Carey Family

Sue

Adventures in mentoring

by 1 Comment

So I’ve recently become an unofficial reading mentor to some girls in my neighborhood and it has been fun and satisfying.  I posted earlier about my involvement with the Utah Women and Education Project, and one of the research outcomes showed that a young woman with a caring adult who is also a female college graduate will be more likely to attend college.  So I’m putting research into practice. 😉  Right now I’m trying to come up with a perfect Christmas gift for each one and that has been a very interesting experience.  I had no trouble deciding on the first and after mulling over the second for two weeks and re-reading a book to make sure, I’ve decided on her gift.  But the third has been tricky.  She is a young teen and wants to read some mysteries but her trip to the library with her mom yielded adult mysteries that the mom thought inappropriate.  So I figured I’d give her an appropriate young adult mystery.  Merry Christmas!  I thought of one and started re-reading it but found a mild expletive around page 60 that I’d forgotten.  So no go with that choice.  I racked my brain for days and finally Googled some young adult mystery lists for inspiration.  I found several possible titles that seemed to be repeated on all the librarian’s lists so I headed to my local library to do some research.  I ended up coming home with a stack of nine YA books, only two of which I’d previously read.  Scott looked incredulously at the stack and asked me if they were to solve my problem and did I plan to read all those in the next week?  Ha ha……then he reminded me that I was already feeling stressed about all the stuff I needed to to do, like finish the half-decorated tree in our living room.  Yeah, right.

I started on the stack, glanced through one that I’d read and saw language I’d forgotten, glanced through the other I’d read and wondered why it was on everyone’s mystery list and now I was down to seven.  I discarded another as boring-seeming and was left with six.  Two were from a series and a cursory glance found language so those were out; two others were from another series and I found an extended passage detailing a keg party with lots of drinking so those were out.  What’s up with these novels?  Now I was left with two.  I was really frustrated and Scott asked me, “Haven’t you read any other YA novels you could give her?” Well, yes, but I want to give her a mystery since she’s interested in that right now.  I make my life hard.

I need someone to write clean and absorbing young adult mysteries for teens with strong characters, preferably female.  Who’s up for the challenge?

In the meantime, I’m reading frantically before making my Amazon order……

A Good Start

by Leave a Comment

Finally started sewing my Thanksgiving quilt today.  Yeah, it was only two 9-patch blocks, and no, it won’t be done for this year,  but I got started.  I cut out the blocks a long time ago so it made me happy to finally start sewing!

Small Victories

by Leave a Comment

Winter storms make me feel yucky and want to curl up and hibernate.  I experience a variety of symptoms every time a storm roars through and they’re not fun.  So with this storm and the incredibly busy weekend I just barely survived, I wanted to lay in bed and read “David Copperfield” today.  But alas, it was not to be.  I spent the entire day packing up Halloween decorations, putting out Thanksgiving decorations, and cleaning my house in preparation for the college youth group that will be arriving at my house any minute.  (Now that all prep is done, I am sitting with my phone writing to you, dear reader).

You may be wondering at the title to this post.  It’s in reference to the fact that those activities didn’t use to take me an entire day.  Not too many years ago I could roar through the house like a bat out of you know where and have all that accomplished in a couple hours.  Not so now.  I am learning to pace myself, put on some music, and just move at a snail’s pace.  Frustrating, but it’s teaching me patience, I guess.

So here’s the victory: got it all done, got myself cleaned up and beautiful, and had 10 minutes to blog! Not bad!

Doorbell ringing………

A tale of misery and woe

by 1 Comment

OK, this is my downer post-feel free to skip.  I’ve written it in my head several times over the past week and decided to keep waiting to get some perspective before blogging.  Not sure if I’ve been successful in gaining perspective, but maybe I’ve cut down on the invective and #$^%& words.  It all started with some kids bashing our mailbox with a baseball bat.  I found this out when the police officer came early in the morning to tell me about it.  We had replaced the box last year after it was destroyed by a pumpkin, but now the combined bashings have rendered our post untenable.  We live on a rural route so we have to have a box on the street, which means it’s open to the frequent temptation of cruising juveniles who want to destroy property.

Next we noticed that the hardwood floor in front of the refrigerator felt uneven under our stocking feet.  Upon further investigation, we found that the boards were warped, the water line between the frig and sink had a leak and we were looking at Scott’s favorite home repair: plumbing.  I’m being facetious, of course, because he’s a handy dude around the house but he really hates plumbing stuff.  Then I pulled our clothes out of the dryer to find they were still wet.  This was after 3 cycles.  Yeah, no heat in there whatsoever.  He looked at it and pronounced it DOA.  We’d had a couple days to absorb the mailbox, this other happened within a few minutes of each other.  We checked the basement office under the kitchen and no water down there.  Phew!

After several moments of despair, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.  We hung the wet clothes around the house to dry, went shopping for a mailbox, plumbing parts, and a new dryer and started fixing.  Scott got the leak under the sink fixed, we went to my in-laws to dry enough clothes to last us until the dryer could be delivered a week later, and put a continuous fan on the kitchen floor.  So far, so good.

Then a couple days ago we noticed a bad smell in the basement office and found we had wet carpet and a large wet area down the wall destroying the paint, and started fans on that.  They weren’t cutting it, so yesterday Scott rented a super blower to get it all dried.  I haven’t been down there this morning to check on the progress because it makes me want to cry every time I walk in there.  The only good thing I see is that we are both committed to tackling the long-standing problem of cleaning out the office this winter.  If only because we don’t want to move so much stuff out of there next time there’s a leak.  Oh, and the dryer was delivered late yesterday afternoon, so today I can do laundry and maybe get the clothes dry.

The icemaker is still not hooked up because Scott is nervous to upset the status quo, no decision has been made on what to do about the warped kitchen floor, I can’t even think about the mess in the office, and Blue Stakes has come to mark our parking strip so Scott plans to dig and install our new mailbox this weekend.  Just in time for Halloween pumpkin smashing.  And did I mention that we desperately need a new water heater?

Fall News

by Leave a Comment

Fall is here so that means our mailbox has been vandalized again.  This time it was a baseball bat but the pumpkin option is still a future possibility.

And today was the first snow in Alpine-three weeks earlier than last year.  Although it was heavy and stuck to the ground and buildings, now that it’s late afternoon it has retreated to the benches.  Most of my annuals survived the snow, but we’ll see how they do against tonight’s almost-freezing temps.  Indian summer around the corner, I hope?