My adorably sweet 13 year old

came home from Thailand with these “palm tree” socks. He bought them as a gift for Josh, who loves crazy socks.

He also bought a pair for himself and explained that as he was wearing them on the trip his teacher approached him and asked what was on his socks. “Palm trees?” he replied. She told him they weren’t actually palm trees and that he needed to change into a different, more appropriate, pair. In his defense, we live in a land where palm trees line every street and weed is nowhere to be seen.

I told him they’ll be perfect for our trip to California. He’ll fit right in.

It’s all history

One of the changes we made in our library this fall was genrefying our fiction books. That means books aren’t shelved A-Z, but instead are grouped by genre/type: Mystery, Adventure, Fantasy, Science Fiction — like a bookstore. Or the way Netflix presents its offerings, “If you liked Breaking Bad, you also might like Orange is the New Black.” We made this change because kids rarely came in looking for a particular author, but they were always asking, “I like horror books. What should I read?” Or, “Do you have more books like Harry Potter?” Those questions left me scrambling to find suggestions since I was limited to books I had read personally. Now I can respond, “Yes! All of the Fantasy books have gold labels. If you browse through those shelves there are tons of books that you might like.”  Continue reading It’s all history

Winter weather

it’s 75 and breezy this evening so it was time to break out the puffy jacket for an evening walk to Chocolate Lab. (Yes, it’s as good as it sounds.)

The wind was kicking up some sand so she ran back into the house to grab eye protection. We may not be able to ski in Germany this Christmas, but the ski goggles are still getting use.

A berry cheesecake waffle — just because.

Caleb is in Thailand and Josh is in the US this week so we are creating our own fun here at home.

Skin deep

We live in a beautiful villa with expansive rooms and high ceilings. But that’s just the facade. The pretty exterior covers a poorly constructed network of wires, pipes, and vents.

That’s why I was on our roof at 1 am last night, trying to figure out what part of the broken system was making a terrible grinding noise. After flipping about 20 breakers, It turned out to be the water pump. Yay! Turning it off meant no water for the house, but a peaceful night’s sleep for me.  Continue reading Skin deep

A new location

Let’s call it the first move of 2018.

 

It could be that this weekend was a 4 day holiday . . . it could be that not reading the news or Facebook really has freed up that much more mental energy to write . . . either way, I’m going with it and transferring over to this website:

https://threejoshuatrees.com

Blogger removed their app over a year ago and it’s impossible to post from a phone. Sometimes I just want to snap a photo and say a few words without sitting down at a computer to write. WordPress has an easy to use app (with a learning curve) that I’ve spent the past few days figuring out so I’m giving it a try.

I’m not making any promises as far as frequency or content, but we’ll see what develops.