If I'd rather have small hands or big feet? You know, I think I'd rather have small hands because then you can, a lot of times you're trying to reach into a small spot and you're just trying to squeeze your hands in there, and you're like if only they were a little bit smaller I can get in and do that, you know, turn that thing, or grab that thing. And I feel like if you had big feet instead of being more like a sturdy, you're thinking like a sturdy base. I feel like you're more gonna trip, when you're walking down the street, you just have more feet to trip on. Maybe that's just cause I stumble around and trip on my feet already, that I'm thinking "More feet? More feet's gonna make ya fall and trip even more!" But yeah, I feel like big feet would be kind of a hinderance than small hands. Although there's some things you couldn't do, you would be able to fit your hands in a lot more small places, to do tiny little work, or get stuff out especially like with your car, or with little art projects. You'd be able to do some of those hard things a little bit easier and I feel like most things you'd still be able to do with smaller hands. But with big feet, I just feel like you're asking to never have shoes in your size and to always trip and fall.

So we're still suspects to receiving lots of lake effect snow and we received about, I don't know six to eight inches last night here. And so today on Sunday we decided to take our sleds down to the dunes, and just do some hiking and sled down hills that we encountered along the way. Went up to a dune top that might be called Mount Edward, which is on the Northern tip of Warren Dunes State Park and we sledded down that and it was fun. And it was great. So this is probably our first super significant snowfall of the winter. If you don't count Christmas. Christmas was a pretty good snow fall, it was like four inches, but if you live in Michigan you know that four inches of snow is not a whole lot. It's great for Christmas cause it was so beautiful. But, today was the first really significant pile up, so it was great just get out there and play in it for a while. Even if I am about to turn thirty seven. I don't think you ever are too old to play in the snow. That's what I've gathered. And I think my theory is a lot of times, folks my age and older, when they have kids, they use kids as an excuse to play in the snow and feel fine doing it. But I don't think you need kids to have fun in the snow. It's just, it's one of those things.

I'm going to try to answer the question of what am I grateful for this week? And it's a simple answer for me this week, acrylic paint. Which sounds kind of strange, but I have been pursuing a hobby of painting rocks. There's a project that's been around for several years, I don't know exactly when it started, but it is called Kindness Rocks and a woman started painting rocks and hiding them. I mean, they're painted with messages or sayings or just designs and hiding them for people to find. And you know it brings really amazing joy to people to find these rocks. And I’ve had no visibility to this -- oh, well, I should go back to why am I grateful for acrylic paint this week: I've been painting rocks and specifically rocks that my husband asked me to paint some rocks to use as markers in our garden. So I've done let's see summer squash, red pepper, green pepper, jalapeno pepper, habanero, lettuce, watermelon, carrots, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers and radishes and cantaloupe. And along with that some of ‘em I've put cute little sayings on like the cucumber has “dill with it” and “you're so cuc” like cucumbers. So I'm not a great artist or you know, can't really draw so it's by, I told him I’m happy to do these rocks for you as long as you can read. So I'm putting the names of all the plants on the rocks along with an image that I've tried to create, conveying what the plant is supposed to be. So they'll go in our garden when we're seeding and looking forward to a good summer crop before all of the weeds come and destroy those fantasies that we have of a garden.

A news headline that has stuck out to me? Of course it would be the inauguration. My take as a teacher, I can give you perspective from the lens of an elementary school teacher. I had great reservation about showing the inauguration live to my students, particularly after the insurrection, two perhaps three weeks ago. I was a little concerned that something could happen during the live inauguration ceremonies that I would rather my students not see. However, upon the realization that Washington D.C. was more or less going to be in just about military lockdown more or less, it seemed pretty safe. Chances of something going wrong seemed pretty low. And then I also saw a tweet from Dr. Jill Biden and Jill Biden shared a link to the inauguration the day before, to a link for a student-friendly inauguration ceremony. It had fun facts on the screen, it had explanations of procedure. Frankly, it was honestly a fun form of inauguration coverage for adults as well. Cause there were a number of facts that I did not know throughout. So, I did opt to show the inauguration to my students and I'm really thankful and glad I did. These times are -- these are wild times. I tell my kids frequently that they're living through history as we speak and I believe I spoke on this last week. We discuss the creation of the United States in fifth grade and we discuss things like primary sources, secondary sources, where do we get -- who tells history? And where do we get our facts and artifacts and sources from in history? And I tell these guys that they are the sources for future generations right now just by being here and a witnessing so many historic events this year.

Another thing I do in the community and I don't tell a lot of people about this, but as long as you're asking. At my church, which we've been closed since last spring, we've been doing all our church services virtually. But I had been bringing flowers to the church in memory of my mom on her birthday, in memory of my dad on his birthday, and in memory of both of them on their anniversary. And when the church service was over, what I would do with the flowers is I would take them, because they'll just die and somebody else has to get flowers. I would take the plant or the flower, whatever it was, I'd take it to a local nursing home and I would tell them to give them to somebody who probably should get flowers but never does. Y'know there's always somebody in a nursing home who's forgotten or there's no one in their family or no one that knows or no one that cares, sadly. And that's a sad thing. But I do that too, so I'll bring a flower, hopefully that'll brighten somebody's day.

