MaeLyn's Musings

My thoughts this morning while on a walk through a park when glimpsing something unusual in a tree some distance off the path: Hmmm. That looks odd. That's not a squirrel nest.... What is that? Oh! It's a bird! That's a BIG bird! Wow! I went back to take pictures, hoping it would stay put. I needn't have worried. I got my pictures, continued my walk, and it was still there on my return trip.  It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures (my phone camera isn't the best) I think it is some kind of hawk, but it was huge - definitely over a foot tall. It had a white chest, you can kind of see in the bottom photo.

Guess what we've been working on! - (Sent at 1:37AM) I'm so glad she's having fun, and doing what she enjoys. That pie does look delicious! I scratch my head at her timing, but I guess that is college life? 

Josh was a grave cleric (a D&D thing). Peter was a mudkip (a Pokemon thing). And John was a boy from the early 1800s.

Thirty years ago I was a little twelve year old, uprooted from the only home I could really remember, and tossed into a new house, a new ward, and a new school. And in the whirlwind of adjusting to a new home, I met Tabitha. She was close to my age, petite with a round face and a cloud of bouncy, curly black hair, and she literally bounced when she walked. She quickly became my best friend. She lived around the corner from me and frequently we walked home from school together, and we had an ongoing joke about "walking her to the corner" while never exactly specifying to which corner we were walking the other - there were three street intersections between our homes. We wrote notes to each other. We had a little black book that we would write in and pass back and forth. Over time, I developed other friendships, but Tabitha was always one of my close friends. Eventually we graduated from high school, and while we both went to BYU, we lived at opposite ends of campus and so we...

A couple days ago, a friend texted the following photo to me and said, "Not sure if you've seen this, [my husband] saw it on the congressman's twitter feed." Well, I hadn't seen it. I recognized some of the people in the photo:  a high school teacher, the high school principal, a blind boy I had seen around the school, and of course I recognized John. But the congressman? When had John met a congressman?  I had to do some asking to find out what it was all about.  So there is this Congressional App Challenge , where students are encouraged to learn coding, and then winners are recognized by their congressmen. John wrote an app to help the internet be more accessible for blind people. It uses text-to-speech technology somehow, to describe what is on the screen. He has been working on it with the help of the blind boy in his coding club. Perhaps because he was the only student to submit an app in our district, he was recognized by Congressman Perlmutter.  ...

On  October 20th and 21st ,  Northglenn High School Theater Department  produced  "Only an Orphan Girl" (a melodrama!) In this highly entertaining production, audience members got to sing, boo, hiss and throw peanuts as they got involved in this tale of a villain who tries to steal a poor orphan girl's inheritance. John received the role of Floyd, the piano player, who not only provided sound effects and musical background music - including themes for each character who ever walked onto the stage, but also accompanied the audience in rousing choruses during scene changes and before and after each act. Songs included "A Bicycle Built for Two", "O Susanna", "She'll be Comin' 'Round the Mountain", "Clementine", "Meet Me in St. Louis", "In the Good Old Summertime", "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean", "Jingle Bells", "I've Been Working on the Railroad", ...