Choose your ad(venture)

Yup, that's what we get

This is a rather disjointed chain of thoughts from a couple days. Good luck!

Saturday 1/25 - Thoughts before heading out for a trail race

The 7th graders have now begun writing stories.

Choose your own adventure stories.

At the end of each page they have to present options to the reader. The reader then clicks one of the options and proceeds down the path they have chosen.

I’m sure many of you remember the paperback stories this assignment is based on. As a kid I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series and would buy them whenever I had a chance. I would then sit and read them and choose and when my path failed I would go back and try again.

Pretty fun.

In my class they have to build these things in Google Presentation. It’s a bit tricky because you don’t want folks to just click around willy nilly. It’s nice to trap them in the appropriate story line.

They started yesterday and seem quite excited. We’ll see how they turn out.

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Our country and world is on its own choose your own ad(venture). We chose a course of action that really did not seem at all advisable to me but here we are. The big TeRibble UmPire has already started throwing his weight around like an unpredictable referee that ruins the game. But that’s what we chose. We knew what he would do. He’s doing it. How it turns out might be unpleasant.

I’ve already received instructions at work on our rights and how to NOT let in agents that are seeking illegals in our country into the school. It’s horrible. Just thinking it gives me flashbacks to riding the train in the East Block and being confronted by military types with machine guns at every turn. “ID please” “Where are you going?” “Where are you from?” “What’s your business?” and then they take it and disappear for ten minutes, return and hand it quietly back with a suspicious look.

This is not what I want in my country.

Fires in LA and storms in the state LA have become political … a shouting match … rather than pushing forward a realization that the climate should be ruling our decision making. Not sales. Not property. Not products. Not social memes. Not pardons. Not wars. Not taking care of our earth will leave nothing for our children. Doesn’t matter if you have a fabulous 401k or a big house to hand down. Hell.

continued - Monday 1/27 evening

I weighed myself last Tuesday after yoga. 184. 17lbs less than what I weighed when Katie died. I told MB and he said, isn’t 17lbs what they said a soul weighs… in that movie? You know, with Will Smith? I don’t know but it made me think about how it is that I’m losing weight. I do feel like there’s a soul missing.

Losing weight benefited me in the trail run. I ran easy with my buddies to the first aide station and then just felt, well antsy. So I took off up the first big hill. Ran the whole thing. Then I just kept going. Up, down. Whatever. Ran the whole rest of the race despite the big ass hills. I passed a lot of people. I ran the same race 2 years ago. I took 21 minutes off. 16.5 miles. That’s a lot faster.

Well, okay. I did stop for a moment or two to take pictures.

ICE raids have begun. They’re rounding up folks and shipping them out of the country. Columbia tried to say “no” but got forced into it by threats of tariffs and no trade. Evil. It’s all evil. I assume they’re starting in the more “red” states where such actions may be deemed as welcome. I have not heard if it’s happening in California at this time.

This morning I was “on guard” at my normal post during a school Mass. Outside the church. Alone. Wondering what I would do if they did show up. sigh.

Yesterday would have been First Date night for Katie and me. We would have had cheeseburgers. I would have given her a carnation. Instead I got to spend the morning with KS and then the afternoon at a birthday tea party with a bunch of friends - mutual friends. They all knew Katie. It was a good way to spend the day. Here we are in the middle of the night one year walking at Relay for Life.

I have begun planning out my own adventure story to post here. I’ll put it up when I’m done. Hopefully you’ll find it entertaining. I’m not actually sure I can embed a Google Presentation in here… we’ll find out!

Be nice to folks. Hugs to all of you.