This past week has been a big one for me. So, I got my second dose of the covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday. So the first dose I had just like a little bit of arm pain and a tiny headache, and it was nothing. And then I really started getting nervous cause as I started hearing about other people that had gotten a second dose they said, you know, “well, it's gonna be -- gonna feel it a little more, it's gonna be a little more rough probably.” Of course everyone reacts differently, but you know, in general. So I'm in my mid-thirties, so I kind of figured it, I'm pretty healthy, pretty good immune system, wasn't super worried about it. It was unpleasant. But when I think about the stories I've heard about actually having COVID, I would do it again. I definitely had gotten it at a quarter to 8 on Tuesday morning, and I worked the rest of that day. And then by about 10 or 11 PM I was feeling kind of tired and just sort of like overall, not a general feeling of unwell, basically. So I went to bed and I woke up at midnight. Muscle aches, joint pain, chills, my skin just like, I couldn't get comfortable and my skin just felt like it didn't want to be touching my other skin. It was extremely uncomfortable, and I pretty much didn't sleep for the rest of the night. I think I fell asleep at like 3:00 for maybe an hour. The rest of the night was that, and then I couldn't eat or drink just felt really terrible. I don't think I had a fever but I don't know, I just, I didn't want to get up so I just laid in bed for about 12 hours. By noon, I pretty much felt better. I went out. I mean I got up, and I was able to kind of like do my normal things for the day.

So, anyways, on a lighter note, one of the girls in my cohort for grad school, she sent a message yesterday morning to everybody in the chat, like our little group chat, and she had mentioned that she was having issues getting on Zoom because of -- she's basically doing all of her online school from an iPad. She had no laptop she was borrowing a friend's laptop, or her brother's laptop, if she had to take an exam, and other than that, she just didn't have one. Given that things are all online right now I was like "that is brutal." So I sent her a text message. I got a new laptop for Christmas, I was so lucky to get that. So, I had just purchased one that was capable of doing all the things that my older, like, couple years old Chromebook, what I was using before, like was capable, cause I couldn't use like the lockdown browser and stuff like that. Anyways so I, y'know, sent her a message and I said "listen, I have this laptop laying around. It's relatively new. It was like a refurbished Acer whatever. It's got this little touch screen. It's nothing super fancy, but I'm willing to -- y'know, I can give it to you for super cheap." And, y'know, I wasn't going to get much from Best Buy or anything for it, obviously. It's not anything super nice. So I told her like, "yeah, like fifty bucks maximum. You get it, it's all yours." And she told me that she actually didn't even have money to buy that at the moment, but she said that she would love to eventually, she just has to get her funds together. After buying textbooks and stuff she said she just didn't have any free funds and I -- at that point, I was like, y'know what? Like this girl, I'm gonna be working with her for the next two years. She's gonna be my peer, you know for the foreseeable future so I don't want to -- I dunno. I just wanted to help her, so I told her I would just drop it off for her and she could just have it, and she offered to make me some stickers and she apparently has a candle for me and some other goodies, so, really sweet of her to do that. Um,…

There's one thing this week I'm grateful for above all else, and that would be the COVID vaccine. My dad is in the 65 and over category and he was able to secure his first vaccine shot on Thursday. And it gives me a small degree of hope that, uh, maybe I'll be able to see my dad again, um, in person, in his house for an extended period of time. Um, I don't think I've really -- I think I've seen him once over the past four months or so, and that was in a Kmart parking lot in Marshall, Michigan, where we found out that there's still, in fact, Kmarts that are open out there. So I know the vaccine, um, has been a complicated unveiling and it has felt kind of distant. I haven't really known many people who've gotten the vaccine aside from my friends in the medical profession. Um, so knowing my dad got the first go-around, the first shot, kind of makes it feel real and you can see a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. It might be a faint light, but it's there. Um, so I'm thankful for that.

What were you doing when you first heard about the riot on Wednesday? Were you following along? How did or how do you feel? Yeah, so I had just come home from my parents house, like I mentioned, I've been visiting a lot, so I had just gotten back. I didn't really do much that day. I think I just kind of laid around, and I got my poop in a group over here, put my things away, that kind of a thing. And all of a sudden I was on Twitter, and somebody said something about somebody was shot at the Capitol. And I was like "What?" And I -- I didn't even know what was going on, like I had no idea that there were even people there, like I missed that entire thing, right? I was just hanging out with my family and then before that I had been at work, so like I just really been out of the loop. And yeah, so I texted my friend and I say, “someone's been shot at the Capitol, do you know what's going on?” And immediately we both start following the news, pretty fervently. But yeah, so, you know, constantly we're both watching different news sources and checking different things and sending it to each other, just kind of doing what they call "doomscrolling". If you're not familiar with doomscrolling, that's what it is. You just feel sh**tier and sh**ier as you go, but you keep on scrolling because you feel like you have to keep up, you feel this responsibility to keep up.