Moonlighting again!

Nearly a month of stewing and fretting about my expired teaching license, then I learned yesterday that filling out one simple form and writing a $62 check buys me a lifetime teaching license. After talking to and emailing with people who gave me the runaround and incorrect information, I decided to go the State Department of Education in person. Upon arrival, I immediately connected with a woman who had a simple fix for my problem. Now I should be able to sub in any district I want to and I don't have to take a bunch of classes to accumulate clock-hours to renew my license.

I was adjusting to saying a fond farewell to subbing in Edina, thinking of it as a good opportunity to re-invent myself, when my teacher friend, Linda, talked to me over lunch about a possible job in Minneapolis testing kindergartners, beginning next fall. The job pays better than subbing, and Linda said she really enjoyed it. Several retired teachers who were doing the work for years suddenly re-retired and Linda said I may have a shot at a position on the testing team. I would work full time during the months of September, January and May.

As if this fortuitous event were not enough, sister Julie found me a tutoring job for the summer. I started this week with two sisters, ages seven and nine, and fell head over heels for them. We will focus only on reading for the summer. Julie showed me a bunch of interactive websites which are excellent for kids learning to read and which will be fun to use with the girls. Tutoring has never been my thing, but it may become more of a thing. It pays well and I don't have to leave home.

I am still working on self reinvention, so the idea of trying two new jobs along with being able to sub if and when I want to next year is appealing. A woman who has to pay for her arthritic neck and knee treatments out of pocket and who likes to shop as much as I do must be moonlighting at all times.

Young people to the rescue!

I am worried that there will come a day when I will not be able to watch television in my own home. Remote control devices used to be a nice simple technology but they have become a nightmare. Sometimes I feel like they are taking over my life. Just as I was beginning to feel confident using the three different remotes it takes to run our television system, Comcast decided to re-design their cable programming giving us a more sophisticated way to navigate their cable channels. HELP ME!!!

All the technological changes the world keeps dishing out at ever faster rates have made turning on a television set downright intimidating. I love having all the options but I feel so inept trying to get them to work. Granted, I could just veto cable television all together and go out to the movies rather than ordering from Netflix, but one becomes spoiled with all the bells and whistles. Netflix now also allows you to stream movies from your computer onto your television screen. I leave that one totally up to Harry! We pre-record most of the programs we watch because you can zip through the ads at lightening speed or pause for a bathroom break. We can also program ahead for what we want to tape. You don't have to revolve your life around a good program you want to watch on television.

Last night we had our young friends Jack and Terra over for dinner. (I think of Jack as the son I always wanted to have. Jack and Alexis were good friends from elementary school through high school, and Jack spent a lot of time at our house on Abbott. Harry married Jack and Terra seven years ago.) After dinner, the four of us were sitting in the living room, sharing new pics of our grandchildren. I was about to serve dessert when Harry the Deaf mentioned how hard it is for us to get enough volume on our new flat screen television. Jack and Terra said all we probably needed was a sound bar.

Target is only a four-minute drive from our condo, so Harry and Jack jumped in the car and Jack had our new sound bar installed within the hour. The difference for us old folks going deaf (Jeanne) and the almost completely deaf (Harry) is amazing. (I think Harry had this planned from the beginning. He knew full well Jack and Terra would feel sorry for us old folks and offer to help in any way they could.) The new sound bar means we do not have to watch everything with the sub-titles flashing across the screen. Our night of good fortune did not end there, however.

As we were marveling at the sound bar, I turned on our dining-room ceiling fan, hoping to relieve the heat and humidity in the room. It is so nice finally to be able to open the windows. Jack mentioned that the fan didn't seem to be doing much to cool the room. I said I agreed with him. The next thing I knew Jack was jumping up on a dining-room chair to adjust some knob on the fan that we had no idea existed. The fan was on the winter setting mode and needed to be on the summer mode. The room cooled off promptly.

Jack and Terra also pointed out that our new sound bar has a place for me to plug in my I-pod, which Harry bought for my birthday a few years back and which had been sitting on the television shelf for years unused because I never put in the time to learn how to use it. Jack set it in the sound bar and out came a couple of Josh Grobin songs which another young friend had downloaded for me years back. Now the technological pressure is on! I suddenly decided to feel empowered. If I can use a GPS system in the car, I should be able to use an I-pod, for heaven's sake!

I wanted to think we have something to offer these youngsters in return for their willingness to help us with our technological ineptitude. I wasn't sure just what that might be when Terra said the dessert was so good she wanted the recipe, and that I should publish the recipe on my blog. I was so flattered. I many not be techno-savvy but at least I can cook. I told her I would include the recipe I half-way invented on my next blog. Now if I can just learn to operate the new remote for the sound bar while operating the other three remotes I will be OK.

Triple Berry Cobbler

one half pint raspberries
one half pint blueberries
one half pint blackberries

Place berries in a casserole and sprinkle them with some brown sugar.

Mix together using your hands:

one cup flour
one cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
4 tablespoons milk

Put mixture on top of berries

Sprinkle some nutmeg on top and bake at 350 for 35 -40 minutes or until brown and bubbling. Serve with cream.

