A little Parental Braggadocio:

The Yearbook votes are in, and....

Matilda was voted Most Likely To Bring A Smile To Your Face. (As a Sophomore!)

and...

Most Likely to Brighten Your Day (which seems similar, but I guess the top one includes humor)

Anyway, our daughter has not only an Emotional Intelligence that JZ and I could not have hoped to attain at age 15, she also has Humor, Kindness and Emotional Generosity.

She's just a very good human being.

Or as we like to say (quoting Raising Arizona): "We got the best one!"

(Of course, everybody got the best one, but we truly feel it.)

You did indeed get the best one! After such a fraught year that is so encouraging that she doesn't seem to be hurting from it as much as was possible. I feel so for the parents, teachers, and school age children negotiating this recent reality. Also, my parenting advice: Take full parental credit for all the wonderful accomplishments of your children. The bad stuff, totally on them, not you. (Something I joke with the kids about, as in my observation parents seem to have very little to do with the core human of our children.)

I feel so for the parents, teachers, and school age children negotiating this recent reality.

My friend Claudine was just up visiting. She's a progressive Democrat who's been on the School Board for several years in a deeply conservative district near San Diego. She's been stalked and harassed this year by right wing nutbags, even as she's been doing extraordinary work to make their schools safe for reopening last year before the vaccines.

She'd even gone to the extra effort to get certification in the complexities of school and state budgeting. Now she's done. When weirdos are coming up to your door dressed like FedEx delivery only to start screaming in your face when you open the door, then it's not worth it.

I think about the harassment that election officials faced, the burnout of nurses and healthcare providers. Who's going to want to do these jobs which are the foundation of a functioning democracy, the nuts and bolts civic level stuff, after all this?

I'm looking at the right wing push to control school districts to the point that they are legally mandating all lesson plans be subject to review before the school year begins and they want to video monitor each teacher in the classroom. Aside from the utter bullshit of that - who's going to teach in that environment? Nobody. Teachers have already been leaving the profession in droves, but you're just not going to have any teachers in districts or states that enact those authoritarian measures.

Aw, Matilda is great! So nice that her peers think so, too.

The raspberry mocha I got at Dunkin' this morning is not as delicious as I had hoped. My expectations were pretty high, though. Raspberry + chocolate is one of my favorite flavor combos.

Onerous task completed (having been rescheduled from yesterday due to snowstorm).

TMI: Excision of a 3mm nodule from under the front of my tongue. It is being sent off for biopsy, fingers crossed it is benign.

As usual with anything dentist-related, the anticipation was a lot worse than the event. Hooray for modern anæsthesia! No pain at all. Yet.

Raspberry + chocolate is one of my favorite flavor combos.

Yo tambien. There used to be a place in LA called Santa Barbara Ice Cream Company, and they had a machine which mixed ice cream together with whatever you wanted. Sort of like the Boston shops where they mix it up on a marble counter for you but here a machine did it. Anyway, I always got their dark chocolate which they would mix with fresh raspberries which would be thoroughly smushed and incorporated through the ice cream. So good - and I've never had anything else quite exactly like their combo.

Onerous task completed (having been rescheduled from yesterday due to snowstorm).

Full credit! Celebrate!

Well done, dcp, and benignity~ma!

Ooh, that sounds good, Hec. Fresh raspberries are so dang delicious and even more so with dark chocolate. I should source some dried raspberries to go in my trail mix next time I make some, I don't recall seeing that at TJ's

Eek, DCP! Good luck!

TJs definitely has freeze dried raspberries but don’t remember seeing dried ones. But maybe!

Oh, they do? Excellent, will look out for those next time.