The Usefulness of Having Blogged Consistently for 13+ years...

 Sigh...

I haven't blogged in ages. The smart phone has destroyed our lives and will be the death of humanity. hahaha NOT funny, actually. Sigh... (but for real, the internet is destroying the world. It had so much potential for good! It's divided us, polarized us, spread SO MANY LIES, it was supposed to be the age of information, not dis-information!).

First off, a shout-out the the incredible usefulness of having blogged consistently for 13 years (over 100 posts a year between 2006 and 2016 - WOW! Nearly 200 posts a year for 10 years straight). 

My freshly turned 21 year old son (OMG, this is insane, he was two years old when I started this here blog, TWO) is obsessed with tracking his travels, down to the days we departed and arrived back. And thanks to this blog, I was able to find out exactly the days we went to Brazil and came back. Thanks to me recording my life in an interactive way -- responding to my followers' questions, "talking" to them so they'd know what I was up to, etc -- I now have a very meaningful record of things we did and when. It BLEW my mind. 

When he started demanding dates, I turned to  my old journals and there was so little there! Then I dug up old passports to look for the stamps, but they were only marginally helpful because they only had dates and not the places of departure and arrival. And then I finally remembered the blog and... voilá, we had all the info we needed at our fingertips. It was super exciting! An amazing breakthrough! And I was reminded of fascinating things I didn't remember had happened as well. I need to go back and re-read this blog.

This was going to be the intro to a post about 2022 and 2023, but I reasoned that it should be its own post. Let's see if I write the other one. I'll be watching a Livestreaming of my son's orchestra concert in the West Coast, so I'll have plenty of time to write. I hope. 

18th Blogging Anniversary, Empty-Nesting, Deaths, and Being American during a Global Pandemic

18 years ago in a month minus one day... I posted a photo of my baby and I. 

This baby is gone off to college now, we're officially empty-nesters. 😱😮

I think I'm handling it well. In a way, it was harder when two years ago we left his older brother in college, on the very day my husband's grandmother died (of COVID, BTW, but she was 94 and declining).

(long digression below)

I wrote elsewhere that on the day she left us, her oldest grandchild, born in her own house of her firstborn daughter, left her very first great-grandchild in college.

So many kinds of grieving in one short day, with more to come -- in the funeral the next day, we were blindsided watching on Zoom when my father-in-law's ashes (he died in 2016) were placed to rest next to his mother-in-law (they were really close). When my  MIL bought the cemetery plot a couple of days before her mom's death, this had been arranged and planned, but she forgot to tell us, so when we saw it happen without any warning, it was quite devastating and my husband cried and grieved for his dad all over again. It was a painful, but meaningful closure for my MIL. In a few days my husband flew to Brazil to spend 3 weeks with his mom while he taught his online

A month later my mom's oldest brother, as old as K's grandma, died suddenly and, since my  mom was turning 80 (and my dad 83), I decided to go spend three weeks with them as well, as I continued to teach online. 

Blessings in disguise, silver linings, if you will, of the global pandemic. And I was never so thankful for my American passport as in that moment! I could board an empty plane, walk out into an empty airport in the country of my first nationality, spend three weeks with my parents, and come back home on another empty aircraft, land in empty airports, with all their stores locked up with no problem. 

The home of the free, the land of the brave. Never was that more clear to me than during the pandemic. Unlike my Canadian brother- and sister-in-law who were stuck and couldn't even see friends, I was free to go because I was an American. (and life was pretty normal here in the rural area where we live, at least in the second half of 2020. Our kids' private school and private university were also in person -- although the college experience of my older son was not being great, but I shall not blog about that).

It took a global pandemic to reconcile me to my new nationality and -- perhaps? -- identity. 

The "in-betweeness" of this blog's still valid masthead is still my life. 

(end digression, I think it wasn't too bad, was it?)

I started blogging in the days of early motherhood. I had a baby and a toddler and blogging changed my life. I met new people, I was exposed to so many new ideas, I came out of my "bubble" so to speak.

I all but abandoned it in the past 10 years, never even blogged when I perhaps most needed it (the pandemic), but maybe being an empty-nester, who goes every school year day to teach "kids that could be my own kids" (this will end in 4 years and I am TERRIFIED of that -- how will I be able to teach when all my students will be younger than my kids, and I'll keep getting older and older and them younger and younger?? 

