I never could get the hang of Thursdays… oh, wait. I do okay most days of the week. I work, I write, I get through. I’m always coming up with ideas but rarely implementing them or doing more than a basic implementation. Anyone who has been around me more than a year or two knows of many many things I’ve started and not finished. So I’m trying to finish some things and get other things moving. With Real School for our eldest in progress in our lives, I’d like to work out some kind of way to balance out the change required in our lives, whatever that change may be. Working different hours, trying different ideas.

Thinking of *something*.

Sometimes my ideas come quickly, and just in the nick of time. Public Speaking Class, 7th grade. I chose speechifying as an elective, but I didn’t get along that well with the others in the class; general shyness and the gearing up of puberty for the majority of us. Getting along well with others was not normally much of a big deal, but on this day it was. Each of us needed to give a speech, as usual, but for the first time we needed visuals. Charts, notes – written on one of those ancient things you young whippersnappers might have heard of – poster board. Big, flimsy, twenty cents at the local 60’s era Michael’s equivalent.

Being a small school with an even smaller budget, we didn’t have easels (or computers, or PowerPoint), just the chalk rail (a predecessor to the marker rail) to hold things up. Each speaker that day called upon a buddy as they moved forward to speak; the buddy served as an ertstaz easel/Vanna White style model. I was apprehensive about picking someone to act as my easel, but as my turn rolled up, I was struck cleanly by inspiration.

I borrowed a pen, poked a hole in the top of my poster, and hung my visual from an old nail jutting from the top of the chalk board (a predecessor to the white board, usually green or black in color). Perfect and brilliant, according to the teacher (who offered the rest of the class use of his hole puncher). Hey, brain pointed forward when I needed it, yay.

Sometimes things take me longer to work out, like organizing the kids’ clothes, or figuring out how to rotate my hurricane food in and out of the usual pantry fare to keep us stocked and fresh for the season. Those require a lot of trial and error, but we get there.

I hope to force myself to post something useful or new at least once a week. Partly just to share, partly to ask for ideas, partly to just get in the habit of writing again. And if I ever come up with something salable, well, yay.

See you next thursday.

Creative Commons License


Toast by
aunt mommy is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work at
blawgh.sublurbia.org.

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