It was at one of those family reunions, and I was probably a teenager, and I was so embarrassed. Let's see, I swam out too far. ‘Cause I used to be -- I am, I was very athletic like, as a teenager, um, but still, like you think when you're swimming, it -- at least for me, it's easy to like, get out far and then be like, "Oh, I didn't calculate -- or my brain didn't calculate, like getting back," you know. Um, if that makes sense. And so, I had gone out further, and then I was trying to make my way back. And I was just, like, running out of steam. And so my nephew's -- would’ve been -- that nephew's like, like two years younger than me. So when I say my nephew, it's basically someone my age. Um, his friend was there with us, and he was also a teenager, and he was taller, so he was like able to, like, stand in the water. And I swam up to him and grabbed his shoulders, which I felt really embarrassed about, and then he was able to help me get back to shore, and I -- it was really embarrassing. But at the same time, I'm so thankful that he was there and saw me and, um, you know, so, ‘cause that could have been bad. So it was embarrassing, but at the same time, he -- he was definitely a hero. So I appreciate that.

I was trying to self-host Nextcloud, which is a replacement for Google Drive among other things. Part of -- out, out of curiosity, mostly. And so I had it all set up. I had my database set up, I had my domain name set up, and it was working, and I had like, a calendar. It was really cool. But, like a few days later, it got ransomware-locked just because I didn't do the security completely right. I had left the port exposed, the database port exposed, and I guess the password to it -- I must have left that admin password unchanged ‘cause otherwise I'm wondering how they would have done that, but I must have left, like, a crappy admin password. But yeah, they ransomware-locked my database and I lost not that much data. Just a few days worth of data that I had from using this Nextcloud system. And then yeah, I was just like, "Oh man. I’m, I’m swimming in the deep end here, a little bit. I don't really know what I'm doing." So that kinda discouraged me from trying to continue self-hosting in that way. But, you live and you learn.

After that, I had this weird thing that, I don't know whether it was from my adrenaline and mortal, just general mortal terror being so high for so long during the cancer treatment or whether like it was a weird effect of chemo, but I, I stopped having adrenaline responses to dangerous situations for a while.  We were at a friend's house for, I think it was for the Fourth of July, and the adults were talking. It was -- there were no other kids there. It was just my kids, and it was at this point just my son, and we were all like, sitting near the pool. Like, we, we were right there. And my friend that I was stand- -- sitting there talking to was like, "Oh, look at your son." And he was like, doing the thing. You know, he was bobbing in the water, like his head going under the water, bobbing down, and then he’d bob back up and, and be trying to, to get a lungful like, you know. It, it's so quiet when somebody is like, starting to drown. It's so quiet. It's, it's not how you expect from watching the television. But, but my friend recognized it right away and I, and I saw this and I was just like, "Huh.” My, my brain had no -- like, normally I am, like, borderline helicopter mother, like if something dangerous is happening, to a ridiculous extent preventive of danger coming to my children, and just nothing. Fortunately, there were four adults to one child in the pool, and my husband -- Oh, he was so cool. Like, just, just slick as ice, he just -- he like, fully clothed, he, he just like -- I think he maybe took a jacket off or something -- why would he be wearing a jacket? It was July -- So he must not -- he must have just been completely fully clothed. Like, he already had his shoes and stuff off because he was just sitting there so he didn't have boots on. And just jumped over the little fence that was around the pool and straight into the water and got my son out of the pool, and he was fine. He was not like, he was not like, drowning drowning yet, he was just in trouble. Like, a few -- like, 10, 15…

And so, she invited me to her Christmas party. And her mom I knew was a music teacher, and my mom was a science teacher, and we both lived in suburban Detroit area and not that far from each other, and I thought, “Okay, you know, this would be fine.” I knew she had a younger brother, and he was in high school and, you know, kind of an average sort of a thing for my era. It was 1975, by the way, and so I wasn't really expecting anything usual ‘til I went to her house. When I got to her house, you know, I went in and I had my, my boyfriend with me and we went in and they took our coats and, you know, hung 'em up in the closet and we went into -- through the entrance hall to the kitchen. And got some drinks and you know, were headed toward, I guess, what would be the family room for sitting down, and all the kinda things you do at parties, and then her father came in and said, “Oh, did you show the, the kids, your friends the Picasso?” So we went -- got all -- had to go up with her dad and had to go back to the front hall and look at this Picasso in their hallway. And I had studied art history, so, you know, Picasso, I kinda knew about it. My boyfriend really didn't have a clue, but he figured, “Okay, it must be something important.” And we went and looked at the Picasso, and I mean, it was a Picasso. I was quite surprised and impressed. I got thinking about it later. We had a mirror in our front hall. When you came in, there was a mirror in a kind of a fancy frame that my mother had put there opposite the coat closet. You know, the idea if you come in and you have to put your coat on, you might need a mirror. Not a Picasso but a mirror, you know, just kind of a, a crazy contrast in being out of your league. It was pretty funny.

When somebody says "touché" it means "you got me there." Tell us about a time you were arguing with somebody and you had to admit they made a good point. My husband, he always makes a good point. We were arguing about the vacuum cleaner and all the stuff that it could do. And I was saying it could do one thing, and he was saying, "No, it can't." And I was like, "I'm sure it can." And he went and got the box. I didn't know he saved the box. And he was like, "Where on the box does it say that it'll do that?" Well, it didn't. So, he had me. Touché.

