Back When Thongs Were Thongs

When I was little, everyone called these thongs.  Except my family.  We called them flip flops.  And we only wore them in the summer, and usually just when we went to the beach.

If you say the word thong today, you know what people think you mean.

And I remember some people calling them tongs.  To me, tongs are things you use for cooking, to pull food of the grill or take out of boiling water.  I remember an absurd conversation with a cousin of mine who was looking for "tongs" and when I asked what for, I pictured her trying to wear cooking tongs on her feet.

We had a foreign language teacher in the early 2000s who called them thongs and the kids went absolutely bananas.  He came from an area in this state where I know people used to call them thongs.  When they were doing the clothing unit, it somehow came up, and when he mentioned the word and then said he wears thongs in the summer....  well, you can imagine that in an 8th grade classroom.

Especially since people were all about wearing thong underwear just at that time.

Usually, the flipsflops I remember were 100% plastic and that piece that goes between the toes was a real killer if you wore them for more than the 5 minutes it took to walk from the parking lot to the sand.  Remember those?  Between your big and 2nd toe would be all raw from trying to walk with that awful plastic.

Even more fabulous, that nasty plastic between the toes would pull out as you were walking and the foam would have ripped so you couldn't replace it, so then you'd try to slide/drag your foot along so you didn't burn your feet on the tar.

While carrying all of your junk from the beach to your car, with a sad, wet towel dragging along your legs.

Come one, weren't your beach trips like that?

Women wore sandals in the summer, but men didn't usually wear them unless they were at the beach, headed to the shower or foreign.  All the Canadian tourists seemed to all wear sandals, even the men.

Wow, what a stereotype.  But so true in my memory.

Then the great Teva invention came along in the 90s and suddenly it was cool for everyone to wear sandals, even men.  They were made for water sports but people started thinking they could walk trails and run around town in them.  They started making more substantial soles, giving lots of straps for support.

But I never liked them.  I thought it looked like everyone had rubber boats on their feet and if you had poor arches, I didn't like seeing your squished feet.

And they were expensive!!  You went from $2 for a terrible pair at CVS to $30+ for fancy Tevas.

And then we arrived at the atrocity we have before us today:

1.  people wear them year round, in all climates; they even make socks with places for toes so you can wear them with flipflops in cold weather
2.  people wear them when they are so filthy, they are a public health hazard (and by "they", I mean both the shoes are filthy and/or the people wearing them are filthy)
3.  we have to see feet that should never see the light of day
4.  people can't walk in them, so they shuffle, slide or simply walk with part of their feet on the ground and part on the shoe
5.  somehow it became cool to wear slide on shower shoes like prisoners wear, so kids wear them with socks all year long

Can you tell I can't stand them?

What concerns me most is when people have babies in their arms or are trying to chase after toddlers and the adults are wearing flipflops.  If you've ever tried to move quickly in them, you know how treacherous they can be.  I'm always afraid someone will slip, fall out of them or get them caught on something and drop the baby or miss the toddler as he toddles out into traffic.

Since I usually have on closed toed shoes of substance, I would have to try to catch that baby or grab the toddler and it's just too much stress for me.

I remember when my former principal tried to stop kids from wearing them to school.  She tried to say that the floor wax and cleaner wasn't really safe for bare skin and that inevitably when people wear flipflops, they fall out of them and end up with bare feet on the floor.  She emphasized the dressing for success thing. She talked about the health hazard they pose.  She talked about needing to have shoes on when going out for a fire alarm.

Parents and teachers protested and today, that same principal wears them to school.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Even our superintendent had a pair on during the opening day last year.  With a suit.

If everyone had beautiful feet, well kept toenails and substantial flipflops, I might be OK with them.  But thanks to the super cheapo deapo stores that sell the paper thin kind for $1, this will never happen.

I wear them at home, don't get me wrong.  They are fantastic to throw on to grab the paper or the mail, to make my morning greenhouse visit.  But no one should have to bear witness to my feet unless they want to.   I never wear them in public.