The past 18 years were pretty incredible. I have nothing to complain about. I do have a charmed, privileged life and I am thankful for every single thing in it. Even for this abandoned blog. It was such a great and important part of the past years. Maybe I'll come back and blog more? Especially when I have a pile of grading that I'm trying to avoid! 😆

The 9/11 Babies Were the Class of 2020 - 9/11 21 years later and the pandemic

It took me 20 years to finally watch the Naudet brothers' 9/11 documentary. I saw it on YouTube.  

No wonder I didn't really know much about it when it aired on TV, CBS aired it on March 10, 2002. 

My oldest son was born on March 9, 2002.

And here, I will begin with a digression, which should be a post in and of itself, but I cannot say I'm a blogger anymore, so it will go here. I shared this thought on Facebook a few times, but writing stuff on FB is not the same as writing a blog post (and don't get me started on how frustrating the internet is nowadays with the stupid social media that is no substitute to what we had with blogging).*

Yes, The 9/11 Babies (in utero or newborns) were the Class of 2020

They experienced trauma before they were born when we were stressed out by all that was going on, and then, they had their graduation and first year of college experiences taken from them. I know because my poor son is still recovering from those traumas. Sigh... 

And all of a sudden, all that I wanted to say had kind of vanished from my head. COVID brain? :-(

As I was saying, I saw the 9/11 documentary film today. The one in which the two French-American brothers follow Engine 7/ Ladder 1/ Battalion 2 Firehouse. The one in which miraculously every single last one of the firefighters survives!!! I wanted to hear from each of them 21 years later. 

Why did it take me so long? I don't really know the answer to this question. 

I just wrote a super long comment in my friend Jamie's blog post in which I realized that maybe I could have blogged throughout the whole pandemic and tried to rebuild the fantastic community I write about the footnote below. Instead I journaled (A LOT), started reconnecting with friends over Zoom (heck, we even watched my husband's grandmother's funeral on Zoom, what a year! I also saw weddings on Facebook and Zoom) and I spent a lot of time on stupid Instagram and Facebook. Sigh... 

The Zoom meetings are still going strong over 2 years later -- it was incredible, really fantastic to connect with college friends who were like family, and seeing one another every Friday night has become a need. 

OK, I've lost steam. I need to go work out, something we also gained with the pandemic, starting in January 2021, we do the workouts of Caroline Girvan, an Irishwoman who is incredible. I hope she keeps on posting videos for us! At 51, lifting weights and exercising is a need, and essential to our health and well being.

In any case... I do think it was a missed opportunity, not blogging during the pandemic. OTOH... yeah... I don't know if it's still relevant. In spite of that, I'll hit publish. ;-P

* And the Millennial Influencers and YouTubers imagining that they are the first to create community online, don't they know that before they were making their videos and interacting with viewers we had blogs and actually made virtual friends online? We created many kinds of communities which were very important to us (for me it was especially interacting with other academic mothers, people who, like me, were raising babies and writing PhD dissertations). I met between 10-15 of these other bloggers in person, I am still on FB just so I can be in marginal touch with them. Sigh... What do these 30 somethings know of what we (15-20 years older) did 15 years ago online? OK, rant over.

The Year of Losing, Forgetting, and Breaking Things

Sigh...

All I do is sigh... it must be aggravating to people around me. Good thing I haven't been blogging then, maybe. About that, I was mystified to still be able to use the old, never updated, Blogger app on my old iPhone 5 an actually post a few words. The major downfall for blogging for me (and probably everyone else who no longer does it) was finally getting a smart phone in 2012. The Blogger app helped a bit, but when it wasn't updated anymore, it was another huge blow.

Occasionally, I still "write blog posts in my head," but since I spend way less time on computers (mostly because I hate laptops and I have one for work) and too much time on the stupid phone, I have all but abandoned this cherished space. I feel very sad about it... and yet, I don't do much to fix it.

One thing I will have to write about is the impending beginning of being an empty-nester about 9 or 10 months from now when my oldest leaves for college. I may, or may not blog about how I am sad that he and his girlfriend broke up (precisely because of HER moving away and going to college).

Today, however, I just want to write about how this year my ADHD is just "killing me" with all the stuff I've lost (and mostly found), and forgotten, and broken. It's becoming extremely upsetting, not to mention also costly!!

