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Happy List: 1/22/2020

This is Katherine. I’m starting a Happy List. Again.

Preface:

My life is different now, but I taught high school English for 33 years. I coached teachers working in at-risk schools for the next 11 years. I know when I walk in a classroom how it feels. Too often sadness filled classrooms so sometimes I made my 17 year old AP students color trees or make Valentine bags. The world was often too much with them.

My best strategies were coloring and happy lists when times were dark for kids. Whenever the world was too much for my students, I assigned a Happy List.  I’ve assigned Happy Lists after a teacher blew up in space in front of them, after students killed fellow students at Columbine, after 9/11. You cannot launch into strategies for scoring big on an AP test after any of those events. I loved reading student Happy Lists. It made me, well, happy.

Well, the world is too much with me. I’m reading The Overstory (Richard Powers) and it’s structured like trees and all the characters connect to trees and all I can see is the end of the world because we are destroying natural forests. I can’t look at a tree without sighing and when our neighbors took out a 35 year old mulberry tree, I cried.

So–it’s time for me to take my own advice. I’m going to happy list my way out of this.

Happy List: 1/22/2020

  1. Nate & Ashley going to see my work displayed at the Los Angeles Museum of Digital Art.
  2. The de-constructed still life print I did for the exhibit. (The image above).
  3. Reading a book I think about when I’m not reading it.
  4. Sundays with nothing to do.
  5. A Broncos win.
  6. Doing the Spelling Bee puzzle with Jim in the the Sunday NYTimes.
  7. My Yeti water bottle.
  8. Campbell’s Tomato Soup with popcorn or oyster crackers.
  9. Cousins–especially Margaret, Lori, Jennifer.
  10. Jim getting excited when he can find fresh chicken livers or gizzards at the store.
  11. Seeing Brooklyn & Sammi in Home for the Holidays. Seeing them period.
  12. Jaydee rushing up & hugging my knees.
  13. Texting with Willa.
  14. The photo of Jim and Willa cuddling.
  15. The wedding photo of Sage & Shannon ( “The Official Starkey’s”).
  16. Chris hugging me.
  17. My recent EKG. I was “perfect.”
  18. Franny cooking Xmas dinner.
  19. Drawing something new that turns out okay like the Cutthroat Trout.:)
  21. My Lamy ballpoint pens.
  22.  Getting an unexpected piece of good snail mail.

That’s enough.  I’m struggling with a moose card. Time to go to work.

Thanks for listening.

Katherine