I have no problem with people wearing them to the beach or for water activities.  I have no problem with people wearing them in hotels or dorms.

I definitely don't want to see 99% of the feet I see these days.  I'd like to shop for groceries without seeing rotten toenails and scaly feet.  I'd like to attend a concert without the person next to me putting their grubby flipflopped feet on the seat back beside me.  I'd rather not see your filthy toe prints on the your flipflops.

I'd like people to wear sandals again, the kind that provide a lot of strappy distraction so I don't have to see the whole foot.

But really, I'd like everyone to just wear sneakers and keep their dirty foot secrets to themselves!

Linking here:
http://www.lovebakesgoodcakes.com/2014/08/freedom-fridays-with-all-my-bloggy.html

A Series Of Peculiar Events

I think I've been in some kind of Twilight Zone episode for the better part of this summer.  I keep stumbling in to real head-scratching/head-shaking situations, some of which I haven't yet solved.

1.  There was the slippery floor incident that I mentioned here.  But that was resolved.  Sort of.

2.  Then there was this.

How can ham be peculiar?  Do you see that it's deli ham?  Do you notice there is none of the waxed paper that usually comes with deli ham?

I was at the deli counter and as the kid was cutting the ham, I thought it was strange that he hadn't put down the waxed paper like they usually.  He was slicing it into his freshly gloved hand.  I had no problem with that.

But when he went to put it on the scale, he put it on top of one of the plastic bags that they put it in.  I still wasn't too worried because I thought he meant to grab a waxed paper and grabbed a bag instead.  But when he got the second bag and wrapped the ham in the first, I said "umm, aren't you going to use waxed paper?" 

He said they didn't have any, if I could believe it.  Well, no, I could not believe it.  How do you run out of such a staple in a deli?

And how safe is it to be eating ham wrapped in plastic that's wrapped in plastic?

3.  I was getting gas from a place I never go to the other day and when it was time to pay, the boy who might have been 20 at the most, called me dear.  As in "you're all set dear". 

Really?

At what point to men start calling strangers dear?  Surely it's not the ripe old age of 20. 

4.  I was posting a picture on instagram of a trade I made with my mother, corn for something I grew in my garden and out popped this:

Everything appears normal until after the 4 corns.  The rest of it was a phrase I had copied and pasted somewhere else.  Somehow it was still on my clipboard and I can't imagine how I pasted it in the middle of the sentence about the corn.  But it posted before I even realized it.

It was good for pants wetting laughter, alone, in my hammock until I deleted it.  K-ster didn't understand why it was so funny.

Maybe because he couldn't understand a word I was saying because I was laughing so hard.

I'm still laughing.

The phrase was from a student survey asking what they thought  I should do to improve my class.

5.  A woman has called me twice, asking each time if I am the cultural center.  Both times, I've told her that I am affiliated with it, but this is not the number of the center.  Both times, she wanted to know if I knew what was offered that night.  By chance I actually knew the details of one of the nights. 

No good will come of this and she will continue to call me to ask what's happening tonight at the cultural center.  But you can tell by her voice she's old and I feel bad telling her to stop calling me.

6. My parents live next door and I arrived home the other day to see the house washers there to pressure wash the house and deck.   After all the partying when my sister was here, followed by the Bauer BBQ, the chairs and tables had been moved onto the deck, off the deck, around the deck in every position you could imagine.

Much to my surprise, the house washers took all of the furniture back off the deck so they could wash it.  And they left it on the lawn for the deck to dry.

Imagine my surprise, when I drove in the next day to see the lawn guy putting all of the furniture BACK onto the deck so he could run around with his volatile chemicals to make the lawn so lush and green.

In my experience, people don't usually move things so they can do their job, you're expected to move it if you want the job done and yet here on the compound, my mother finagled a way to get workers to do each others' jobs.

She can be sly like that.