I admit it's an annoying topic, but it's what's defined 2019 (I was going to write 1999!!!) so far. And I don't know WHAT to do about it!! I really don't. Taking medication (much like consuming any caffeine) is problematic for me. I can't sleep well, I don't feel hungry and just don't eat, so it's not a good option. Other things (such as Bullet Journaling) don't help much either. In any case, not to bore you with the details, the most aggravating things that happened were:

• I "lost" (in truth misplaced) my pretty journal (Katie Daisy's 2018-19 planner) inside my house for about three months. I even bought a new one (a good thing because I can now use the pictures for framing or decorating other things). It was with some books under the piano in my living room.(spent like $9)
• I brought this brand new book (if you don't want to click, Ruth Chou Simon's Beholding & Becoming) and took it to our church camp out to show to a friend. Then I forgot it on the blanket where my friend was sitting, got busy with other things and only remembered it at the end of the day -- but there had been a sudden rain and the owner of the blanket (not my friend, someone else) had tossed the book into a random camping chair. Not only was the book gone for two weeks, but it had gotten wet and dried all bent. I had already bought another book when it was found as well... (spent $15)
• Two days after also misplacing the book, I was driving to work while wearing my beloved amazonite gem necklace (made with locally mined and polished stone), but it was on wrong, so at a red light, I removed it, intending to put it back on the right way at another traffic light, but there wasn't enough time. So when I parked the car, I was in a hurry to go get the bus, I just got off the car, forgetting the necklace was on my lap. In between classes, when I went to the bathroom, I noticed I didn't have the necklace and remembered with alarm I probably had let it fall on the ground next to the car. Of course, when I walked back to my car in a hurry again (I was driving to Washington D.C. to meet up with a friend from Brazil!) I completely forgot to look for the necklace. So... two days later, when I parked in the morning, there it was, broken down by the cars which drove over it. :-( It took me two weeks to buy another one and I'm happy with the new one, but I'm $25.00 poorer. 

[maybe insert depressing photo of the broken necklace on the road]

• Just last week on Tuesday I forgot a pencil case at church, but thankfully my husband found it for me yesterday.

I wonder what I'll lose next. I have also misplaced and found a bunch of pens, but I'm getting mad at how I keep misplacing or forgetting things. I'm sure it is also related to my age. In two years I'll be fifty. Sigh...

Yeah, so, at least I finished a whole blog post, even though it's mostly negative, like some of the previous posts I wrote this year. Only 11 posts so far, I'm sure it's a new kind of depressing record for this little blog of mine.

OK, hopefully I'll blog again soon. 

November is almost over and I didn't blog once (till now)! :-(

I blame it all on being forced to use a laptop, something that I don't like much at all, since my oldest takes over the desktop computer for hours for Minecraft or gaming during his free time -- which coincide with the hours I would be working at home in the evening. I am thoroughly enjoying the one brave friend who is still blogging daily in November and making me a tiny bit wistful for the good old days of NaBloPoMo. Oh dear... I have FIVE labels for that in my sidebar, from 2007-2011, I didn't know I had quit it in 2011, how depressing! But I did it a few more times all 30 days from 2013-15, I stopped in 2016. HA! That coincides with the time when we moved the desktop from the office upstairs (which became Kelvin's bedroom) to the family room on the first floor.

Anyway... yeah. These days I journal on two separate journals, but I haven't yet given BuJo a try. I'm considering. I had no idea the author had created it to help him manage his ADHD -- this is precisely what I need! Help managing mine. Sigh...

I went to check BuJo and some articles about it and got distracted from writing this post! ;-P And of course my son will soon come to use the computer (I was writing this earlier, late morning, by now I've done three loads of laundry, most of which I am attempting to line dry since the weather is nice, nearly 60 degrees.

What else has been going on? We had a lovely Thanksgiving with my brother-in-law's family coming and spending two days and a half with us. We spent 10 Thanksgivings with them from 2002-2013 before they moved to Egypt in 2014. They moved back to the U.S. last year and since then my BIL had to have his leg amputated to get rid of an extremely rare recurring cancer. He is doing incredibly well and we hope and pray that his cancer will be permanently gone now.

I'm not looking forward to the last two weeks of the semester, this break is always a little unsettling... but I will soldier on, and grade a lot and everything will end well as it always does.

Hopefully I'll blog again a few more times before the year is out.

Retroactive Blogging or 17/71

Written last week on 1/4:
It's not about the 77 posts, it's more about getting posts from last year out of the drafts folder and still in the last year, and also other New Year's Eve related posts that don't belong here in January.

So I will do some retroactive blogging in the next day or two, without any guilt because it's my blog, my life, etc.

