Mary Anne has her own blog now
Monthly Archives: December 2011

Well organized

by Mary Anne

When I first enrolled Matthew into the Busy Bee childcare, I was really impressed with the set-up that the daycare center had. The building was a large old house that had been converted into a day care center. The first room was really a large mud room, filled with kids lockers and benches for the kids coats, hats and boots.

After the kids took off their outerwear, they would go into rooms that were age specific. There was a nursery for the children that were too young to crawl, another room for the toddlers, and several other rooms for the older children. There was even a room for a real kindergarten, taught by real certified teachers. Each room had a row of childrens lockers in it, each one labelled with the name of the individual child.

I think that the individually assigned lockers for kids helped to ensure that there was minimal spreading of germs, and minimal loss of clothing and toys. When Matthew switched from Busy Bee childcare to the after school childcare once he started first grade, the difference in organization was astonishing. There were no baskets or lockers for individual storage of any kind. There WAS, however, a large Lost and Found Box!


My niece is dating someone of a different race

by Mary Anne

I haven’t seen one of my nieces (not the one who was just in the hospital, a different one) at a family function in a couple of years now.  That makes me sad, because I have always enjoyed seeing her and talking with her about how her life has been going, and what her future plans are.  I have sent her several emails, asking her to please come to the family “events” and she has finally told me that she has been avoiding them because she is afraid of the family reaction to the fact that she is dating someone who is a different race.

I understand her concerns, although I am very open-minded about interracial dating and inter-racial marriages, the rest of our family is openly hostile to the concept.  I can vividly imagine the lectures she would received from older generation.  I have always tried to cushion my children from the bigotry that runs rampant in my family, as I feel that there is no place in today’s society for bigotry.  I have let my niece know that I do not share the prejudices that the rest of my family has, and for her to feel comfortable visiting with me at my house if she does not want to go to family functions.


Don’t cut your hair so short!

by Mary Anne

Seems to me that whenever I tell one of my sons that their hair is starting to look really good, they run off to the barber shop to get a haircut. Having been in high school in the early 1970′s, I’ve grown to enjoy a man’s hair cut to be a little bit on the longish side. Don’t get me wrong, I am not endorsing hair that is long enough to cover the ears, I just have never been a big fan of a crew-cut or a “skin head” look. When the Ken and Allen dolls came out, I liked the longer cut of Allen’s hair instead of the crew cut of Ken’s hair.

As far as I’m concerned, a guy has a better chance to attract women if a guy has a little bit of hair on his head. Now I’m not saying anything negative about guys who are balding; if they have a good hair cut that is not a turn-off at all. But I like a guy who has a little bit of curl in his hair, and my boys have curly hair. So when they cut their hair so short that you don’t see any of the curl at all, it makes me sad because I think that they are trying to repel women, not attract them!


Time to replace the sofa

by Mary Anne

I bought our sofa back in 1973, when I worked in a furniture store.   It was a floor sample and marked down, and I needed a new sofa for my apartment, and bought it at a great employee discount on top of the floor sample price!  It was a top of the line queen sized sleeper sofa, and it has served me well.  I have had it reupholstered once since then, but it is showing signs of wear again.  I really don’t want to reupholster it again; it was more expensive than buying a new one!  But I hate to throw it away; maybe I’ll donate it to a local thrift store.

 


Drowning in paper

by Mary Anne

For years I have resisted going paperless. I’ve wanted paper credit card statements in my hand to make it easier to reconcile the statements, and I did not want to have to use my own printer ink and paper to print them off. But I’ve noticed that my home office is drowning in paper, and I’m seriously considering checking out some paperless office software. Sometimes I feel a little bit old-fashioned in my desire for permanent hard copies of everything, but since I’ve been working with computers since the very first personal computer came out on the market I’m a little bit gun shy over the losses that can happen when something crashes. For example just yesterday when I downloaded photos from my digital camera and then was trying to modify and save the changes. The program crashed and during the crashing it deleted the entire photo. Gone, forever, never to be recovered or seen anywhere again. So I’m a little bit gun-shy, do you know what I mean?


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