Mediation and Meditation

So far, I'm not getting into blogging too heavily yet.  A big reason why is I feel guilty doing it when my basement is still a disaster and my garden is not ready for spring.  Another great excuse is, I'm going to school.  Yep!  I'm taking classes to certify as a mediator. Why?  That's just the way I roll.  One thing leads to another and I find myself on a new path.  Not that I plan on leaving the old path, but I'm branching out in an effort to have more services to offer and to learn something new.   So this path started really a few years ago.  I was interpreting in a trial and a witness does mediating, which had nothing at all to do with the case, it was just a side job this guy had.  The attorney asked him what training he needed to do that job and it didn't sound like it was any more complicated than becoming an interpreter and that piqued my interest.  I had already interpreted for mediations and I liked what I saw, and actually, it requires some similar skills to the ones I use to interpret.  Then a few weeks later my husband mentioned that a guy that works for him was taking a mediation course and he thought I would be good at it.  Plus, they need more people doing it that speak Spanish.  It was too weird, I took it for a sign and spent the next year and a half trying to get BYU to let me sign up for a prerequisite course.   Finally last fall I took that course.  Due to the fact that BYU will do anything to make my life difficult, they no longer offer the mediation courses so I'm taking them at UVU.  It took another year to get my records to UVU and get into the course.  Now I'm fighting to get into next semester's course.  Anyhow, it has been a fascinating ride so far, and I'm learning a lot of things that apply to life in general so it shouldn't be a wash-up no matter what.

Now the other thing I'm doing just adds a t- meditation. :) Sweet, huh?  Why? Because I have had a lot of health issues and I figure the root cause of whatever is really going wrong (who knows) is that you can't live in a blender indefinitely.  Eventually, the stress will make you sick.  This is a way to calm and focus and relax my body and mind.  I'm no sure how far I'll get with it, but so far, I'm liking it too.  Which leads, in a strange sort of way to what I plan to do next when I get done with school.  Take belly dancing classes.  Because they help you relax and stay fit.  I'm not planning to do live performances.  It's just for me; it's really fun! My mom probably remembers that when I was really little I said I wanted to be a belly dancer when I grew up.  I meant ballet, but now I"m getting back to my original goal- to be a (closet) belly dancer. 

Too Amusing

Thanks for the clarification.

Just in case you were wondering what to do with those hangers, wire, and duct tape lying around your house....


My computer won't take these photos so I had to try saving them here on the blog.  I need to stop locking horns with computers-I don't get enough sleep! BUT I WON!

Loved this One, Thanks Anna!

I Used to Be Short

Still catching up here. I have to save this story that happened a few months ago.  I was with Thing 2 at the store and he happened to mention something about "Tom" aka Gigio, being pretty short.  I said., "Well, he got that from his mother." Thing 2 stops short.  "Wait a minute," he says, "You mean to tell me you were short when you were a kid too?"(Totally shocked here).  I told him that not only was I pretty short when I was a kid, I was always the shortest one in my class. And I still am, I'm still very short.  He was incredulous.  He argued with me that I was not short anymore.  I told him I was still short.  He almost comes up to my neck already and he's only 9.  He holds his hand up at an angle and says, "No, Your head comes up to that sign"  Well, that's just an illusion I tried to explain to him.  If he's looking straight up at me, the sign farther back appears to be right over my head.  I saw a lady who was more like about 5' 7'' not far from us and asked him if he didn't see that the mommy over there was taller than me.  No, she looked about the same size to him.  So, there you have it.  I used to be 4'10'' but now I'm 5'7'', at least in my baby's eyes. The End.   

Stinky Locker Syndrome

Good news, my husband found my patience! You'll never guess where he found it! And he gave it back to me. <3.

One other piece of good news. This year we finally qualified for reduced fee lunches at school! This tender mercy is probably why I'm not writing this from a mental hospital.