I also want to write some more New Year minded posts before it's too late.
--------------
OK, so in the end I only wrote three posts (on 1/9) and because 71 is 17 backwards I think those to posts are enough!

The first is a list of things that were kind of new/unique in 2017 -- my apologies if the post is a tad negative. Sigh...

The second was also a list (yeah, I know, I'm way too much into lists and looking at the past and figuring out what happened every year) of the family reunion holidays since I started blogging THIRTEEN YEARS ago! :-)

And the third is a list (with brief commentary) of all the films I watched this summer -- most were Marvel!

Yeah, so there you go, I hope you enjoy my "retroactive" posts. ;-P

Happy New Year!

Yeah... I never got to post and reach my goal of 77 posts in 2017. So lame!

Sigh...

We left the rental house past 11 am, and since we had to stop by the airport to pick up our other car that K's brother "K3" had left there as they went back home to Qatar, we decided to stop for lunch on the way at our new favorite fast food place: Blaze Pizza. We actually invited K2 and his family to join us, so we had a few more moments together with them.

Then we picked up the other car, stopped at Trader Joe's and Aldi to do some grocery shopping and didn't get home until past 7 pm. I did my best to cook a relatively ok New Year's Eve meal and then... we decided to end the year watching a movie with our oldest son -- Batman Begins. It ended shortly before midnight and we saw the stupid ball drop.

It was then I realized I hadn't blogged. oh well!

The truth is that I don't really like my work laptop. I didn't want a Mac, so I went for a PC (Dell) and it turns out that I cannot install or update ANYTHING because I don't have administrator privileges! SO USELESS! My brother said it was the same thing with him, so I don't feel that awful anymore, but if I knew this, even though I have come to dislike Mac laptops (I am still 100% in love with the iMac I have on my desk at work and which will be removed at some point, since I have the laptop).

Anyway... I don't like laptops and wish I could use our home's desktop instead, but our son, the gamer, is always on it.

I will try to post the pending 2017 posts tomorrow. Perhaps "cheating" on the date (as I am with this one, publishing one hour earlier than the actual time).

Happy New Year!

8 posts to go...

... to get to 77 (because one is already written).

I'll have to post them all in the next 24h, but that won't be hard. ;-)

Sometimes I wish I were blogging more, but I keep in touch with former bloggers (such as Leery Polyp, Professing Mama, Anastasia, Raising WEG, etc.) on Facebook. I like it that Jamie (Light & Momentary), What Now?, and Laura (11D) are still around in blogland, though.

OK, gotta post this and come back for more later. Today the family who lives in Qatar (K3+family) had to leave to fly back home. Tomorrow morning the rest of us will leave the Poconos, so tonight my husband, his youngest brother and four of the boys (my youngest, K3's two boys, and K4's oldest) decided to go snowboarding/skiing because it snowed lightly all day. I hope they'll have fun and that my son & hubby won't get sicker -- they had scratchy throats. I'll update later.

When you think you wrote something...

... and then can't find it.

I thought I'd blogged it, so I looked in my archives this year (easy peasy because, hello! only 62 posts, the most depressing number ever), part of last year (wow, what a depressing year 2016 was!) and came up empty.

It may be in my journal somewhere, that's what I'm hoping. If it is maybe I'll even post a photo.

Yesterday a former blogger I really like* and who often posts funny things on facebook that all her really cool friends comment on and we always have great interactions in the comment sections couldn't sleep and wrote a post with chapters of a "book" of self-condemnation items. People chimed in with chapter titles and appendices and what not, and I wrote a comment outlining my own very sad book of regrets & other negative things.

However, a while back -- a few months? half a year? a year? I was feeling like literally writing such a list of negative things, but I stopped myself and wrote a list of the things I'm best of.

That's what I'm looking for. I'll go look in my journal, maybe it's there.

* and one of a select group of bloggers I met several times in person, in her case and two others because of LLL!

Highly Curated Content versus Relatively Raw & Unflitered...

... or the Instagram/Pinterest versus the Blogger/WordPress generations.