7.  Finally, I signed up for an online conference for teachers.  Basically a nerdfest.  But after I frantically tried to "visit" all of the sessions and thought I'd missed the whole thing, I realized all of the times were pacific so I hadn't missed a thing.  This wasn't made very clear and I kept going in circles around the website trying to figure out why I wasn't cool enough to get into these virtual sessions.

As I mentioned in this post, there is no end to the entertainment provided here.

It's BTS Season and I'm Not Partaking

Back.To.School.

Apparently we've been in back to school mode since the first week of July because that's when I saw the first ads for back to school shopping.  I didn't get out of school until June 27th, so back to school anything the first week of July was nothing but a joke to me.

I realize that some parts of the country get out of school in the wee hours of spring, like at the beginning of May, so for them, July 1st is a reasonable time to think about going back to school.  If your first day of school is August 6th, and I know some people for whom this is actually reality.

But now we are in full BTS mode and I can't escape it anywhere.  Not on TV, not in the newspaper and certainly not online.

All this BTS B.S. is causing me to feel a little bit anxious that I'm not ready.

But that's because I don't have to be ready until September.  You remember that month?  The month when everyone used to go back to school in the old days?  Back when everyone got out in June and everyone started in September?

We New Englanders are old fashioned like that, staying out of school until Labor Day or just before.

Hearing back to school this and back to school that is causing me some unsettling dreams.  I dreamed the other night that a man who was part Danny DeVito, part Ed Asner (Lou Grant) was my principal and I was in hot water with him.  When I tried to talk to him he blew me off and told me to make an appointment, which wasn't going to be possible, no matter what I did.  He made me so furious, I woke up irate.

It's also making me feel like every time I hop online, I need to start finding good suggestions for things to do to make my room better or make my teaching better or cute.  I'm not cutesy when it comes to what I have my students do, but when I see so many things on blogs or pinterest, I start to panic that I don't like to do cute and should want to.

But I don't want to because that's not what teaching is about, for me.  I want students to actually know things, not just make cutesy projects to take home for fun.

Nothing can be as bad as the sad, sad state of my new classroom at this time last year and at least I have an image of how my room will be set up and what I will be doing.  I've been in to drop things off and talk to our secretary about budget stuff, and it feels like a running school now.  Nothing like last year when we were in the land of boxes and no one knew up from down and it was so unsettling.

So, while everyone is running out to buy school clothes and pencils and computers, I'm going to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears and keep having summer.  Savoring every moment until I'm back into that wild machine that is the routine of school and everything that comes with it.

And now if you'll excuse me, I think I hear my hammock calling.

Hang On To Your T-shirt Before I Recycle It Right Off Your Back!

I've created my own monster.  I watched a video about how to cut t-shirts to recycle them into "yarn" for crocheting projects and I can't be stopped.

I cut up a few shirts and made a rug for my etsy and thought that was the end of it. I explained how to do it here.

But I've been eyeing every t-shirt in the house lately and somehow, I managed to come  up with enough this week to make this.

The bottom is from two "ladies style" t-shirts from when I did promotions.  These are supposed to be 100% cotton, but when I cut them, they didn't do the nice curling maneuver that the other t-shirts did, so I didn't think it would work.  I actually like the way it crocheted better than the other "yarn"!

I was also surprised that small shirts worked as well as I wanted them to.  In my tutorial, I said I wouldn't bother with any shirts that were smaller than XL, but they were ladies S and I got a lot more out of them than I expected.

I've put it on my etsy for sale, but I think I have to make one for myself.  The storage possibilities are endless and because the t-shirts make a thicker "yarn" than actual yarn, this basket actually holds its shape and stands up  more like a basket.

 I love the handles!

When I filled this one with yarn, I had a flash of pure insanity.  Since I know I will teach crocheting class again during our enrichment period this year, I thought maybe I should make each girl a basket of her own so she can keep her yarn and hook in there and we can put them on shelves instead of throwing them in plastic bags in a bucket like we did last year.

And then I came to grips with that reality and decided I'll keep my ideas to myself and not make 25 baskets before September.  Can you imagine THAT insanity?