The kids are ok

We spent the past week in St. Louis visiting the kids. Our second granddaughter, Catie Jane, was born March 15 and we had not seen her yet. Eva, age three, is now the big sister and is handling the job beautifully. Ivan and Joanna are handling parenting two kids well too. Joanna continues to work from home on an assortment of editing jobs and Ivan is busy as a research scientist at the Danforth Institute. He took time last week to donate bone marrow to a man in New Jersey who has lymphoma. It was not an easy process. He also invited us to his lab and he did his best to explain to us what he is doing (more on this topic from my editor soon!).

Harry and I took Eva to the park in the 90degree heat, and we had a night babysitting both girls that was really fun. We ate take-out Chinese food and watched So You Think You Can Dance with Eva, who danced her way through most of the show, taking time out for a few bites of food. Eva eats like a little bird and Catie loves nothing more than to eat. Catie is a very tranquil happy baby, every mother's dream. She is just beginning to make those adorable baby sounds. At one point, while Harry was singing to her, we both distinctly heard her tell him to "shurrup!"

It would be so nice to live closer but we found the day's drive to St. Louis very do-able. If Ivan and Joanna would just buy us a new bed in the guest room we would probably drive down every month! Old people do not do well on a futon. We listened to a great book on tape as Phyllis, our GPS system, guided us along: turn right, exit left, you drive like an idiot.... recalculating." We drove along some pretty back roads and never consulted a map, having learned to trust Phyllis completely! It is certainly better than having me as the navigator.

We came home feeling very relaxed and of course missing the girls. Grandparenting is one of those things in life that is definitely not over-rated!

An empty bucket begins to fill up.....

I got word this week from the two suburban school districts where I teach that my good gig is up. Both Edina and St. Louis Park require a valid teacher's license, and mine expires this month. I would need 125 hours of continuing education credits to renew the license and I have not accumulated any credits over the past five years since I retired. I have not worried about renewal because I never saw myself teaching five years after I retired and, more to the point, the thought of taking classes makes me gag!



I was shocked and angry about this news so I fired off a letter to the director of human resources in Edina asking why I could not be "grandmothered in," as I know some of their subs are. They informed me that they have had a change in district policy and grandmothering in teachers without valid licensure is no longer done. This is the same district that had me teaching a day after they hired me because they were so short on subs. Nice they can now be so picky.

I have really enjoyed my many days of subbing this past school year. Not every day was great, of course, but most days were fun. I learned a lot from the richest school district in our state. Technology is king in Edina and the schools are so beautiful. I remember subbing one day in a small Edina elementary school and taking the kids out for a short recess they had earned for being so on task and well behaved. As we came out the back door of the school, I thought I had to be in the Northern England countryside. The playground was several acres of rolling hills and trees, trees, trees.

Thanks to Edina, I am now able to navigate my way around all the new technological teaching devices that can make classrooms "very cool" nowadays. It is the "stuff" I could only dream of when I taught in Minneapolis. It has been wonderful to experience all the dramatic technological changes that are out there for school districts with money to burn. Not only do Edina elementary classrooms have lovely playgrounds, teachers who use the latest technological teaching devices, banks of computers along the classroom walls, and more books than a small library resting neatly on the shelves below the windows, most of the children come from homes which provide and then some for the needs children have. All students, even the students bussed in from the city on open enrollment and the new immigrants from all over the world who live in Edina apartments, get the best of the best in this district when it comes to education. If only all children could experience such an education. Fair the world is not -- a truth which I always used to tell my students.

I feel very fortunate to have had all the work I had this year both in St. Louis Park and Edina. Harry and I had huge out-of-pocket medical expenses this year due to Harry's accident and the fact I am not as yet on Medicare. The knee and neck treatments I needed were not covered by my health insurance so I had to pay for them all myself. We are hoping the coming year's challenges do not come in the form of medical issues, but at our age, that may be wishful thinking.

After the news I got this week, the question now becomes what to do next? I really have no idea. Harry points out I am not retirement material at this point, and he may be right. I started working when I was 15, and for the past 45 years I have always worked and/or gone to school. I took a couple of summers off from teaching when Alexis was young and I have had stretches of time since retirement when Harry and I traveled the world. I always knew, however, that I wanted to get back to work. Work, along with shopping, is what I do best. I have developed hobbies I love, but teaching has remained a passion. The good part about subbing has been that I can work when I feel like it and not work when I feel like it. I have found the role of sub to be fun, worthwhile, and not too taxing. The money is not great but it is not bad either.

I recently happened upon an old journal I wrote about 16 years ago. I have a box under our bed of 20+ journals I filled up during some of the darker times of my life. I used to read scores of self-help books and then try to write myself into sanity (guess that didn't work). I found a page in one of these journals that included a list of things I wanted to do in the future. The term "bucket list" had not been invented at that point, but nowadays that is what such a list would be called. The shockingly amazing thing was that I found I have done all the things on this bucket list. (Arthritis of the knee and neck were not on the list, however. Life is nothing without its surprises.) Obviously I did not dream big enough. Today, while my students were taking a test, I started a new bucket list. This time I decided I am going to dream big!!!!!

One of the things I have put on the new bucket list is to have a Westy in my later years, should I get some later years, and always assuming that my elderly and non-dog-owning editor goes first. After traveling to the long list of places I want to see, I will be exhausted, and will need a good excuse for getting up out of my easy chair to walk on my knee replacement. A dog would be perfect! If I can just move fast enough so the dog doesn't pee in the elevator.