valeriesbookofme

Note: I am not naming any names in this post. It's not my wish to co-opt someone else's story or cause embarrassment for specific people. So I will be as vague as I can be although friends will probably know who I am referring to. I write this because it's very close to my heart and brings up a perspective for honesty is the best policy. Wednesday morning I woke up to a text message from my granddaughter that she’d had notification from a genealogy website that her DNA had matched to a guy in the UK. A few years ago she had asked for a DNA kit for Christmas; at the time she was fascinated with family history given that her mother's father was out of the picture and her father was adopted. For the first few years, the matches haven't shown anything too helpful to her, lots of names that really couldn't be linked because either the person hadn't created a tree (how is it that people will do the Ancestry DNA thing and then NOT create a tree with the information

  Happy Leap Day! Happens every four years, February 29th. An extra day. In my case today, it's an extra day to recover from bronchitis. Actually, probably to recover from a bug that affected me earlier in the month and, because I didn't take the time to fully recover before resuming my out and aboutness, morphed into bronchitis right when I had guests visiting from Canada for a week. Ugh. We actually had a very good visit. I had guilt feelings about being possibly contagious but as one of my guests is a nurse and she didn't order me into isolation or flee our house, I decided I would just focus on hostess duties. I did notice, however, she was always scrubbing behind me.... I now have a much cleaner house than I normally do :) I don't have any deep or pithy things to write today. I could write my dark thoughts about the current political situation in the world. My horror at social media, even while I still participate in it. My reflections on how I learn more from the

The title of this week's blog comes from the title of an article I read this week in The Atlantic. The author, Arthur C. Brooks writes a weekly column on "How to Build a Life". His articles are always worth thinking about. The subtitle of this one, whose three-word title might have been written by a certain nameless US presidential candidate about his numerous misdeeds, actually clarifies more about Brooks' theme for the article:  Our fears about what other people think of us are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. Brooks describes where this fear originates--in many of us, it's an ancestral holdover from a time where it was imperative that we knew what people thought of us. It's also a holdover from a time where what people thought of us determined the grades we would achieve in school, the job we would obtain and whom we would marry. Those fears are not in Brooks' article though, they're my own musings. Brooks focuses on the other kind of fear,

A few years ago I had a planner, Panda Planner, that was aligned with something called Via Institute on Character. I am (almost) always up for filling out questionnaires that relate to who I am, my talents, weaknesses, etc., and Via had such a questionnaire--Finding Out Your 6 Strengths. Long and short of it, I filled it out and I discovered I had six strengths although, as I read all the things that each were about, I would have said they were more six tendencies than strengths because I am still working on them three years later.  Via presented the results in terms of a "meaning wheel". I often forget to review it but as I am in January, taking stock of where I'm going and all, I share these six, ummm, reminders?, that I am using to take stock of my life on a weekly basis: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Curiosity, Social Intelligence, Perspective, Gratitude and Spirituality. I suppose that, based on my answers to the questionnaire, these were the top aspects tha

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most

  I subbed for my daughter yesterday. I wasn’t sure how I’d cope as I am still somewhat jet lagged but she has a very well behaved fifth grade class: they’re respectful, good humored (most of the time) and willing to learn (most of the time). She warned me the night before that there had been some “issues” this week—kids fighting on the playground, some backtalk in class from a boy who’s normally a very hard worker. With that in mind, I started off my day in the classroom addressing this up front. “I hear it’s been a tough week,” I said and then waited for a response. Some shifting in the chair, some rolling of the eyes, a couple of “Yeah, it really has” emanated from the kiddos. I then sat on the corner of my desk and talked about how I remembered being their age, the emotions, how things seem so very important, so very “raw” in the moment. I shared with them how my own teachers reacted to misbehaviors, after-school detention (Wow, Mrs A, AFTER school? They could DO that?) But then I