My entire family was just about climbing the walls because we had no Internet access for so long!  I think I’ll be checking out the wildblue satellite internet services to see what their rates are.  I don’t want to be without Internet again!  I can’t believe how dependent my family has become on it for so many functions – entertainment, communications, paying bills, shopping…..  We depend on it so much!

Now that the Internet has come back up on line, the entire family has parked themselves in front of their respective computers.  Watching shows, checking their emails, playing games.  I have to make sure that the bills I needed to pay got paid!  I hope I didn’t miss any deadlines!

If I could give a speaker some speaking tips it would be to make sure that you are not just giving a “feel warm and fuzzy” speech, that you actually bring with you information you can pass out that would be helpful to people who need resources to improve their lives.  This is a difficult time for many people, and just trying to get people to “feel better” is like slapping a band-aid on a compound fracture.  It really doesn’t help very much!

When I moved back into the southern area where I live now, I found that I was exposed to a lot of people who spoke Spanish and some of the Spanish I had learned in school started to slowly come back.  Enough so that I could act as a translator on a small scale if I needed to communicate with an ESL student on my bus.  There have been times, though, that I couldn’t figure out a translation to fit the need, so I have been musing over the options to me at this time.  I really don’t want to take a class; I’m tired of studying!

I’ve been lucky and found a couple of places that offer online translation services, and even found some that offer free translation; some are so quick and easy that you can enter the phrase in one language and it will convert it to the other language.  But I’ve also found some interesting services where translations can be arranged for large documents.  I think it sounds like a fun job, being a professional translator!   It sure makes me wish that when I was in school that the schools had offered more than just French and Spanish!

I love finding out about student freebies and passing them on to my kids and nieces and nephews.  Education is so expensive now; the cost of tuition and books seem to be skyrocketing!  Whenever I find out about something they can get for free that will help them out in school I will grab it up for them (or tell them about it) so it will make their school experiences better and less expensive.

So I’ve decided that maybe I should exercise more, thinking that if I am more physically fit that I would be less crippled up by driving the bus. The trouble is that I hate to exercise! A good friend of mine has suggested that I take some belly dancing classes with her. She told me that she has been taking belly dance classes in Winchester for a couple of months now and that it has helped her lose an inch off of her waist and improve her posture, too! She said that belly dancing is so much fun that she is in a good mood for several days after the class, and that it doesn’t seem like exercise at all! I went online to see if I could find any belly dance classes in Virginia that were closer to where I live, but I couldn’t find any. So maybe I’ll join my friend and carpool up there with her to the class she takes. It’s probably more fun to take a class with a friend anyway!

I think I was born way too early!  Students have so many advantages that I didn’t get!  I would have been thrilled to be able to go online and get the Statistics Homework Answer to a problem that I was struggling with, or to get a copy of someone else’s Statistics Lecture Notes for a class that I missed.  It would have made life a lot less stressful back in that work-filled summer!  I didn’t even have time to go outside and weed my flower garden once that summer!  The biggest lesson that I took away with me from that course was to never take on a summer session again!