”The only thing most people do better than anyone else is read their own handwriting.”
Today is a perfect day to see the world through windows. It is only 32°, the high for the day. A bit ago we had a snow shower which left a light coating of snow on the tops of branches and along the sides of the road. The snow showers will be around all day.
Though my jigsaw puzzle, on the table here in the den, isn’t finished, I can see they’ll be a couple of missing pieces. I know we’ll all accuse Nala, my felonious dog, but we’d be wrong. I caught Henry with a piece of the puzzle sticking out of his mouth as he was trying to sneak out of the room with his booty, his loot. I yelled. He dropped it. Now I’m confused.
When I was a kid, I went to the parish grammar school, grades one through eight, where I had nuns every other year because there were too many of us and too few of them. Every grade had two classes. Some years there were as many as 40 of us in one class. It was never chaotic. Most of us were a bit afraid of the nuns with their black habits and their white wimples. One of the schoolyard topics of conversation was those wimples. We wondered what their hair looked like underneath. How short was it? What color was it? Once in a while we’d see a tiny line of hair along the wimple’s edges.
I remember the nuns used to keep their handkerchiefs under their habits on their wrists. They wore huge rosaries, our early warning systems. You could hear the click of the beads as the nuns got closer. We learned over time to be covert.
I remember learning to write. It seems just about every classroom had the alphabet in white letters on black cardboard across the tops of the blackboards. Each card had the cursive upper and lower case of one letter. We’d practice writing the letters during penmanship, a now and then class. We learned Palmer Method. We had writing drills. I was great with the up and down lines but not so great on the circles. Mine were messy. We’d practice one letter over and over. I remember a page filled with upper case A’s. The nun would wander the aisles checking on our work and commenting on our attempts. I never did great, no penmanship awards. My writing now is a combination of cursive and block lettering.
I still have an empty dance card.
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keepthecoffeecoming.blog 
February 1, 2025 at 4:03 pm
Hi Kat,
Sunny skies and a high of 67°. A gorgeous day! My daughter’s favorite thing is to swing on the swings at the park while listening to her iPhone playing Amazon music. She’s in love with the music from the movie Wicked. We are currently at the park now.
The big piece of legislation that our crazy governor wants passed this regular session is, “School Vouchers”, he calls it school choice. It will kill the public school system which far right wing Republicans have hated for years. They are considering taking taxpayer money and allowing it to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. It’s one way to starve public education and kill teacher’s unions at the same time. Thankfully, the founders of the State Constitution, were smart enough to only require that they meet biennially for only 140 days. If they met more frequently who knows how much other damage they could do. The Governor can call them into special session, but only for specific legislation and only for a limited number of days. He tried that to get school vouchers and failed last time.
The last speaker of the Texas House, wouldn’t bring up the governor’s far right wing proposal for school vouchers, so he ran candidates for his pet legislative agenda and they won in November. If you think the Republicans in the U.S. House are nuts, then every Republican in office in Texas is far more nutty. A democrat hasn’t won a statewide office since Ann Richards was elected Governor in I think 1993.
When Texas was a Democratic state, they were considered conservative democrats. People like Lyndon B. Johnson, or Jim Wright. Those days are long gone. When Johnson signed the Civil Rights legislation in the mid 1960s the Democratic Party lost the Deep South.
February 1, 2025 at 6:14 pm
Hi Bob,
I think we all could use a ride on the swings. It is so wonderful to fly. I remember pumping my legs until the swing went as high. When I was young, I’d jump off at
a high point. It was a contest.
I haven’t seen Wicked. I know it is on one of the movie channels now.
We had the voucher system voted down here, but we do have charter schools, magnet schools, school choice and tech schools. The state pays the education money to all these schools from money allotted to the local districts. We thought school choice would devastate individual districts as kids could go to any school district they wanted, and the kid’s local district had to pay the chosen district. That didn’t happen.
I’m happy to stay here, the most liberal state in the union. We are still proud we were the only state to vote against Nixon.