Nothing like a scattered and hastily written blog post to dispel writer's block, I guess? ;-) ;-P

Yes, I know that smiley faces make me look less intelligent, but this is not a work email, and I don't care. Although I am bravely resisting the urge of adding emoticons to my emails to students. I still draw smileys on exams, though. ;-)


I have wanted to say this for a while and I wish I could write a highly edited and curated blog post, but a quick one will have to do, before the writer's block sets in again! (can you feel the despair in my voice?)
;-P

In any case, first of all, I think this is a generational difference... (that's why I added the "Aging" label -- I don't have one about different generations) younger people (and by that, I  mean folks 10-15 years younger than me) have a "thing" going. At least the sample of younger people that I know and interact with -- most are originally from Brazil, BTW. They are very intentional in the way they decorate their house, plan and execute their weddings, pose for photos, not to mention fashion choices. They also photograph everything daily life & events very selectively and at expert angles & lighting and post it to Instagram.

I guess it all started with Pinterest and the ability to curate content online (so people would find the same things cute & "fashion" would become even more uniform than it already is) and then Instagram made it easy to share one's highly photogenic choices and lifestyle.

There are some older people (although maybe still slightly younger than me) such as Dooce and other professional bloggers who have been very picture perfect in their online life, although not exactly like the younger people I know -- but those are the "professional" web content creators. Today, everyone looks perfect like that, I mean, at least the sample I'm exposed to.

One thing that is kind of scary to me is how fads and styles have become the same here and in Brazil. The style of wedding decoration and children's parties, for example... Wooden things, greenery, mason jars for drinking, naked cakes, hanging lights...

Sigh...

Can you tell I'm slightly irritated by all this perfection?

I miss words, many many words rather than pretty images. I miss raw feeling and relatively unfiltered thoughts. I still attempt to share them here, but I confess that I'm becoming more and more overwhelmed by the millennials that create such perfect content online now. I severely limit my exposure to such folks, only following a few people I know on Instagram, but even this small exposure already influences me.

Looking at their neutral colors, extremely beautiful party decor, lovely assortment of picture frames arranged on walls, is making me feel ugly and old and too colorful and LOUD, even.

I LOVE who I am, I love my funky style, all the colors, all the flowers, but sometimes I feel like I want some of that stereotypically beautiful style that today's younger generation likes.

A prime example is the new Magnolia line at Target. I have also been photographing things in this style for a while on my phone and I'll try to illustrate my point with photos later.

For now I just want to say that I really, really, REALLY miss the community of bloggers that I was active part of from 2005-2009, maybe 2010. I have some more thoughts about this (that have to do with the openness that came along the advent of blogging and that has now waned), but I'll try to share those later.

Have you noticed this new Pinterest/Instagram trend? What do you think?

Gotta Write Something! (And a Xmas Card brought to you by... Lowered Expectations!)

OK, I have FIVE posts sitting in the draft folder right now, all my latest posts, and about 5 more in draft since June.

I'm tired of thinking of the draft folder. I also think that the internet and my phone are exacerbating my ADHD to such a point that I'm becoming a useless person. Really.

So I've gotta write and publish something. ANYTHING!!

It's cold and I think that now that I've been back from my trip for a week I'm finally back to "normal" -- especially today that I finally took my medication again (it had run out a few days before my trip and I had not had time to fill the prescription and did so only yesterday).

And back to normal is not especially pleasant since I feel HORRIBLY guilty that I have a HUGE number of compositions and online work from my students that I haven't read and graded since the beginning of the semester. Yes, I am a horrible person and a horrible teacher. Sigh...

I hate online homework. I don't know how I can make that better. All the "PTSD" from the horrible University of Phoenix gig (from like 8 years ago!) is still a factor.

Ok, what else can I say?

We've decided to go to Montreal next week to visit my youngest brother-in-law and his family. Oldest son is suggesting we stop for a night or two in NYC and get a hotel in Manhattan.

Youngest son is grumbling that he hates cities and it will be torture (this is the poor kid that was "forced" to spend his 12th birthday in Manhattan with us last year -- MoMA (which he loved, BTW) and Top of the ROK.

What else? Oh, yeah, Last night I ordered our Christmas Card at Costco and we picked them up today. This is the photo paper one that I send to Brazil to be mailed to all our family and friends. I order extra-early so my mother-in-law can take them to Brazil for me for my mom to mail them out.

We had NO nice photos at all, so I used a photo taken at a sunset at the beach in FL (and the light looks horrible in the print out) and -- GASP!!! -- a SELFIE! How low have I gone!? A selfie in a Xmas card? Talk about lowered expectations!! Then I added two more photos -- one of our youngest son and I in San Francisco and the other a nice photo of K and Kelvin on my new phone. It's not too horrible.

That should be enough for one post.

