Christmas Parties Begin in Earnest

Saturday night was my friend's annual Christmas party. We always have a delightful time dressing up and eating lots of good food. After lots of time to eat and chat (and get caught up on the year's activities), we have a Yankee Gift Exchange and play games (Guestures, four-on-a-couch, and psychiatrist this year). It was lots of fun.

Of course, I took the opportunity to get a bit of a "baby fix." Rose was such a sweet little baby. She is 11 months old in case you are wondering. I also enjoyed hearing about people's year and getting to know some friends better. Altogether it was a very successful evening as far as I am concerned. I was sorry my sister couldn't attend (she was recovering from the stomach flu), but everything else went well.

If you have never played psychiatrist, it is lots of fun--especially if there is someone there who has never played it before. And there was. The first round we did the "easy" version. Then we did a good and hard one; many thanks to Kristen who was a great sport in her role as psychiatrist and did finally figure out our problem.

Estimating

It started as spelling lessons and quickly included math. Now we are including science and social studies. Everything as a matter of fact. I must admit that I am enjoying myself tremendously. Not only do I get to review all the stuff I only vaguely remember learning in school, but I get the joy of teaching it to a young lady who goes from being bored to being interested. And seeing her go from a D in math to an A is wonderful.

Then there is the first-hand look into what kids are being taught in our schools...not that I didn't have a clue before. Why take the time and energy to teach kids how to estimate in math when you can teach them how to figure it out for real? It really isn't that much (if any) harder to teach someone that the circumference of a circle is (pie)2r than to teach them to draw a box around the circle and use 2r as both sides. And it would be more accurate.

I hope they (the kids) don't expect to use estimating in business. Sure, estimating is great for getting a rough estimate of your grocery bill as you walk through the store, but you want the "real" number when it comes to paying for it. It seems to me that it would be much easier to teach them to do it right now, and let them figure out how to estimate on their own.

We Get Some Rain

Every once in a while, western Washington lives up to its reputation for lots of rain in a grand style. The past few days, the weather decided to go whole hog to celebrate December.

On Saturday and Sunday it snowed. An unusual thing for us, although common enough in many other parts of the country. The snow did stick, but it stayed very wet. Occasionally it turned from snow to rain, just to keep us guessing. The roads in our area never really got bad.

Then it started to rain in earnest. If you haven't heard about the rain in Washington, you probably aren't watching any news. We set all sorts of records. Record flood levels, record rain fall in 24 hours, etc. Our office parking lot sprouted a couple of large ponds, one large enough to really get wet in if you tried. I took some pictures to document the occasion. (You might be able to guess that we were a little short on parking yesterday.)


Some employees couldn't make it to work because of closed roads. One employee raced home early afternoon yesterday when we heard that they were going to be closing I-5 (the main freeway) between us and his home. He made it safely home before it closed, but he won't be able to come back to work for several days. There was 8 feet of water over the highway in places! (We are talking about a major, 4 lane highway!)

We don't have any real problems at my home, other than general sogginess of the ground, etc. However, one does have to be very careful about branches and trees being down in various places. There were very high winds in some places.