Category Archives: school

High School Reunion

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Yesterday was the first day of my 45th high school reunion. It was fun. Even Travlin’ Tim was reunited with an old classmate.

Yesterday I rode from St Louis to Moberly with two classmates, Sheryl and Chris, and then met up with a whole bunch of classmates, most of which I hadn’t seen in 46 years, 1977. (Although it was the 45th high school reunion I moved away in my junior year so for me it was the 46th year since I had seen my classmates)

Below are a few pictures, I’m not going type a lot about how much fun the day was.

Not to mention how nice it was to see Moberly again, my old house, my old elementary school, and the newspaper I delivered.

Today, half the class is playing golf and half (including me) are going on a tout of the high school.

Speaking of gold, below is an old newspaper photo in which I played golf. Can you spot me?

Have a great day!

Stealing My Stars

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I think this one should have been n right. For those who don’t use Duolingo for free, you start each day with 5 stars. And you can only make 5 mistakes and then it’s a hassle to keep your number of days streak going. (My streak is 280-something).

Sometimes it seems like they’re unfair a d try to steal my stars. I know it’s not true, but sometimes I feel like it, especially when I make dumb mistakes when I have only one or two stars left.

i went to bed early last night, and slept an extra 20 minutes this morning.

Friday and Monday are holidays here. I’m glad.

have a great day!

Since My Last Post

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My Last post was Thursday morning, in Miami. Thursday after school, I went looking for a denim skirt size 6 for The Wife. I was keeping an eye out all week, but Thursday I looked all over and  finally found one at Nordstroms for $211.

Got back to the room late, and started packing. It was after 1AM when I went to bed.

I got up Friday morning, finished packing and checked out of the hotel and went to school. I was hoping we’d get out early the last day of class, but no, we stayed late. The instructor printed the certificates. He was handing them out when the guy right before me said his name was spelled wrong. So. everyone (but me) had their certificates, and I had to wait till he re-printed one. It took him an hour to print one sheet. I’ve never seen anyone with an Apple computer do anything easily and without problems. Lately all the Apples I’ve seen have been running Windows.  What’s up with that? You’d never see Windows machine running Apple.  Windows doesn’t need it. And you know  that I don’t even like Windows. Also my phone rang in school, and I couldn’t answer it because I was in school. They left a voice message. I never retrieve voice messages on the road, as our phone company, LIME, is the most incredible ripoffs on the planet. I don’t even know how to get messages when roaming.

So, finally we got our good byes said and I  was on the road. My flight was 9:25 PM and I figured I could head to the beach for an hour and then head to the airport, stopping at a cigar store that was very close to the airport on the way.

I left the beach with plenty of time to spare, traffic was atrocious, 5:30 PM on a Friday afternoon, the worst of the rush hours.. The GPS wanted to put me on a toll road. I didn’t go on the tool road. I got lost and was at the southern  end of I-95. I canceled the cigar stop and programmed the GPS for the  airport. The GPS wanted me to go on the toll road. At this point I didn’t care any more, so  I went. Got to the airport (I never had to pay a toll) and checked in the car. Went to the ticket counter and was informed my 9:25 was delayed till 1 AM.

Trapped at the airport, no cigars. I could have spent the whole day differently. I could have stayed at the beach until rush hour was over, gone to the cigar store and done some more shopping. It could have been a wonderful day, had I known about the flight being delayed. If I knew in advance the flight was delayed, I would have been glad.

Got home about 3AM. Went to bed. Got up Saturday morning and checked my voice mail, and the call I missed in school was Cayman Airways, telling me about the delay.

After that, it was a good weekend. Yesterday was a holiday, Discovery Day. And now I’m heading into work this morning.

Overall, it was a great trip, I think it’s the first time I ever spent time in Miami, really. Usually I’m just in transit. I spent a week in Ft Lauderdale once in the early 90’s..

Have a good  week!

Next to Last

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It’s the next to last day of school. 36 hours from now, I’ll be at the airport, waiting to go home.
Here’s a cool plant that is growing at the building where the school is.

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And a thunderstorm when I was flying into Miami on Sunday.

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And Travlin’ Tim, on the plane.

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Hasta mañana!

Melatonin. The Good Stuff

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I take melatonin every night at home. I didn’t bring any with me this trip. I haven’t been sleeping well, and o haven’t been tired at bedtime.  Yesterday I got some. I slept good last night. Note to self: always take melatonin with you when traveling.

Here’s a super cool satellite dish. It can lock on to more than one satellite at a time.

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Here’s my rental car:

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Have a wonderful day!

In Miami

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I’m in Miami, headed to school in about an hour.

Flying yesterday, there was a yellow haze almost the whole way. It didn’t look like Earth. Earth, The Yellow Planet.

