Over dinner the other day my husband and I were telling our teenage son about old insult sayings, to see if he could figure out what they meant. We were saddened to learn that phrases we’ve known since childhood were no longer common knowledge. Are they dying out completely? Some of the more colorful ones we asked about were:
I’m a hard-headed realist who tends to strongly doubt the supernatural. Psychic mediums, ghosts, alien abductions, are all beyond belief. But…there have been occasions that have caused cracks in my idea of reality. In the past I’ve had an extremely scary seance with a Ouija Board that still scares the pants off me when I think about it. I had a puppy that was throwing herself at the front door in the middle of the night trying to get out, and when I opened the door she slipped past me and chased a thing off my front porch that was thigh height and made a noise like nothing I’ve ever heard – and it ran on two legs. A long time passed and then I was walking that same dog in the early morning hours when a silent craft flew over, just a few stories above my head, which I later saw on TV as a child’s drawing of an alien ship in another country.
These and other incidents have always made me wonder, and recently I added a new experience to that list. (more…)
A charter school recently saved my sanity. I have a brilliant daughter who experiences anxiety when she attends regular public high school. Something about the huge crowds of children, or the chaos during class changes, pushes her panic button. Because of this problem we spent the better part of the school year dealing with truancy, constant illnesses, falling grades, therapy, and medication. I finally withdrew her from public school and enrolled her in a local charter school. What a relief. (more…)
