Late, Massage, Libraries, Schools and Coffee

[liralen]

Oreos and coffee from El Salvador (fruity, bright notes with medium body). What a great breakfast.



Woke up late, already, for a meeting I'm supposed to be running, but when I got here, folks had already decided to skip the meeting, and I don't blame 'em. Nothing on the agenda, most of the engineers missing, and we didn't really have anything we had to discuss, yet. So it was done before I even got here.

Whew.

I had a massage last night. I think, of my friends circle, blackwingedboy and I are the only ones that get regular massages. I need mine to stay on top of my abuse of my body with regards to computers, and, this time, to help my body recover from coughing its darn lungs out so often over the last two and a half weeks. My whole chest, rib, and diaphragm areas were just aching, and Bonnie did an extraordinary job on everything, including the back, hips, and low back that were all equally affected. It didn't help that I was coughing through the whole thing. Bleh.

She's also a good link, for me, to more flexible care, i.e. more homeopathy and gentler ways of trying to treat my body. I will probably follow up on a chiropractor she knows of, and maybe even with a general practitioner she knows who isn't afraid to use antibiotics or acupuncture, depending on the cause of something. That would be more refreshing to me.

After the massage, I picked Jet up at the church, as John was running a meeting. Jet and I went to the library (a treat!), and returned his videos and he picked four more, Teletubbies, Elmo, and Fantasia! Fantasia... I remember being led out of the theater during Night on Bald Mountain as my younger sister cried and cried at it. We'll see if Jet really wants to see the whole thing. We also got a children's book titled "Roast Chicken and Love" and while Jet played with the electric train on the lobby floor, under the eyes of the librarians, I went upstairs and found two Dan Simmons books, one of which was one of his three PI novels, the other was another of his more familiar SF novels, the beginning of a series of two. I like him. I love that I can borrow books for free rather than buying them. :-)

Yes, I'm rediscovering the joy of a real library.

Jet met a little girl at the train, they played, followed each other, and made up a game in just the ten minutes they'd had together. They were having a great time, but both cheerfully said good-bye when the mothers appeared and tugged in their separate ways. On the way to the car, the girl counted sidewalk blocks, "Uno, dos, tres..."

Jet jumped up and down, "She's, she's, she's talkin' Spangles... Sparkles... Spaniel... Spungle.. Español!! like Dora!" Though there were more like a dozen mangled attempts at "Spanish" before spitting out "Español" like it was more natural. Aiee, my son...

Poor Jet got his smoothie bottle stolen from him at lunch, first time he got to use it. I'm not happy with Jet having some toys, the blue ice, and his special smoothie bottle stolen from him by other kids and having no clue by the teachers that that was happening. It's also unhappy making, for me, at least, after the attention Jet was getting at his other schools to find that his ability to simply be quiet is the one that sticks out the most in his teachers' minds. NOT that he has the attention span of an elephant, not that he's extremely bright, and not that he can learn systems in a snap... plus with all his complaining in the mornings, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't work pretty hard, this late winter, early spring, to get him into a pre-school with a better ratio.

One of the local pre-schools is called Tiny Tim, and they specialize in a high student-teacher ratio, mostly for special needs kids, but they like having a 1:1 ratio of "special needs" kids and "normal" kids, though the latter can benefit from simply having more attention as well. The other is a pre-school in the high property value area of Boulder County (i.e. Niwot), which also has a better ratio, a higher tuition, and takes more school-like vacations. I kind of like having Seven Oaks available even when most school district kids are on vacation... but that's a different thing.

After reading Sunshine, I'm not so sure I'd want to run a real cafe, with baked goods and everything. Most of what we saw on Cannon Beach was Victor and Jane's setup to just roast coffee and pull a few shots for friends. They only had four or five baked goods, mostly for evening/dessert consumption (they didn't want the early hours anymore and just made a schedule that fit them 3-7 three to five nights a week, and you were lucky to find them if you did and people STILL came), and they just roasted for the local restaurants, the old Victor's, and a man in Japan who opened up a coffeehouse to emulate Victor's. The money was in the roasting, the work is in maintaining the storefront and pulling shots. Baking requires killer hours, though I guess we could "just" get our baked goods from somewhere else. A thought or three...

And, yes. Journals don't have to have structure. :-)

Comments

[archangelbeth]

A good preschool is a good thing. (Three teachers, 24 kids at max, at Peter Cottontail.) A really good thing.

Did he get any of his stuff back?

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Not yet. Sniff.

Well, it's supposed to be an 8:1 ratio all the time (state mandated limit at this age, I think), but it doesn't always seem to work out that every kid is supervised all the time. Bleh. The class sizes are limited, here, too, but for some reason the value of it doesn't seem to be that good.

I know that there's a couple of 'trouble kids' in Jet's age group some of which actually get bitten and hit because they're not being supervised closely enough. *sigh* I'm glad Jet's not one of those, but if he were, he would have no help from teachers, and that bothers me, too.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

The "trouble kids" also seem to be doing the hitting and biting as well. Tit for tat, so to speak, but they shouldn't be allowed to DO that, either.