66 or 23 more posts to go

Once more, I want to pursue the "silly" goal of 117 posts in 2017.

If I find it too hard to write 66 posts, which would be PRECISELY one post a day until Dec. 31st (yikes!!), I'll settle for 77. ;-)  That's way more manageable, only 23 more posts to go!

In any case, if I post daily in November, I should be good, shouldn't I? (old NaBloPoMo!) In any case, I know that once I get going, or "start talking writing" it'll be easy to keep going.

So... yeah, I have a feeling that 66  more posts would be relatively easy. OK, let me post this and get started right away! I feel good about the prospect of blogging more often. I just wish the Blogger app still worked so I could blog from my phone more easily. Now with a bigger screen I can probably manage doing it from the browser.

I'll be back soon!

I really don't know...

... why I'm not blogging more or, I mean, much, or at all.

There's no good reason, perhaps the main one is that I have the (probably correct) impression nobody reads anymore, it's no longer a community. And I HATE that I spend so much time on stupid Facebook because I want to continue to have some relationship with people I met through blogging.

Sigh... such a lame reason to waste time on social media!

Everything is going ok. My title at work has changed. It's supposed to make us feel less bad, or to make us almost believe that we actually have some professional dignity. It's the same title of TT faculty, with "General Faculty" attached at the end.

It's a cosmetic change. No pay raise, no other benefits. More work because some service will be required -- they need more people to populate committees that will "promote" other faculty to the same "fake" rank.

I am sorry if I am horribly bitter about all this. I've hardly had the courage to blog about it... it is what it is. I will, after my review next year, have some actual stability, and that's good, but I want to be able to take a semester leave without losing my job so my husband can take a sabbatical and we can go live in Europe for about 6 months. Maybe it will be possible -- but by then the kids will be older and probably won't come with us. :-(

I am not very happy about my teaching, as usual... but everything is going ok.

I have a trip coming up, but I hope to blog about that in a separate post.

My mom turns 77 in 4 days and my dad will be 80 in two weeks -- that's the reason of my trip, BTW.

OK, more later!

P.S. (ETA 10/24, 10:50 am) What makes me more depressed is that for our "promotion" only research about pedagogy counts. We have ZERO intellectual freedom. I mean, we can do some research, publish, present (no funds to go to conferences, BTW, only with grants that only let us apply for pedagogical stuff again), but it won't count. And this "lower," second-class pseudo tenure is becoming the norm. I know I should be thankful that 1) I have a full-time job; 2) I have a multi-year contract and hence higher pay; 3) I will actually have stability.

Sigh... why can't we do research too if we were trained for it and are passionate about it. Are we really such a threat to the tenure system? Is it our fault that there aren't enough jobs to go around and too many of us?

As I'm getting older and more bitter I begin to regret having gotten a PhD. WHAT FOR???? Academia is the worst, it really is. 

And I guess it makes perfect sense I haven't been blogging. I don't want to be whiny and annoying, so why even write here? :-(

Blame it all (blog hiatus mostly) ;-P on the birthday boy

My son turned 15 two and a half weeks ago and I didn't even blog about it! Or about anything else, for that matter.

The main reason is that with him constantly gaming and editing videos, I have hardly ANY access to our only desktop! :-(  And I don't like to use my macbook pro that needs urgent file purging to work ok. (and a secondary reason is that I have NOT installed any other blogging apps on my phone, so I continue not to be able to blog from the phone! :-( :-( :-(

So... what have you missed? TONS ;-P

If we're friends on Facebook, you'll know that on International Women's Day my husband and I went to DC to get our Brazilian passports and we ended up participating of a Women's March protest in front of the White House. That was awesome because minutes before the march started pouring in, we were there looking at that place and feeling horribly dismal and upset.

Too bad we came back home to find out that our youngest son needed a new passport too! What a failure!! Sigh...

I wanted to blog more about my "Volunteering" Spring Break, so I'll leave it at that for now (many many hours of volunteering, but, thankfully, also three fitness classes [two yoga], YAY! Conversely, I haven't been to one in two weeks [since then!! oh no!!]).

I still cannot believe that the craziness had taken various hits and that we have a temporary break and some respite from the constant anguish and despair. I'm indescribably relieved that the second banned was blocked even before it went into effect and there are no words to describe my relief about the health care replace failure. I literally want to cry for joy.

