I saw a brief clip of Oprah going door to door for Stacy Abrams - she knocked, a woman answered and fell back, totally surprised. I kept waiting for Oprah to say something like, "you get a vote and you get a vote" and so on.

Todd, I watched the joint event with Abrams and Oprah yesterday and that is exactly what she did!

Bwah! Oh, Oprah. I do love her.

I memorialized ita's facebook account this week. Just FYI in case anyone did not see the discussion with Allyson about it.

Looked up a book over on Goodreads. Ginger marked it "To Read". Gutpunch.

Ouch.

I have today on my calendar as Ginger's yahrzeit. I don't feel enormously confident that that's accurate, but lighting a candle.

Thank you for the reminder. I'll light a candle too.

It was December 7th, but candles are good in advance I'd say.

eta: although that date could translate to today since I know little of how the calendar stuff works

A yahrzeit is the anniversary on the hebrew calendar, so yeah, it drifts a bit from year to year on the western calendar. More important, observing some kind of annual reminder is awesome, whichever date you pick to track it! Thanks for the reminder, -t

So, I went to a krav class yesterday. The second krav class I've ever attended in my life.

Well, no, that's not exactly accurate. I didn't really participate in the class yesterday. I have indeed been in the room during the class, and I even got to run a bit back and forth and grab the shirt of a five-and-three-quarters years old enthusiastic happy girl and be shoved off by her. It was her class, you see.

No, wait. I'm summing up instead of explaining. Let me explain:

A few months ago, during the - oh, goodness, I have no idea how to call this in English - um, it's not 'summer camp', because the kids get home every day and it's actually where their usual kindergarden takes place during the non-summer-vacation schoolyear. So, day-to-day summer camp? I think you get the idea - activities for kids for the days during the summer vacation when I'm still at work and still unble to have some vacation time with them, but they come home at the usual time every day.

Um, how much further can I digress?

So, a few months ago Pi+Girl attended a demonstration of a krav class with all the other kids in her day-to-day-summer-camp, and she loved it. She came home and showed us the basic stand and how to hold her hands and she was all over it. And then the summer continued and they had a huge soap bubbles activity (both the bubbles and the activity were huge! Large enough for each of the kids to stand in one of the bubbles), and I thought that she didn't even remember the krav thing.

And then, when the new schoolyear began, she asked for not one, but two - oh, there's this English standing in the way of my complete sentences again. Um, I'd call it a "class", had it not been for 5-year-olds and not in school (and the 5-year-old kids not being yet in school), but I can't think of any word that could be better for it in this context. There's a group of kids who want to attend (um, or their parents want them to attend and just take them there), after their kindergarden (or school) ends. I'll go with "class" and return to the actual sentence.

So, when the schoolyear began, Pi+Girl asked for two classes.

The first one was the same class as last year. She went all of last year to a ballet class, and it was pretty much her favorite hour of the entire week. She used to wake up in the morning of that class all happy that it's the day of the class. She loved every single aspect of it: the pink - oh, I'm not going to do that thing with whining about the English again, I'm just going to choose a word and go with it - outfit that had the little frilly skirt that moved around when she moved, the music, the moving, the moving with the frilly little skirt and the music. Everything.

She declared that she's going to continue taking ballet classes until she's going to learn to stand on her toes. I'm still not sure how she even heard about the concept of a dancer standing on her toes (and it took me quite some time and effort to convince her that the standing-on-toes part requires apecial shoes, and she mustn't even try doing it with any other kind of shoes), but she's made up her mind.

And the funny thing is, I totally believe her. She has such a fierce will power. It's like, whenever the world seems to collide with what she thinks the world should be, she is not only convinced that it's reality that should change according to her will, but sometimes she even manages to re-arrange the facts and events so that they actually do line up to what she thinks they ought to be. It was this way even from before she was born (to the puzzlement of my doctor at the time), and if anything, it grows stronger and more stable as time goes by and she matures from a baby to a toddler to a child.

So when she said that she wanted another class this year, we already knew that she can commit herself to something and go along with it, and that she understands what she's taking upon herself.

And she asked to go to a krav class.

(continued...)