Have I ever been that happy something ended? Sure, so many things. The one season I played softball in middle school, man I was glad when that was over. I was glad when - when Trump left office, but of course, that's not really over, over. There was a guy I dated,  and his name was [redacted]. And this guy randomly asked me out. I was working at the library. I never had anyone just like a stranger asked me out before - well I mean, I guess I had but not like in any sort of non-crazy creepy way that I would actually say yes to, anyway. I mostly was just feeling sad - sorry for myself. And I knew that this guy was not my type, but he was very attractive. So I was like, "What the heck? Sure!" And ended up dating him for a couple months. And like the whole time I was like this is not the guy for me and he was clearly looking for like a wife. And yeah, it was just, finally I was like I felt bad because it was, I was kind of just using him to feel better about myself because this attractive guy wanted to date me. And so I - plus we were just very different politically and all kinds of ways and so I broke up with him, and that was a relief, that felt good. I was glad that that was over. Except that I mean this is probably a bad but I mean this is before like I don't even think I had a cell phone. So like I couldn't just text him or like anything like that. Anyway, I called him and I couldn't get a hold of him. So I finally left a message that said, "You know, I don't think this is working out. But if you want to talk about it, you can call me back." And like I would never have called back. I didn't think he would I was just trying to be nice, you know, but then he did call back and I just had a landline. No, like I didn't know it was him. So I picked up and there he was and so then we had to talk it out and he was trying to convince me not to break up with him and it's…

Yeah, I got a new hamster by the way. I had one, he died recently. What happened was, he was a friend of mine - or so my sister's roommate now, and who is her best friend in high school had a hamster. That she didn't want anymore, which also made me very sad, but we'll talk about that later. She didn't want him anymore and I was like, "I'll take him." I don't - he's like he was already two years old at this point. He - there, they don't live that long, but I was like, "I'll take him and I'll let his live live the rest of his cute little life out with me." Like, it'll be fine. What I didn't anticipate was getting attached to him. So he died last week and I was very upset but at that point it was like well now I want another little guy. So, I went and got another hamster. Same hamster, the Roborovski dwarf hamster. They're very cute, and I love them. But mine now, I got used to having like one that was already used to people and now mine's like gonna - not bite me but, like does not like me that much right now because I plucked her out of her little house at the pet store, but I'm working on it. So that's why we're talking around her right now. So she gets used to my voice.

Have you ever known someone who could be really critical about small details? One of our team members has a grandpa who really likes western movies but will get upset if things are inaccurate, like if someone walks through a saloon door wrong. Interesting. Um, that's really specific. Wow. Critical about small details, my mother? I guess my mother. Yeah, it's funny, she's a history teacher, right, she teaches like American history, high schoolers, and also AP human geography and some electives, you know, she'll do Holocaust like this and other things like that. But she is very critical of her students' grammar and like punctuation things like that. It's really interesting, and she doesn't hold it against them, as far as their grade maybe like I think 5% of their total grade if they write a paper is about grammar and punctuation. But she'll mark it up as if she's an English teacher. So that's really interesting to me. And I think it's beneficial for the students to know, even though it's not an English class, "Hey, you should you really do this like this, this needs to be a different way." So that's interesting. She's also hypercritical about a lot of things. Just — she's very intuitive, too. I remember when my husband wanted to propose he was gonna talk to her about it, and they went to go get Chinese food together. She knew right away. She knew, she was like, "You want to propose to my daughter, don't you?" I don't understand it, some kind of, I have no idea, ESP, I don't know.

It's another little insight. I'm getting here as to why so many teachers, at least partially why, so many teachers are are burning out and leaving the field, because you're kind of thrust into this position where you have to make a decision - are you going to spend not only your 45 minutes planning period during the day, but also likely hours at the conclusion of your school day every day, just jamming your preparation just like just trying to get everything set up and good to go, and then still probably not feeling totally prepared, day in and day out for an entire school year. And I think you can come up with, you know interesting concepts and reasons from the outside, which I understand you could say things like, "Well, teachers only teach 180 days a year, so you may as well just go ahead and and go hard for those 180 days, and then you'll get your little summer off." And there's some validity to that, to some degree. But 180 days is a long time. All together it's probably counting, you know, just the school year what we get two or three months off in the summer. So it's probably nine months of just a really impressive grind, and I frankly don't think is sustainable, and just from chatting with a few of my co-workers I can already feel that weight on my shoulders and their own, where many of them are just stuck in this like perpetual space of "What can I do to get by?" Basically meaning here's my curriculum, here's how you employ it correctly. However, there's no way I have the time to actually employ this curriculum correctly. So then you have to kind of get super creative and spend even more brain power figuring out how to parcel down your curriculum so that you're still hitting the state mandated standards, but maybe without fulfilling the exact needs and expectations of the program itself, if that makes sense. And it's crazy. It's wild. I'm currently -- a lot of you any of you who've already been working for years in education or otherwise, you're probably like "Uh-huh, yeah, welcome to the Real World." But like my email inbox is just drowning in in things all the time, you know last year, I took pride in keeping my inbox like nice and…