The hard part is that we still don't know what is going to happen in the rest of this presidency, there's no predicting it. :-(  Have you been reading/following Dan Rather's Facebook updates? It's the BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED since the election. Reading what that man writes keeps me sane (yesterday's post is most excellent, and a great "sample"). I like him better than Michael Moore who can be a little incendiary and who's been very very quiet lately... don't know why. I hope his health is OK.

Ok, what else? Well, there's some more, but maybe it's worth saving the juiciest bits for stand-alone posts.

Dirty confession (that also deserves its own post, but is too silly not to mention): I have become a  LuLaRoe legging semi-addict, but I'm working on quitting, slowly, but surely. Sigh...

I'll end here, this is a jumbled and long enough post to break the hiatus, isn't it?

Blogging in 2017...

... is lonely and discouraging.

But blogging is one of "my favorite things!!!" :-(

BTW the label/song-nod, is wrong because I have A LOT of favorite things, really, not a few by any stretch of the imaginations... shall I list?
... traveling!! (planning trips, being out and about)
... my sons & my family
... colors! (greens and aqua and rainbow colors, rainbow things, rainbow anything!)
... clothes and shoes and cute things
... music
... cooking for people! (my "drug of choice," remember?)

yeah... and much more.

Back to blogging in 2017, though... sigh... it's frustrating to say the least. I made so many friends through blogging! It literally changed my life (I'd like to a post from 2006 -- ELEVEN years ago! -- but why? I know how to find it, nobody will read)

And now... all that I can do to keep up with these dear and thoughtful friends I made is to hang out in STUPID Facebook! :-( And since I hardly ever post there, those friends, who no longer read my blogs or any blogs (I'd like to hope, 'cause it's very sad to think they still read other people's but just got tired of mine or something, it hurts my feelings, not to mention my self-esteem which is already pretty bad!) don't know what's going on with me much.

I blog for myself though, the same way that I still keep journals -- a daily one, writing a few lines about each day (generally once a week on Saturdays) and sometimes on another one I can write more. I re-read my journals regularly and I also re-read old blog posts quite often. It is a wonderful way to keep track of one's life -- and also the lives of my sons to a lesser degree (given that I've never blogged much about them, as I wrote on this lovely post from 2013).

So, yeah... I'm glad Jamie is still around (and sent me this most beautiful, absolutely GORGEOUS shawl I have yet to blog about) as well as What Now? Thank you SO MUCH to both of you for still reading and commenting!

I love to blog and I'll keep on doing. I just don't know if I can trust Google not to delete Blogger. I need to back up this blog somewhere safe and I hope Google will let us know ahead of time if it decides to shut this free service (for which I am very thankful) down.

I want to give an update on the refugees, since What Now? asked, but it will have to be another post. I should be grading now, but I'm blogging, obviously. Classic procrastination tool!

2016's Final Blogging Stretch

Last year I had to write 19 posts on Dec. 31st to reach my goal of 215 posts in 2015. The goal is considerably lower this year (116 posts), so I have to write only 10 more after this post, and I've got two days to do it! And the good thing is that I have a lot to say, so it should be easy. I'll start with a look back at the past week.

Quick holiday trip update:
After we arrived here in Montreal last Friday, I spent nearly three days cooking for three families (13 people). The meals were relatively simple ones, but I was the main person cooking. K's uncle's wife helped to clean lot as did my husband and my sister-in-law, who was also in charge of setting the table and decorating on Christmas Eve.

We decided to do our Secret Santa and open presents on Christmas Eve because on Sunday K and his brother took their uncle's family on a driving tour to show them Montreal. It was really cold and most everything was closed, so it didn't take them too long.

They left on Monday and I spent many hours at the outlet helping my sister-in-law with her Boxing Day (more or less equivalent to Black Friday in the U.S.) shopping excursion (she took advantage of the holiday promotional prices to buy things for her mom to take to Brazil).

Since then we've been mostly staying up late and sleeping in, then playing board games and going out to eat, first to an all-you-can-eat sushi place and then in a Brazilian bakery. We also had to go to stores to return Christmas gifts and K ended up buying a bargain priced snow-board, bindings, and boots for himself!

I am still recovering from a pretty bad sinus infection and my husband also had a nasty cold, but we're much better. The guys (K, his brother and our two sons) were going skiing tomorrow, but the forecast is pretty bad weather for the place where the ski station is located, so I guess they will go on Sunday -- even though we were planning to start driving back then. It looks like we'll have to drive straight back home on Monday (our younger son goes back to school on Tuesday).