Almost three years ago, I bent over backwards to make appealing school lunches for my kids. See here. Which came from here and here. Now that you see where I was coming from, I will catch you up on what has transpired since then. I spent two years alternating between trying to teach my boys to make lunches they would want to eat and trying to make exciting things for them that would make them the envy of the lunchroom. No matter what marvel went to school with them, a certain person's backpack and the recesses of the mini van were often found harboring old rotten lunches bags in this child's backpack and under back seats of our vehicles. Strange lunch bills appeared from the school. I tried to curtail this activity every way imaginable without any permanent success. Things would get better for a little while, then the lunches would start appearing again. Then the last term of last school year we had the famous incident. The one I'm sure you're dying to hear about. You aren't? Too bad.
This will go down in the annals of history as the stinky locker incident. So, it's spring of 2011, and the uneaten rotten lunches are back. I am desperate. I send an email to the teacher in hopes she can help me come up with a plan. No response. Since parent teacher conferences soon followed,I asked about it but this was an IEP/PTC in a hurry because they all had a lot to do and they sort of brushed off that concern as unimportant. 
Not more than a week after that, I get an e-mail from the teacher. There was an incident at school.  It turns out no one wanted to go to their locker anymore.  Everyone was complaining about a foul odor on that hall.  So, they had each child open their locker to try to find what the source of this stench was.  When they had Huck open his locker, what did they behold but a locker stuffed to the gills with rotting lunches in brown bags.  No wonder they started showing up at home again, there was nowhere else left in his locker for them.  I'm not sure why he couldn't just say, eat them each day or if he was going to refuse them, just throw them away.  I guess that he somehow had my other admonishment to not throw away food emblazoned in his mind and heart, NOT the one about just eating your lunch.
So, I digress a bit.  The e-mail went on to say that the stench was so awful, the lunches had to be taken out to the trash bin outside because the toxic fumes were making people feel faint and or nauseated.  This was all such a shock to the teacher because she always assumed he ate school lunch. I mean, she'd never seen him with a lunch bag before the whole year.  She also never read my e-mails or heard what I had to say about it in person the week before.  Her proposed solution to this dilemma?  "Could you please put something more interesting in his lunches so he'll want to eat them?"  I consider it very fortunate that she chose this method of communication because if it had been in person or over the phone, I think it might have gotten nasty. As it was I could cool off and then explain why this was impossible.  I did have a long talk with my son about his see food diet- I see everyone else's food, that's what I'll eat.  We talked about the health consequences of some of these foods he was mooching off others, because he wasn't begging for their carrots.  I let him know that everyone was going to be watching him now so he'd better start eating his own lunches.  The last week of school I found out he was buying two milks a day.  How?  Turns out he convinced a friend to give him the money to help the other guy buy his milk for him and pay him back with one of the milks....ARRRGGGGGH! BUT! THE! SCHOOL! YEAR! ENDED! So I heaved a big sigh of relief and hoped the world would end before he started second grade.  When it didn't I started suffering panic attacks.
Now thanks to our underemployment, we can let the boys just eat the hot school lunches for no more than we were wasting on homemade ones and one big huge daily burden was lifted from our collective shoulders. Of course, I can never quite relax.  Who knows how much of the hot lunch gets stuffed into someone's locker?  Sometimes I think I look a bit like Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus at the end of the Pink Panther, eye twitch and all...

Lost:

Shellie's patience. She's always losing things, ask anyone who lives with her. So it was bound to happen sooner or later. She's misplaced it several times but it always turned up. This time, she really lost it. She is searching high and low but it is really lost. It might help her find it without the clutter of malfunctioning, belligerent computers and printers and disobedient, distracted, disorganized dis-interested students living under her roof. If things didn't take 400 times longer than they should, (slight exaggeration) maybe she would have time to finish fixing her files and paying her bills and mopping that kitchen floor that she so very very desperately needs to mop in order to not lose that one last thread of sanity.

Maybe, just maybe if the only fruits of a day without work and the kids in school could at very least be that she managed to print all the documents she needed to put in her class notebook, she would feel better about all the things left undone. But no, printing 8 documents was beyond the capacity of the combined capabilities of 3 computers and 2 printers and assorted flash drives. WHO PUT THIS CURSE ON HER?????