And it's been frozen in bits. It's probably -- I can't remember the first day that I came -- I should've written down the first day that I came and part of it was frozen. The whole thing obviously hasn't frozen over yet, but there was a good chunk of it frozen. And today, all the ice went away after, you know, the third -- second or third day in the 40s, and it's, it's gone. But this morning, there was still ice and there were several bald eagles that were just sitting on the ice in the middle of, of the, of the lake or bay or whatever you wanna call it. And it was so cool and we tried to get -- we even have like a fancy camera that has a, you know, zoom lens that you can like switch out to get closer and whatever, but it just -- it was -- they were still too far away to really get a good picture to really see, but it was so cool. You could see 'em kinda dotting all over the, all over the ice, right, you know, kind of in the middle so that was, that was pretty cool.

My very first meeting at that school, the principal had every single teacher stand up. And then she informed a few of those teachers to go ahead and sit down, leaving a significant amount of teachers still standing. And then she put a random number on the screen which she said represented the percentage of students at our school who did not qualify as advanced per M-STEP scores. And she said, "Look around at everyone who's still standing up," talking about these teachers, who are being -- who are standing up. And she's like, "That's how many kids you failed this year." Which I don't know if I'm saying it correctly, but essentially it was a public shaming of the teachers who had not, I guess, successfully taught the -- every student to a point where they can then be considered advanced on the M-STEP. I remember thinking it was funny, because it was so preposterous. It was like a tone deaf scene from The Office, shaming teachers. And, you know, then the principal began asking, "How do you think this happened?" You know, she was pointing toward like, you know, "You must have taught poorly."  And stupid me, I'm used to having these conversations at my old school that are real. At my old small school, where we start talking about, like, “Well, let's take a look at demographics," you know, "Has there been a change in the types of students we’re serving? How about support staff? Have we lost support staff over time? Or teacher turnover? Which, the school, one of the big reasons I got the job was because there had been so much turnover, they needed new people coming through, like me. I remember asking these types of questions, like, "Has there been any other big change in the last four years since you've started to notice this downward trend?"  Um, and I had a co-worker, I don't know, months later, when she finally got to know me a little bit, she referenced that moment when I, when I innocently asked like, "Has there been any kind of big change in the last four years? That's something, I'd wonder if that would influence why we're seeing scores trending downward." She's like, "We all thought that was hilarious at the time when you asked that question, because you were being so sincere." But she's like, "That moment…

It was me, my sister, and my mom and we were downstairs watching TV. And then upstairs, we heard a sound. It was really scary and we were like, "Is there someone there?" Because we thought my dad was sleeping. So, is, is there someone there? And we don't know who and there's noise going. And we're all just a, a little confused, a little terrified. My mo- -- so my sister just stood up and went there alone. And then mind you, in a horror movie, you always stay together. The one who goes first dies. So, I did mention to her that this is exactly like in the horror movie where the monster is gonna kill you. Which she was like, "Eh, okay. Whatever." And then yeah, she just like, left. And obviously she was fine. It ended up being my dad, so. Apparently, he was not sleeping.

But I was going to have tea at Rovaniemi, and the food on the train -- this is a very, very, very old train. So the food booth -- it was a, like, it was about less than half the size of an Amtrak snack bar. Small, this is small. So the poor attendant was -- I would hate to be the poor attendant 'cause you're in a cramped space all day riding on that train. Of course, I don't speak Finnish and I don't read Finnish. I'm just a tourist in Finland. And the poor, poor attendant is there to serve Finnish customers. So she doesn't speak English. So I can't read anything that's on the snack bar menu, anything that's on the labels of the food products in that little refrigerator sec- section of the, of the snacks. I'm just, and I'm just having to guess what anything is. So there's a container that looks like a yogurt container, and I point to it and I, I, you know, I ask, "What's, what's that?" And she can't understand English too much. The best she can manage, manage to say is, "Yogurt.” So, I buy it. She gives me a spoon. I take it back to my seat.  And, it looks like yogurt inside, but when you pull out a spoon, instead of just the spoonful of yogurt coming out of the container, what you've pulled out on your spoon, it's, it's like, goo? It's still connected to what was in the container. So you pretty much have to just put it in your mouth and cut it with your teeth, or cut it with your lips to make that band -- a band that's connecting the spoon to inside the container, to cut that. It was very gooey, and visually, if you remember the Ghostbuster- -- the original Ghostbusters movie, there was a toy called Slime. It was like that, that's what it looked like, Slime, ‘cause, because, it -- There was that connection between the spoon, what you held, what you held up on the spoon, and the yo- yogurt that was still in the container, it just didn't separate. It was all connected. I found out later that the English term was curds and whey.

Has there ever been a time that I wanted to take a time out? That actually happened today. So, I can't give a lot of specifics and you'll understand why in a second but I was called for jury duty and ultimately was selected... So anyway, I ended up getting selected and I knew I didn't want to be, um, besides just the basic like it obviously really interrupts your week. I heard what the crime was and I didn't want to hear more. But I also didn't have a legitimate reason to not serve, so, um I kind of just let the chips fall where they may whether or not the lawyers decided to dismiss me and they didn't. So again, I can't get into specifics but today they had a printout of the charges and then the legal definition of what the charges are or what the charges -- like what a person would have to have done, what would've had to occur for that specific charge to be accurate and the first bullet point under one of the charges, I just like, put the paper down and thought to myself, "Oh, I don't think I can do this. Like if that's what happened -- " 'Cause there was like a menu of potential outcomes essentially that if that outcome occurred, basically, the crime qualifies as this type of crime. And so when I saw, oh, like this is an option on the menu of things that maybe happened, if this is what it is. Like I don't wanna hear about it. I don't -- certainly don't wanna see it, so I was feeling almost like sick. And I say that and I'm not a particularly, like, squeamish person. I'm normally not terribly affected by something I read. See is kind of a different story. Like, I don't like excess violence, you know, in shows or video games or whatever, but. Anyway, so that was the time I wanted to take a time out.