Maunder

April 26, 2010

First, I have two lovely nieces who are celebrating birthdays.  Ladies you deserve special days and I hope your friends and family who live near you fill that prescription (doctor's orders).

Second, the First Annual Erin Buenger Memorial Scholarship Garage Sale netted just at $2000.  We owe a great debt of thanks and praise to the small group of PTO leaders and student helpers who did all the heavy lifting (literally and metaphorically) to make the garage sale a reality and a success!  

Thanks also to all of our friends for donating items, making contributions, and shopping to help us build up a corpus to fund the scholarship for high school graduates that attended Jane Long Middle School and who exemplify Erin's approach to life and school.  If you would still like to contribute to that effort and make a monetary donation to the scholarship fund contact Jill Hiney at JHINEY@cvm.tamu.edu.  

I can also report that I registered my first voter during the garage sale and we had solid lanyard sales!  Not bad for a morning's work!

I know, that wasn't exactly maundering.

Here it goes:

You recall I spent Saturday before last at Fort Hood with my chess team.  Except for one small incident that didn't involve the base MPs, but could have, we had a practically perfect day behaviorally.  That is what I'm here to complain about.

You see, the tournament officials did the coaches, sponsors, and parents a favor.  They hooked up a projector to a DVD player in a side hall and showed back-to-back-to-back movies, from before a single match was played, through all five rounds, and even into the start of the awards ceremony.  Instead of the kids re-playing their matches or starting fresh games or even playing other kinds of games between rounds, they ALL sat in bleachers, slack-jawed and quiet.

Why am I complaining about this?  It made my day pretty easy.  All I had to do was collect outcomes from matches as my players walked out of the playing room past me towards the film fete and pry them out of their seats when the next round was about to begin.  

I've actually started to hate this baby-sitting devise.  We all justify it by saying it's a one-off experience.  We don't show our kids movies every day.  It's just this once.  Just for this special occasion.  Just to pass the time over a very long day, where the kids are using their brain so diligently in their matches.

Except, that's not true.  It's not just a one-off experience.  They watch movies in the back of the van, in the waiting rooms at doctors' offices, while they are having their hair cut.  My mom went to a restaurant recently that had 21 televisions available for her dining pleasure, plus the added bonus of bathroom televisions, just so she wouldn't miss a single thing, even if she needed to "rest."  Add in the laptops, iPhones, and Droids, and well, alert mission control:  "Houston, we have a problem."

Am I sounding old and cranky?  

I don't care.  I'm about to follow my own advice.  Put down that electronic gadget.  Turn off the t.v.  Log off.  Go outside.  Find something to do to entertain yourself.  Do it now.  

You have an imagination.  Go outside and use it before you forget where outside is.