And I know what you're thinking:  have them make their own.  Maybe 2 of them could do that at the beginning because they have a grandmother who already taught them.  For most, it took the entire year to be comfortable with holding the hook and yarn and complete their way around a granny square without help.  They're only 9-11 years old and most have never handled yarn crafts before.

Those first few weeks- oh I don't relish starting that again next  month.  Hooks falling, girls crying, work being ripped out over and over and being asked 456,000 times in 50 minutes:  now which hole do I go into?

Umm, try the one over there behind the bookcase that teleports your into another universe- oh sorry, I digress.

Anyway, I swear this basket is my last t-shirt upcycle for a while.

But then there's this...

Linking here:
http://www.sewcando.com/2014/08/come-join-craftastic-monday-link-party.html
http://www.skiptomylou.org/2014/08/04/made-by-you-monday-215/
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2014/08/clever-chicks-blog-hop-98-with-two.html
http://www.flamingotoes.com/2014/08/think-pink-sunday-176/
http://sewmanyways.blogspot.com
http://www.thesitsgirls.com/diy/instagram-craft-photo-notebook/

Growing A GIF In My Garden

I love to do photo challenges on instagram because it makes me remember to take pictures and it's fun to see if I can actually do the challenge for the day.

Right now, I'm doing Rachel's August photo challenge from Adventures in Wunderland.  Is it weird that I follow her on instagram but I'd never been on her site until this very moment?  How do these things happen?

Anyway, today's challenge is Summer Selfie.  Since I no longer have a phone whose pictures I can actually get onto a computer, I have nothing to use for selfies except my actual camera which has a timer.

Why doesn't the ipad have a delay so we can do awesome selfies?  Every selfie I do with my ipad looks like I'm posing for an upper body competition because I have to hold that giant thing in front of me and try to tap it to get a picture.  My arms aren't long enough and the weight makes it look like I'm flexing.  My arms look enormous, my neck looks thick.

I'm  like The Terminator.

I'm not above putting the ipad on a table and using my toe to tap the screen.  Seriously.

But for this one, I knew the best summer selfie  I could take would have to be in the garden.  I am in the throes of an amazing garden season and everything is so lush it's almost blinding to look and see all the growth.

There's no way I could take a selfie with the ipad  in my garden.  No matter how flexible I am, you'd never see the lush vegetation and me at the same time.  You'd just see up my shorts.

Don't ask me how I know this.

So, I set up my camera, set the timer and darted around my garden about 50 times to get what I wanted.  Every time, I was sure someone could see me and wonder what I was doing, crouching and grinning in my garden.  I'd set the timer, run and crouch down, smile, and then pop up and go look at my handy work, set the timer and do it again.

We provide endless entertainment here at our campground.

It was hard to choose just one.  They were all pretty ridiculous.  Made even more ridiculous by my pose in this one.

When my sister a-ster was here, she had a million pictures of Beanster in her invisibility cloak and as she went scrolling through them, I said she should make a video of a few of them together. I didn't know they were called gifs and you can make them online.

Here it hers, at the bottom of this post. I crack up EVERY time I see it!

When I looked at my handiwork, I suddenly saw my own gif happening.  One thing led to another....

Tip, when making a gif, it's best to have the same exact background over and over, so only the subject moves.  The first two pictures actually look as though I am rising up out of the broccoli but when I shifted the camera a little to take the next shots, you can see the shift in background.

I crack myself up.  Why are gifs so funny???

Like A Deer On Ice

I was walking barefoot on the carpet the other day and notice it kind of felt slippery.  A slippery carpet?  How can that be.

I went into another room and felt it and then when I put shoes on, I noticed my feet were pretty slippery inside my shoes.

I figured I had put something on my feet that made them slippery, or maybe the fake linings of the shoes were causing my feet to slide around, so I didn't say anything and figured when I took my shower, it would all go away.

But when I came in from the outdoor shower, I slipped in the bathroom.   Where there was no water on the floor.   And then noticed that the carpets everywhere were kind of slippery.  I made sure to wash my feet, so this made no sense.

