Shared Quote… “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.” — Rachel Held Evans
Refer to title please. 🙂 My hometown boys (the Warriors) SWEPT the Cavs in the NBA Finals. That’s three NBA Championships in four years. 2016 (Cleveland’s ONLY championship win) was indeed a one-off (and a very last minute victory given that they have ONE good player).
And yes, I do enjoy hating on Cleveland sports. 🙂
Wow. This past Wednesday (the 6th) marked my last in-person class for my program. Everything else is either online or part of my internship this fall. It’s bittersweet because while I’m happy that the quarter is winding down, I’m going to miss my classmates. We’ve been together for 1-2 years (depending on where people are in their programs)
Daniel update. His gazzazzapop is giving him a weight gain of at least 1 lb per week, which is good as it is taking the threat of an NG tube off the table. He’s fighting against having to drink it, but he doesn’t get a choice at the moment because they are the only calories he is currently getting. (The little beast stopped eating solid food.)
Integrated projects. I turned my first Capstone Case Study in on Sunday. I was talking to my instructor on Wednesday while she was grading them and she told me I had done very well.
My response: “By your standards or mine?”
She laughed. (I had gotten 109.5 out of 110, which is excellent by her standards while I was bugged by the 0.5 point I had lost.) She created an optional discussion post where we could post part of our case study (in this case, a flier for a yurt tour) and it has been fascinating to see what people put together for it.
Mea culpa, Lord. Sleep deprivation and stress have led to me feeling like I was going to have a panic attack multiple times this week. On Wednesday, I came home after my tutoring shift and did noon prayer (about 2 1/2 hours late) which was helpful. I also felt like the Spirit was reminding me that I need to pray about things a lot more often. (Admittedly, my prayer life sucks right now.)
God speaking to me through music. One of the way God breaks through the armadillo shell I seem to have around my soul these days is music. Unapologetically Episcopalian shared this piece on their Facebook page on Wednesday afternoon and it was needed.
Update on the kid. Because I am a slacker mom, I forgot to schedule my beastling for a weight check today (it *IS* technically Friday). If I can’t get him in briefly at our pediatrician up here, I’ll just stick him on a scale at home and see if he’s gaining appropriately.
He’s drinking his gazazzapop (“gazazzapop” being a word my grandpa used for a liquid without a name) willingly and I can’t wait until summer when we can space it out over the course of a day, rather than having to fit three boxes in between when he gets home from school and when he goes to sleep.
I am wearing… jammies. Church clothes were my little black dress with a green denim jacket over it and black flats. Other clothes were jeans, a charcoal-colored t-shirt, and flip-flops any time I left the house.
Shared Quote… “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.” — Greg Boyle, S.J.
A moment from my day… My first Mother’s Day nap in the NICU
The Toronto Children’s Chorus Chamber Choir recording is the one I’ve found that has the purest tone and sounds most like what I grew up hearing. (My mama is responsible for my Baroque music addiction.)
A good translation of the German can be found here. (It’s number 2 on the list of parts of the cantata.)
Tutor Tip #1. If you’re going to sit in tutoring and make nasty remarks about how horrible your instructor is, you might not want to be sitting in their class and making bitchy remarks to the people around you while your “horrible” instructor is lecturing on this week’s homework assignment that you are claiming not to understand. (I had emailed my homework in before class and ghosted class that day to avoid this person, so I heard about it after the fact from a couple of my friends who had the misfortune sitting next to the chatterbox.)
Tutor Tip #2. If you ask someone for help, do not argue with that person when you don’t like his/her answer. People will leave the room when you walk into it because they do not want to deal with you.
If you do that to your tutor (who is helping you because he/she gets paid to do so and loves his/her job), you will be referred to your instructor for assistance and your instructor will be told WHY you are being referred to her for help (my department has all female staff), especially if you have just screamed the tutor into a puddle on the floor. Your tutor will then respond sweetly with the words “you need to talk to [Instructor]” every time you ask them for help because your tutor does not get paid enough to deal with you screaming at him/her. (My boss and the instructor in question have both explained to me that people are not allowed to yell at me and that I am completely within my rights to tell the offending person to leave.)
Tutor Tip #3. Your instructor is not docking you points because she hates you. Your instructor is docking you points because you did not follow the instructions on her clearly-defined rubric. Telling your tutor this will result in being told that “you will know better for next week!” in a cheerful voice. (Your instructor puts these instructions on the rubric in bold formatting because she grades 120 files for just your class alone every week, and she does not want to play hide-and-go-seek with your file.)
Tutor Tip #4. If your tutor is giving you instructions, taking notes on the instructions will cause your tutor to praise you to the heavens when your instructor walks through… and your instructor will go to her office to retrieve her gold star collection to give you one. (I kid you not — the instructor actually did this. The person being described is someone I will go out of my way to help when I am actually not on duty because he/she is polite, comes prepared EVERY TIME, takes beautiful notes, and asks questions that include the steps he/she has tried to find the answer.)
Tutor Tip #5. Saying “please” and “thank you” to your tutor will make their day so much better. (I am thankful that most people I tutor will say those two things to me.)
QuickBooks Take #1. This class is not going badly, but its organization could be improved. My instructor wants us to read and do the review before we do the in-class lecture on Monday… but the reading doesn’t work well if you aren’t actually *DOING* the work along with it. People are having a bad time with the review questions because it’s a book where you learn the material by doing it.
I need to email my instructor about it, but I need to acquire some tact first. (Let’s just say that I’m still a bit crabby about the screw-ups with the Payroll Project last quarter.)
QuickBooks Take #2. Other than my issues with the organization of the class, I’m enjoying my work with the actual software. There’s a fair amount of data entry, but I don’t mind that.
DACA.DACA is a huge issue where I live because of our migrant worker population, and I have classmates who are “Dreamers”. Let me just tell you… they are some of the hardest workers and I would hire almost all of them in a heartbeat. (They always have themselves together and they can function seamlessly in two or more languages.) They are also my favorite students to tutor because they are always polite when asking for help and consistently ask good questions.
Seriously, I wish the path to citizenship was easier for them because they are socially active on campus in positive ways, and embody the American Dream. They are the antithesis of the foul stereotypes that 45 and the Republican Party spread about them.
Choral music take #2. This is our piece for Sunday (Good Shepherd Sunday). It’s not the most sophisticated setting of Psalm 23, but it can be put together in a few minutes with a small number of choir members. (We’ve got 2/3 of the soprano section traveling or sick, one of our altos is traveling, and one of our basses is sick.)
My current earworm. My go-to music for homework these days is bluegrass and the Wissmann Family is a recent discovery. I’ve got this song stuck in my head.
