Tuesday afternoon things

 * My mom's phone is back. A tree had come down on some of the equipment Frontier had, and it took clearing that up. She had it back midday Monday. 

I will admit the "not being able to reach her for a bit" perhaps brought up a bit of old trauma for me and also reminded me there may be a day when I try to call her and can't get her....ever again.

* I mowed the lawn for the first time today. Well, it was more a "ceremonial" mowing - mainly to knock down some of the weeds going to seed, and to get the deadnettles cut before they got their usual powdery mildew (which I'm allergic to). It took the entire charge on my mower to get through stuff - some of the weeds in the backyard had gotten tall. (The grass doesn't take over until it's a bit warmer)

I'm hearing thunder now and it's supposed to rain the rest of the week, so I'm glad I got it done. 

* Darwin (the cat) was back in again today. He's really grown

 Even though it's been a couple months, he remembered me. His owner said he perked up and started looking around when he heard my voice coming down the hall.

He is very soft. He started twining around my legs when I was petting him. 

He's probably going to be a good-sized cat; he's not quite six months old and he's fully as big as one of my parents' last cats was when she was an adult.

And his ears are proportionally big on him, which suggests to me he'll get larger yet:

 It made me happy that he remembered me and was still my friend. (Later on I came down the hall again and he was hanging out in a "tunnel" that was formed by the tables stacked up from one of the classrooms being renovated, and he came out when he heard me and said "Mrrrp?" and I had to pet him again)

* I'm currently reading The Poison Squad, which is about early food-safety regulations. It's fascinating but also hair raising - I guess another way little kids just randomly died a hundred or more years ago was that they wound up getting milk that had had formaldehyde put in it to mask that it was going bad. Or candy that had been colored with some kind of toxic heavy-metal compound. And I guess you really, really could not trust food stuffs to be pure, not like we can now. (Even given periodic recalls). 

I really hope we're not going to go back to those days. 

*Busy week, and to my disappointment, I will have to carry a lunch also on Thursday and Friday.....Thursday noon we meet to assign the scholarships for next year, and Friday (unless I hear otherwise) is a mandatory Zoom to learn to use yet another new piece of software we have to use to manage stuff. 

I like teaching a lot but all the add-ins of the monitoring and the assessment and the like just gets me down.