Have you ever had a chance encounter with the stranger that has stuck with you? What happened? I was 20 and I was pregnant. And single. And my parents kicked me out of my house, well, their house. And I was going to my brother's house in another state and I lost my bus ticket. So I started walking. And I remember being- I hadn't eaten in two days and I was starving, big ole pregnant. And I saw this grass that just looked so comfortable and I laid down on it. And I fell asleep, and I woke up to having, again, three women standing over me asking me if I was all right, what was wrong with me and I kind of started to cry and told them my story. And they took me home with them. They gave me a bath, another bath, but this time it was a shower. Gave me, washed my clothes while I was in the shower. Gave me a robe to wear while they dried. And then they fed me a hot meal. I ate like I hadn't eaten in a week. And they bought me a bus ticket and put me on a bus to my brother's house. They were angels. God sent them. I know he did.

The first one that struck me was actually the snowbird one because it makes me immediately think of a story which is probably my only snowbird story. When I was like 24-25, I was living with two other women and one of them I did not get along with and the other one who I did get along with, mostly, she grew up in Austria so there were definitely like kind of cultural things and customs that aren't you know, second nature to her, that she didn't necessarily get. And so she had started dating someone. And I was asking her about him, like they had probably been dating for a couple weeks and she was a singer like a choral singer and so they had met in this like choir, a city choir. And you know, she's telling me this, that, and the other and he sounded really great and she said, "But he spends the winter in Florida." And I think it was about approaching winter time and I just like had this moment of pause. Because I'm like, okay. Old people spend the winters in Florida because we were in Michigan, living in, Michigan. And so I was like like ,"How old is he?" And again, we were like 24 or 25 and it was the funny part is that she did not get that like living or going to Florida for the winter was like a clue that he was much older. So she said, "He's 51." and I had another pause and I was like, "How old is your dad?" And she says "52." And I was like "Well, at least he's younger than your dad." You know? And it was just like, oh man, they I mean they dated for- what I mean, at least six months I think maybe longer. But it's just like- she definitely- there were some father issues there and I think he seemed like a great guy and she was a great person but it's just like yeah, I don't think that's probably a healthy relationship. But anyway, he was a snowbird. And that's what I think of when I think of people who winter down south.

What's the silliest thing you've ever seen a pet do? Well, when I was seven we got my dog Peyton. She was a Jack Russell Terrier, and we were in Ohio at that time. About four months later so I had turned eight by then and it was probably like early April because we were wearing coats my dad and I were taking her for a walk and we were probably maybe three blocks from our house or so. And there was a piece of bread like in the street, kind of like one of those dinner rolls you get at a restaurant or something, so pretty like big. And it was just sitting in the gutter of the street and Peyton was the most likely of our dogs to eat strange things that she shouldn't. And so she saw this and she managed to get like the entire thing in her mouth and so her mouth was wide open because like I said, she- Jack Russells are not huge dogs, she was maybe like 20 pounds. So she had this whole thing in her mouth and my dad was trying to get her to let go of this big piece of bread and she would not do it. He had his hand around it in her mouth. She wouldn't let go, and her head was like bobbing up and down as he was trying to yank it away from her. And I think finally they ripped the thing in half and so Peyton did get to eat half of it. But It was really funny to watch from the sidewalk like this tug of war with little Peyton's head bobbling up and down and my dad getting progressively more frustrated. A grown man in tug of war with 20 pound dog over a piece of bread. Always remember that, we still laugh about it today."

I spent six days in Taiwan where my major professor was spending a sabbatical. And that gave me an opportunity to have a wonderful tour of Taipei, as well as the southernmost tip of the island. So, I wanted to mention that my participation in the workshop at the East-West Population Institute introduced me to a very nice lady from the Philippines who was at that time a professor in the sociology department at Saidaya University which is in Cagayan De Oro City, Philippines, on the island of Mindanao. And she facilitated a sabbatical for me to spend in the Philippines. So I lived in the Philippines, the far east from September, 1984 up until May, 1985. It was a difficult sabbatical and I ended up wishing that I had not gone. I was there in the last days of the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. dictatorship, that was masking as a democracy but was not a democracy. And all of the people that I came in contact through the university who were intellectuals had turned against the Marcos regime. They saw it as a dictatorship and not a democracy. I did suffer anti-Americanism because everyone knew that I was from the United States. And the United States was viewed as propping up the Marcos dictatorship, which we certainly were doing. But I was treated poorly because of my American citizenship. But when you handed lemons you make lemonade and I learned from this experience in the Philippines, and I learned things about myself I did not know before. And I emerged a stronger person after having had that hard experience. I'm reminded of the old saying 'Diamonds are made under pressure.' And I hope I have become a diamond even if imperfect.