Clock-watching

I find that I spend many moments glancing at the time, on my watch, my tablet, the clocks in the room.  I look at time.gov to check how much my watch has gained since the last reset.  I like my Casio's setting that enables me to get its second hand pretty close to what I read on time.gov and then get the other figures corrected, more or less.

I think it does me and others good if I am more or less consistent about time: getting up, meals, tv.  I grew up before streaming, back in the time when The Lone Ranger began at a certain time.  If you wanted to hear the whole radio program, you had to be on time.

What's best?

I wrote my dissertation on choosing.  It could be called "deciding on a choice".  It is easy to find choosing discussion that refers to "optimal choice".   That "optimal" is usually meant to mean "best".  But since I have taught that bugbear subject, grading, too, I realize that there are nearly always many different "bests" depending on the chooser and the situation.  In addition to different approaches and definitions of what is best, there is often a price involved.  One class of smarties gave me a t-shirt with "How much?" on it because I asked them so often if their 'best" was much better or just a tiny bit better than the nearest competitor.

"It's all my fault"

When boys fight, say, between age 5 and 14, fight, they may see that Mom or Dad is displeased with them.  One may attempt a verbal defense of his behavior with an attempt to blame his opponent: "But, Mom, he hit me first."  When girls and young women have a difficulty, instead of trying to blame a different person, they may come out with a statement that a poor or bad situation is "all my fault."  I taught the 5th grade for four years but I never grasped a female reaction of assuming guilt, full guilt.  I first grasped this tendency recently while watching episodes of "Call the Midwife".  When I see a young girl or woman wearing a very negative look and asserting that "it is all my fault", I am sometimes in possession of the whole story, being a complete witness.  My first impulse is to explain, in a lawyer-like way that no, others did this and then that, others bear some or all of the onus of negativity, misbehavior and such.  Now, I just offer a tissue and remain silent. I figure that female processes are in progress.  I think the best thing to do is wait silently and supportively.

"I'll be seeing you" by Elizabeth Berg

I read aloud to Lynn while she does a jigsaw puzzle.  It started when we were first married.  I wanted to see her reaction to a moment in a Peter DeVries novel and we have kept going.  Now we are into Elizabeth Berg's novel "I'll be seeing you", a story of marriage and family stresses as parents age. At one point, I was ready to drop the book but now I'm quite glad I didn't.  It helps me think about my own family and stresses.

One reader

I get a kick out of reading some of the statistics available about my blog.  I read that India has the most people of any country: 1.3 billion.  For comparison, the US has about one third that many people.  I can get some statistics about my blog and people who read it.  At times, India or China or some other country with a large population is reported to have one person who looked at my blog.  From my experiences teaching, I have a respect for the power of a single person.  I have no way of knowing who the one person is, how much of my blog that person read, what the words did for that reader.  I am confident that if an internet user stumbled on a post by accident and forgot about seeing it, the experience might have been less than a single breath. Or, my post might have enraged or enriched a life, maybe briefly or maybe permanently.

Escape room experience

I had my first escape room experience yesterday.  Our group consisted of seven relatives including me.  I was the only member of the group who had not done an escape room before.  You may know that one enters the room with a time limit to figure how to escape. There were many locks guarding clues and procedures on how to escape. We had about an hour to escape and we managed to get out in about 45 minutes.  

I write "we" but it was all the other members of our family group.  My impulse was to sit quietly and meditate but that would have been a defeat.  I guess our greatgranddaughter who works there and my son-in-law who built the place felt our group did ok.

Guest blog by Kerry Ames, author of We Three

Many interesting facts and myth-busters are attached to the voyage of the Mayflower. For instance, not all of the passengers were Pilgrims (or "Separatists," as they referred to themselves). What was the new colony to do with a group of this size (30 or more) that didn't adhere to their strict rules and interpretations?

I have a maternal ancestry tie to one passenger: Francis Cooke.

My great-grandmother's surname was Starkweather. That line goes directly back to the Mayflower landing. If certain interpretations are to be believed, my 7X great-grandmother, Ann Woodbury Starkweather, was a "praying" (i.e. "converted") Wampanoag indian, a daughter of Metacomet, also known as King Phillip, namesake of the awful war between the colonists and natives. Such claims about Ann's lineage are dubious, but are often quoted and affirmed in various ancestry forums. My two DNA tests did not reveal any native traces whatsoever. But, if those lineage assertions are accurate, my ancestry would go back to those who were watching the passengers from the Mayflower disembark.

Fun to think about.

A splendid book about the Mayflower is Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War - by Nathaniel Philbrick (who, I note, is a featured historian commentator in Ken Burns' Revolution). Some of the shine often associated with stories of the first Thanksgiving is given over to a more realistic depiction, with the essential follow-up: the quick dissolution of once-favorable associations. Great read.

Ames