And the top picture was my view until I got sprinkled by the sprinkler system.

Flashback Friday, Second Grade Hell

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This post doesn’t mean I’m not feeling great. It is inspired by a post by Candy’s Daily Dandy yesterday.

GLAD IT’S FRIDAY!!!!

In first grade, I liked school and I got A’s. Then we moved half way across the country over the summer.

In second grade, I got bussed to this old, nasty school. I hated it especially because there was a new school very near my house.

My second grade school was all brown, brown bricks, brown wood, walls and floor, brown desks. Everything seemed dirty and stinky and unsanitary. I remember sitting in my nasty brown desk, trying not to touch the desk or anything at all, except what I had brought from home.

I remember there was a secret panel in the hallway (I shit you not) and at lunch the secret panel was opened and it led down to the dungeon/cafeteria. It was white-green florescent lights in a windowless stinking hellhole. I didn’t want to eat any of the food because it seemed dirty and unsanitary. And the dungeon smelled like nasty food, steam, and dirty dishwater.

When I got home from school, every day my Mom said I stank. I knew it was from that dirty nasty school. She didn’t seem to believe me when I said how bad it was.

My teacher was Miss Bolware. To me she was a disgusting filthy hag. When she first saw me she gave me a hug, and I hated being touched by her. She didn’t stay nice long, she would yell and grab you by the arm and whack you with her filthy brown ruler. I hated it when she touched me with her nasty old witch hands.

I felt trapped, and I couldn’t run away because I was seven years old and didn’t even know where I was, just some nasty place on the other side of town. I lived in that town for ten years and I don’t think I ever learned where that school was. I don’t remember ever seeing it again.  I was in Junior High School before I saw any kids from that second grade year again.

From third grade on, I went to the new school, walking distance to my house. But I never got good grades. Second grade is probably what destroyed my relationship with my parents. I didn’t get good grades in second grade, and I got punished. Then I figured that if I started getting good grades, my parents would think their punishment was effective, so I didn’t get good grades, and was more or less in a state of constant punishment for bad grades till the 11th grade, (when I had a teacher I had a crush on, Mrs Berry, I got A’s in her class!)

Incredibly, we then moved again and I went to 12th grade and graduated from a different school. The idea crossed my mind that maybe we moved because I got some good grades again, but I didn’t really think that. But I got crappy grades in 12th grade too, just to be safe.

One year later, when I turned 18, I joined the navy, and got out of my parents lives as much as I could.

Flashback Friday: Johnny Walker

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Not that one, the other one.
Keep walkingI went to Bradley 6th grade school with a kid named Johnny Walker. Not the booze, the kid.

So one day, it was before school, I walked into the classroom and Johnny Walker slapped me on the back with a chalky eraser. We started duking it out and wrestling all over the classroom. It was early so there were no teachers. We wrecked the whole classroom, tipped over all the desks and scooted them from their neat grid to a train wreck of a circle around the edges of the classroom, we spilled everything that was in jars in the class, and generally destructively re arranged the furniture. The hallway was full of kids watching. We were pretty evenly matched.

Finally a teacher turned up and broke it up. We were following the teacher to the principals office and Johnny looked at me and broke out in this big toothy grin. I smiled back and we both started laughing.

We were pretty good friends from then on.

Flashback Friday: Kindergarten Kite

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kiteThe year was 1965, the place was Brookhaven Elementary School, Rockville Maryland USA. I was in Kindergarten, 5 years old, first year of real school. Kindergarten was half day, either in the mornings or afternoons. I was in the morning class.

One day, my class and I made kites out of construction paper. Then we went out on the huge vast playground to fly them. In my memory, this playground was huge. Huge paved section, huge grassy section, with trees way far far away on the horizon.

I was running and trying to get my kite in the air, the kite was pretty small, so it didn’t fly too good, but I was really trying to get it up there. All of a sudden, I noticed that all the other kids on the playground were really big, and I looked and looked and didn’t see anybody from my class.

I started crying.

Eventually a teacher asked my why I was crying.

“I can’t find anybody with a kite like mine” I whined, and held up my kite for her to see.

Turns out, morning kindergarten was over, I was trying so hard to make my kite fly that I missed the bell that signaled the end of recess, missed the end of school, everybody in my class had gone home and I had stayed in school late. So I went home.

That’s my Flashback Friday for today. Have a good weekend.

I was thinking about an advantage of the Free Blogger or WordPress blog over the pay-for-your-own blog. When you die, the free blog will stay up, but with a pay-for-your-own, when the payment is due and you can’t pay (because you’re dead) the blog will come down. A free blog would theoretically remain up forever, a tribute to the bloggers life and history.