Other things we did: I read two books and have started a third one! We watched one movie (the new one about Pelé, the Brazilian soccer player, more on this later) and played lots of games!

Thanksgiving in Michigan... thinking of other bloggers during trip

I'm still grieving and upset, but I am actively choosing to avoid listening to or reading the news. I feel a knot in my stomach just by looking at email updates from Time magazine (we're still print subscribers) and thinking about their (now dreaded for me) "person of the year" issue. Sigh... My dear friend wrote very poignantly a couple of days ago about the thought of "empty tomorrows." I've always looked forward to future days, but right now it's hard to look into the unpredictable future that awaits those living in this country. OK, moving on from that, this is supposed to be an "Update" post and those are often cheery.

Last week we traveled to a place close to Michigan's Southwestern shore to spend Thanksgiving with K's cousin D who is finishing his master's degree there. D and his wife are expecting a baby girl (due Jan. 1st) and it was very nice to spend time with them. We did a quick side trip to Chicago on Friday and we played lots of board game. Their friends had a potluck Thanksgiving celebration at the house of their friend who is a pretty well-known Brazilian food blogger (I'm linking to her Christmas dinner "post" so you can see some of the decorations that were actually used in our dinner. I have photos, maybe I'll include some of them later). It was nice, and I was the one providing all of the "traditional" American Thanksgiving touches: cranberry sauce (I had made "only" 14 quarts of cranberry sauce for my son's elementary school banquet last week and I had taken leftovers), the Yams with Pecan Praline (a recipe I posted TEN YEARS ago!), roasted Brussels sprouts, and butternut squash "pudding" (crust-less pie).

What I really wanted to blog about, though, is that during the whole trip I kept thinking of the bloggers and former bloggers who live (or grew up) in places not too far from our route or from our destination. When we drove around Pittsburgh and into Ohio, I thought of Jenna who grew up there. Then, when I saw the sign for Fort Wayne I thought of my friend and former blogger Professing Mama. And when we went to Chicago I thought of Doctor Mama Esquire who lives there now, and of Jamie who is not that far away. I still want to meet these women! And I really miss all those who quit blogging along the way and who are one of the main reasons I'm on facebook a lot.

OK, gotta go because I have lots to do! I have one week of classes left (YAY!) and I have tons of grading to do. Hopefully I'll blog more in the coming days. 19 more posts to get to my "116" total for 2016. Yeah, I'm doing that, just to be cute. That was the main reason why I skipped "NaBloPoMo" for the first time in 9 years (with the exception of 2012 when I wrote only 25 times in November) -- very silly, right? In a way I'm glad I wasn't blogging daily. There would have been lots of anguish and despair about the election. Sigh... 2016 was a crazy year, that's for sure! :-(   

NaBloPoMo?

I guess that maybe I'm going to try blogging daily in November once more, although that will defeat this recent idea I had of maybe posting 116 times this year (to look cute, since I can't possibly reach 216). Writing every day in November will take me to 123. ;-P

Oh well, maybe I'll change my mind so I can do 116 posts.

More tomorrow!

Blogroll mostly back

I spent some time today trying to remember as best as I could the blogs that were in my now-gone blogroll and I think that I was able to do it for the most part.

This brought home the sad realization that there are very few people left in "blogland" and most people aren't posting anymore. :-(

oh well... I do this mostly for myself, so I'm still here.

Favorite Blogs List and Feed is GONE!! :-( WHY?

Well... it looks like blogging really will have to be over soon for me or I will have to move to another platform. If I can't use my blog to get the feed of my friends' blogs, then what's the use of it?

I'm trying to understand what's going on, but just last night I checked the blogs listed on my side-bar and now they are gone. Do I need to add them back up from memory? Searching for each blog? :-(

Maybe it's a temporary problem (this has happened once before and after a day or so the blogroll was back in place, to my relief), but maybe it's not, since there's a message saying that my "HTTPS" settings have been changed in the blog.

Whatever is going on, it's pretty distressing, annoying, and is making me sad. And nobody will read this if their own blogrolls are gone! :-(

I just checked Jo(e)'s blog and her list of a few blogs from her blogroll is still there! Why is mine gone? (says she pouting).

Well... ridiculous 21st century problem, right? It still disrupts my life, though. A small part of it, but it does.

And I didn't even intend to be blogging, just came here to check if there were any new posts from friends to read.

OK, before I go, I'll start making a new blogroll from scratch and see if this one will be gone too!