After nearly wiping out numerous times in the bathroom, I finally decided to ask k-ster if he was noticing it too, or if I was exuding some sort of chemical that was making my feet extremely slippery.

Like everything before me was going to become a bobsled course where I'd go whizzing around corners and hand on for dear life.

He kind of mumbled "maybe" and then I forgot about it until the next time I went into the bathroom (this time with socks) and realized something was drastically wrong in the house.  Walking around something on the carpet was like taking your life in your hands because if you walked too fast, you might wipe out around a corner.

On carpet.

So, a day or two later, I asked him again.  "Have you noticed the floors are extremely slippery?  Like even the carpets?"

This time, he agreed.

And we puzzled on it for days, walking slowly into the bathroom, grabbing onto things for support.  I had visions of one of us forgetting and crashing to our deaths in the bathroom one night, having to explain to everyone "we don't know, the floors just got so slippery and he/she must have forgotten and stood up from the toilet too fast and hit his/her head on the sink and that's where I found him/her as I was tiptoeing in"

And then it hit me:

K-ster has been chaffing with the summer heat when he runs, so he got some bodyglide and loved it.  The first kind was like a deodorant stick and when it ran out, he thought he'd try another kind.  In a spray.

And where did he spray that spray?

Of course, on the bathroom floor. 

And then we tracked it all over the house.  We've been sliding for weeks.

It's supposed to clean up with soap and water, so when I washed the bathroom floor, guess what?  Instead of cleaning up, it allowed the water to bead up and added an extra layer of slide to the already treacherous linoleum. 

I think we're going to have to add grab bars all around the bathroom because it's not getting any better.  The carpets seem to be mostly fine, and the one pair of shoes that were affected had insoles that could be washed, so they seem to be fine.

But that bathroom floor?

A luge course.  Pee at your own risk.

Spooky Dancing Man

I've had a great summer so far (and I say so far, because I still have an entire month before school starts and I'm sick of already hearing people say back-to-school  because it's very far away!!) and I'd say I'm fairly relaxed.  Not a lot of stress going on.  I'm pretty laid back, not worrying about much right now.

My brain is not working on overtime as it usually does.

There's plenty of time to think about school later.

I let you know I'm not under a lot of stress because a most stressful thing happened the other night, as I was locking up and getting ready to go to bed.  It was one of those moments that lasted for what seemed like hours, where I was frozen in time, not sure what to do.

I looked out and saw a strange man, dressed in light clothes, near the greenhouse.  Since we own a campground, it's not unusual for people to be in my yard, but at 930 at night, it was kind of strange.

And to be so near the greenhouse.  Like the back corner of it.  Not near the door or the center of it or anything.  Just at the back corner.

Alone.

And he was doing a strange dance.  He was weaving back and forth, not really going forward, not really going backward.  And he'd raise his hands UUUUUUUPPPPPPP in the air and then let them come back down and then UUUUUUUPPPPPP they'd go again.  And his body would kind of billow forward as his arms went up and then curl  back in when they came down.

It was almost like Tai Chi but he was alone and it was dark out.  Very unsettling.

I started to get kind of freaked out.  I really couldn't figure out what was happening.   I didn't see a dog or a kid with him.  He kept standing there alone, doing this very strange dance.

Had this been a cartoon, I would have rubbed my eyes to clear them and you would have heard them squeaking.

I thought of yelling for k-ster.  I thought of calling the police.  I thought of wetting my pants because it was just soooooo creepy.

And then I realized.

It's a drop cloth that I used when I repainted the kitchen last week, and I thought I'd air it out before putting it away.  So, I hung it out during the day and left it, not caring if it sat for a few days.

The airier, the better.

And as it blew in the wind, going UUUUUPPPPP and down and UUUUUUPPPPP and down, it wasn't a man.

Just a figment of my imagination.

The asylum?  They have my room ready for me.

Linking here:
http://www.myturnforus.com/2014/07/freedom-fridays-with-all-my-bloggy_31.html