Aca y Alla

I'm done! Yay! Grades turned in, any residual fires to be put out later, whew, yay.

Now off to play in the Hill Country. Gotta make a trip cd.

In the meantime, Diane got "memory jewelry" today; a sterling locket and bracelet, each with essential ID information engraved on the back. They're beautiful, beat an index card on a lanyard, and take some worry out of our lives. But what an utterly strange disease: you know who you are, but not where; you worry about some routine self-care issues very much, others hardly at all (kind of reverting to being a typical freshman guy, that). You don't know if you've eaten, but can follow Obama and McCain closely and in detail on MSNBC. Very, very odd.

I voted this morning. So as Richard Nixon used to phrase it, let me say this about that. Big school districts, like big government, big business, and, actually, anything else that's a really big persistent organization, have huge standing flaws. But I want you to know that we had about as good an experience as a family could have had, and had it in Dallas public schools.

Mind you, we planned on raising the kids in the local mine school or the British / Indian international school in Lusaka. We didn't, back then, know if we'd have to send them away to boarding for high school at RVA (Rift Valley Academy, near Nairobi, where jillions of missionary and other kids are educated). And Jonathan started kindergarten in Louisville, a town I much prefer overall for family-raising to Dallas.

But you know, Stonewall Jackson was and is one of the best elementary schools around. Jonathan's kindergarten teacher there didn't blink when I described our and Jonathan's situation, but set to work making him feel at home and be successful right away. And the sign language they got into kept their multilingualism alive.

Of course junior high was mediocre, at least from a parent point of view, because, so far as I can tell, it just is. But the School for the Talented and Gifted was rated number one public high school in the country the past two or three years running, and it just baffles me that people in Dallas don't know that.

So yes, I voted Yes on the billion-three dollar school bond issue. Is that a lot? I guess; Plano's is $700 million. So maybe it's not. Anyway, why in the world say we should save money on property taxes when the end result of that must eventually be to destroy the school system, parks, libraries, police, and so on, that make your property valuable enough to live in, and to tax, in the first place?

So that's done. And now, without further ado, I give you: Our Anniversary Vacation.