Sunday Wrapup 2/26/2012

Yesterday was one of those "in like a lion" days we sometimes have in early spring. After we got home from the teacher's retreat, Hiromi and I joined everyone in the family except Dorcas and the baby in a massive cleanup effort along the fence rows and tree rows on the property. While Shane and Grant manned chainsaws, and Joel piled brush, Hilda, Clarissa, and I were dispatched to the pasture to gather up some of the smaller branches left behind after Shane's skid steer gathered and piled the bigger stuff.

Standing upright in the face of the 40-miles-per-hour south wind required the expenditure of significant energy, to say nothing of getting some forward motion going and wielding rakes and pitchforks, bending over to gather up debris, and carrying it to a pile. We learned quickly not to try to work downwind of another person, to minimize the chance of getting dirt (or worse) in our eyes. As Clarissa posted on Facebook: "It was so windy, dried cowpies were rolling down the field."

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Earlier yesterday morning, at our teachers-and-spouses retreat, Wes had walked down to the Ninnescah River about 1 1/2 miles away. He reported on his return that it was a beautiful morning--perfectly calm and sunny. "We should eat breakfast outside or something."

I'm not sure when the wind began to pick up, but it ended up being a "Red Flag Fire Danger warning" kind of day, with all kinds of open burning having the potential to spread out of control in a flash.

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Last night the Iwashiges gathered at Shane and Dorcas' place. Among the topics of conversation was rehashing memories of the fire fiasco I had last year when I burned a tiny little pile of brush at the Trail West place and the fire licked at and traveled along the short dried grass to within a few feet of the cedar trees that form a windbreak around the edges of the property. Only by stomping wildly on every flame I could find was a much bigger disaster averted.

I had taken the precaution of seeing to it that a water hose was properly connected to the hydrant and ready for use if I should need it. What I had not done was actually turned it on to see if it was sound enough to work. I did need it--desperately, as it turned out--and it simply leaked along its length and only produced the smallest trickle at the end of the hose.

Grant clarified the problem for us all last night by explaining that "the red hose had a prolapse inside of it." This created a total obstruction that did not allow water to pass through, and created back pressure that either created or revealed many leaks elsewhere in the hose.

So that's where the blame lay. A prolapse. Silly me. I thought it was due to my lack of foresight.
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One of the other topics of discussion at our family gathering was how to be effective in carrying out one's responsibilities in a role as a board member or in other decision-making-for-a-group capacities. Grant had brought up the potential for problems when a person is put in charge of something in which he or she has very little personal experience or specific training.

Both sides of Grant's observation were aired. Joel saw that a person who has good general skills and some experience can often be successful even in a kind of work he or she has had relatively little specific exposure to, if they also have the right combination of willingness to learn and good people skills. Joel serves on the Manor board. The CEO hired there has a banking background--not nursing home administration, but the match seems like a good one.

On the other side of the issue, Shane repeated what he was told by the outgoing chairman of the Choice Books board when he was being initiated into his new responsibility as chairman of the board. "You know a lot more than you think you do because you've worked for Choice Books and you've had some board experience." Some people who serve as board members come into the job with a lot less exposure than this.

My take on the subject is that, no matter whether a person arrives at a certain position through election or hiring or volunteering, that person is responsible to learn as much as necessary to carry out their responsibilities with integrity and fairness. Personal agendas can't totally be divorced from what is good for the group, (a personal vision and personal skills and insights can be very valuable to a group effort) but viewing any such position as an opportunity to advance primarily personal agendas is deplorable, to say the least.

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Someone told Shane recently that she had been reading archives on this blog from 2006. "You guys were snippy little fellows," she told Shane in response to having read a post on "mantras."

That led to looking up several other posts, reading aloud from them, passing around personal communication devices for individual reading, and filling Clarissa in on details that had transpired before her recent entrance into the family. Clarissa has only once ever looked at the blog. Who knows? Maybe if she had done more of this when she first learned this family existed, she might have had second thoughts about getting entangled. It's too late now.

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At the teacher's retreat, the high school staff performed an original skit for the benefit of the grade school staff. In it, we conducted a staff meeting, each of us representing one or more of the grade school staff members. We had stealthily gathered information ahead of time about the habits and idiosyncrasies of each person, and tried to re-enact them faithfully as we conducted the meeting.

I have some very dramatic co-teachers, and seeing their enthusiastic and convincing portrayals cracked me up, so I got a very unprofessional giggling fit in the middle of the performance. The maddening tendency I have to mentally stand apart from a situation and look at it as though it were happening in an isolated context does that to me sometimes. Wes may have missed his calling as a playwright, but I certainly am not an actress masquerading as a teacher. I'm just a teacher who occasionally gets giggling fits.

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I thoroughly enjoyed Will's stories about his preschool boys, especially the one about putting in the chickens after dark. One night the door to the chicken house had blown shut during the day and the chickens roosted outside. Upon making this discovery, Will and the boys donned their head lamps (gifts from Dad/Grandpa Joe) and searched for the chickens and returned them to their shelter. The boys had great fun doing this.

The next few nights the same thing happened. Then Will began to realize that the boys were purposefully creating the nightly emergency--not by furtively closing the chicken house door ahead of roosting time, but by entering the chicken house after roosting time and throwing the chickens back outside.

Will's discovery coincided with an abrupt end to the necessity for nightly chicken search and rescue efforts.

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You know you are kindred spirits when both of you wonder if you're going to be the lucky person who gets to take home the banana peelings and orange rinds left over from the breakfast fruit plate--for your compost pile. I won, because I helped wash dishes. Will didn't.

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Marvin and Lois and their family moved last night back to their Partridge house, mostly to be more available to Mom and Dad, who live across the yard from them.

Mom fell twice in one day last week, and the second time Dad could not get her up by himself. He called someone, and both Lois and Myron came to the rescue. Mom was weak from fighting an infection. This is probably why she fell in the first place and why she could not contribute at all to the effort of getting back on her feet.

I'm relieved that Marvin's family is close by. I think Dad will appreciate having a bit more freedom to leave home when he needs to.

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For the next three weeks the Home Environment class at school will be working on the three monsters of homemaking: Laundry, cleaning, and cooking. I think the two boys in the class enrolled in spite of this element of the class--not because of it, but I think they'll be better men because of the class experience, even this part of it. I'm positive they'll be better husbands some day because of it.

We still haven't heard from the church trustees about whether our proposal for redecorating the typing room is approved or not. Who knew that a Home Environment class project could turn into such a major lesson in "How Things Work" when people with a variety of agendas have to interact and come to agreement?

We were asked to present a specific plan, after the general plan was deemed not detailed enough. I suspect the trustees weren't expecting as detailed a plan as we provided--complete with goals and background and caveats and procedures and materials and cross-referencing between the plan and the statements in our interior design textbook that justified the plan. In case there was insufficient motivation to read the entire plan, we did staple the materials list and cost estimate on top. The total cost comes to less than $150.00.

The thing the trustees didn't ask us to do that we are doing nonetheless is making the project a matter of prayer. We have two other possibilities in the "right responses repertoire" the class developed if they should be needed.