fall, think of the women and children behind the scenes!
5.
One of the things that crack me up in the Apologia Physical Science book, is their mentioning safety glasses for all of their experiments. Putting a cotton ball on a thermometer bulb? Put on your safety glasses!! I think it’s a little ridiculous.
However, this past week I was helping a table of my students in our homeschool co-op classroom. We had just put hydrogen peroxide into a pop bottle and added bakers yeast. These combine to make a lovely CO2 gas. We quickly put a balloon on top of the bottle to collect the gas. The girls were having a hard time taking the balloon off the bottle so I went over to help. The balloon got away from me and lightly sprayed the mixture all over me and the closest student.
We were stunned. It didn’t hurt or make a stain on our clothes, but it did make us smell slightly like a cross between baked bread and champagne.
I might mention this to the students and put it out there for the parents to decide whether or not they want to invest in some safety glasses.
6.
Rosie got a 40 on her very first writing assignment in this new class. She was devastated. You don’t think your homeschooled students will care that much about grades, but they really do. Especially when several of her friends are also in this online class and have started to compare notes. This is a high school level class and I think it’s going to take her some time to get used to it. This week, I think she has a great essay and I’m interested to see how it gets graded. It’s all about comparing and contrasting the riddles in Chapter 5 of the Hobbit.
Mr. Pete has read the Hobbit and all of the Lord of the Rings series four or five times. This is my first time through the Hobbit. Will I be a heretic if I admit that I’m just not that into it?
7. The Friday Freebie!
