“People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true.“ – Terry Goodkind 🕊️

GOALS THIS WEEK: Start clearing a place for my friend to do our market analysis for our programs.

Last Week: Spouting morning glories.

This Week: Sprouted sunflower and rhubarb.

HEALTH OVERVIEW:

Mental Health: Happy to be closing out the coding challenge even though I’m proud of the kids.

Physical Health: So much better, exercised Sunday and was okay, feel the tiniest bit short of breath in my lungs still, with a lingering cough, so truthfully not 100%, but close.

Social Health: Happy to be gardening with my friends again.

LIFE JOURNAL:

“Without forgiveness life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.”
– Roberto Assagioli

“There is no small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world.”

–Mary Anne Radmacher

Saturday: Last week I grafted cherry tomato from my first year here onto an avocado tree in my daughter’s square-foot garden. I wanted to add new soil and turn the soil, but I need more vermiculite and also want more compost, so I’ll have to do a store run. We had some kids over, sweet kids, I was surprised at how fast they adapted to our home, they were easy to feed the simple foods I have, and easy to have them brush their teeth and settle down at night. It was stressful not wanting to break their mom’s rules/trust, every candy or movie felt like, is this the candy/movie that will get me in trouble, or is this candy/movie totally fine? I didn’t want to let her down. The kids said they always eat cereal, but I didn’t know if that was true… so they ate healthy over here… the kids wanted videos I don’t show, so they watched multiplication songs and Daniel Tiger over here, the kids wanted to play games, I didn’t know what games were allowed, so it was just “you need authorization for that”. I never felt sure about their rules.

Sunday: Last week I had fun sailing, and did some Hilo gardening, clutter fight club, and shopping. This week I exercised again, for 25 minutes, but it’s a grueling 25 minutes with T25. I went shopping and got exhausted, I went five places for vermiculite (Home Depot, General Store, Hilo Grow Shop, Walmart, Ace) that didn’t have it after doing grocery shopping. I just ordered it online at night, screw “shop local” when they never have what I want, how about “stock local” first… Thank you, Amazon, for having the items I want to buy.

Monday: Last week I was super tired, but then got inspired and cleaned half the patio. This week a lot of social studies, it wasn’t my intention to finish it so soon, but I liked it, it let me know the subject matter that is being covered in the “standard curriculum” then that lets me know what I want to add or integrate like Columbus is covered and they also cover that in “Mankind the Story of All of Us” so I can integrate the curriculum that way and also with Civ games such as Children of the Nile and Nebakanezer and Cesar and Pharoh. My son particularly likes civilization-building games, he is 3 now, at that age my daughter preferred zoo and theme park games. We did some Daniel Tiger to start the school day, we did some music time too.

Tuesday: Last week I we did a ton of social studies, and more music. This week both kids pretty much finished social studies, learning about continents, and historical events (Columbus, Alamo, Titanic), social studies makes me the saddest because I notice how little we know about the Native Americans, my daughter is about a quarter indigenous, I’m 4%, but we really know so little, I’m a little Eqyptian, but I know so much more about that. Also, my kids are Mexican American, so the Alamo is the first time we discussed our own people kind of murdering other people… which is going to come up again as Germans, as Japanese, as Chinese… but this is the first time (second grade) when the horrors of war start coming up, the war of independence is a bit glorified and watered down in Kindergarten and first grade, but second grade starts to be grimmer. We cleaned the bathroom, decluttering our stuff as well which takes more time.

Wednesday: Last week I planned my school day, it was a birthday, math day, gymnastics, and tie-dye. It was nice to finish out the computer coding. I’m so proud of the kids who were involved, all our programs are so grassroots, it takes a lot of faith and flexibility on the part of the kids to believe in us that there will be any value in the work they put in and then it’s a gamble, some put in a lot of work hours and I hope they got value out of the work they put in.

Thursday: Last week I made some clutter fight club graphics and cleaned up the front garden. This week I want to go grab steer manure, the vermiculite is already here. I did get 8 bags of steer manure compost, 7 bags of brown mulch, and site selected, filled, and mixed the pumpkin patch garden bed, also viewed the larger site of one garden, and built a large composter.

Friday: Last week we started Japanese lessons finally… which was awesome. This week a lot of math was going on, some writing numbers, some Fibonacci addition, and some fraction multiplication. Started distributing principal mementos to the scouts, seven so far.