It started earlier in the evening--really loud music. There are some Hispanic families in the area, so I wondered if they were celebrating Mexican Independence Day or something. Then it didn't really seem like that style of music, but it was really loud--does someone have a live band playing nearby? What the heck ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I saw a blip of an obituary in the Chronicle: Sandra Flannigan, age 75, of Geneva had passed away. When the obits are so short there's virtually no personal information, it's not easy to know if you knew this particular person, but I'm certain, given the spelling, that this was my high school English teacher ( Read more... )

It was 25 years ago tonight that I graduated from high school. It was the first time we'd purposely had an indoor graduation; the other three years were supposed to be held outside, though one of them (I think '93) had to be inside because it was raining. (I'd attended the three graduations previous to mine due to being in the graduation band.) I ( Read more... )

With sports at a standstill, the local sports reporters have to come up with something to talk about each day. There's some talk about trades and things, but on Channel 5, they're talking about this day in history. It just so happened that 25 years ago this month, Michael Jordan made his triumphant return to basketball ( Read more... )

A few years ago, my high school started a Hall of Honor to recognize alums, faculty, and community members who have gone on to achieve notable/laudable things. Mr. Heath was inducted a couple years ago. We have a community magazine, and when we got it last week, it listed this year's class. ( I found an article on the district website about it. )

I've gotten behind with some of my notes, so let's play catch-up...

Duolingo
Back in March, Duo was going through some changes to the French exercises, and my app would attempt to change, then immediately go back to what I'd had. On April 1st, no fooling, it made the switch. I lost my crown levels, which showed how much progress I'd made with ( Read more... )

Oh, man. Monday morning was unexpectedly adrenaline-filled. Thankfully it was nothing, but we didn't know that for a while ( Read more... )

The Crazy Lenten Diet is not the only thing I do during Lent. It's just the most famous thing. I have several other Lent-related activities, one of which is going through my email. This is another thing I've done for a number of years, but this year I've made quite a bit of progress, likely in part to hardly sending emails any longer. Consider ( Read more... )

Our local paper arrived today, and as expected, the state champion football team made the cover and there were several articles inside. I haven't really read those yet, but I paged through a fair bit of the paper like I always do, jumping around from the front to the back. It's the end of the fiscal year for a number of local school districts, ( Read more... )

My high school's football team won state yesterday--in overtime. This is the second time since 2013 that they've won state, and third time since 2010 that they made it (they were second that time around--but it was the first time they'd ever gone, so it was still really exciting). Considering where they were back when I was in high school, when ( Read more... )