President’s Weekend – 2012

It is the second long weekend of the calendar year and I am home, Beth and the kids are skiing in Michigan and having fun. They took off Thursday evening because the kids had no school Friday or Monday, making escaping the city and running off to the north woods a three-day fun-escape and much more inviting than staying home and cleaning the basement or other chores. I won’t be cleaning the basement, either I have a stack of papers to grade and get back before next Tuesday and I have time to make it happen.

There is no snow in the yard except for a little patch of what is left from William’s attempt to make a quinzee or snow shelter in the backyard after our last snowstorm in mid-January. Yesterday it was 50 degrees, more like mid-March than February, and I expect we’ll get our winter smackdown after the crocuses pop and the trees begin to bloom and we’ll be reminded that we live in the frozen north.  Nevertheless, it is nice to have a bit of fair weather. I took Ivy to the dog park yesterday and she had a great time running, sniffing, and playing while I walked in a sweatshirt.

It is President’s weekend and I am reminded that I need to catch up on my collection of railcars – here is February’s question:

Question for February: Which President was a Yale boxing coach, was the first president to have been an Eagle Scout, served as a gunnery on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific and was never elected President or Vice-President?

UP 1989 - commemorates the Rio Grande railroad which the UP aquired in 1989, hence the name

If you know (and you should) leave a comment. The series is getting down to the last few presidents and we have all of the cars. Last weekend, William and I came across a UP locomotive waiting for a crew change and we snapped a few pictures – it is one of the heritage locomotives UP painted  a few years ago to commemorate the railroads the UP had gobbled up in the 80s and 90s. I have written a few posts about railroading and model railroading, but I haven’t worked on or played with my toy in a while. I won’t get a chance this weekend, either, too much work involved and it is low on the priority list.

What is high on the priority list is writing thank you notes to the students in my field trip group from a few weeks ago. I spent time in class teaching the concept on how to write a thank you note and they wrote one to their chaperones. They moaned and groaned about, but they wrote them and they are some of the best thank you notes I have gotten my seventh graders to write – ever. I showed them the CBS news clip about 365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life and shared my value of writing thank you notes and even shared my stationary and stamp choice – Wonders of America – a Land of Superlatives from 2006. They are amazing stamps, perfect for a geography teacher and I often wonder if the student who receives the note looks at the stamp.  I hope so, because if they do they get it, really get it.

Well, that’s what’s on my list for the day, so I had better get to it. There are thank you notes to write, papers to grade, and a dog to walk and so much more. Making the Days Count, one long weekend at a time.

Do you look at the postage when you get a letter, if you do what is your favorite or the prettiest stamp you’ve seen or remember?

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