A surplus of crowding.

DeKalb schools report $40 million surplus in construction funds

How about renovating or rebuilding the Shallowford School location to ease the overcrowded classrooms in Dunwoody?

Just sayin'.

Squirrel!

Scooter the Wonder Dog is a connosieur of squirrels. He sniffs their trails, observes and reports their presence with loud joy, and demonstrates a variety of track and capture techniques ... so far in vain.

He's also the Forrest Gump of dogs. Stupid is as stupid does.

The guys were in the sunroom this morning, enjoying breakfast and Dick Williams' Sunday morning news show. Suddenly, a squirrel appeared on the railing just outside the window. "Scooter! Squirrel!"

Scooter ran to the sunroom, having heard "food" instead of "squirrel." He sat at attention, staring at their plates.

"No, Scooter. Squirrel!" They pointed. His focus on their plates never wavered.

"Mom! There's a squirrel outside and Scooter can't see it."

So, wanting to give the dog an opportunity to bark insanely, I picked up Scooter, turned him to face the blasted squirrel, and said, "Squirrel!"

He looked lovingly up at my face.

"Squirrel! (blasted dog) You love squirrels!"

He squirmed.

I put him down, he ran toward the window outside which the now laughing squirrel perched, did a quick 180, and returned to his post facing the guys and their plates. At this point, the squirrel fell off the railing, in hysterics and eager to post Scooter's embarrassing lack of canine instinct on Squirrel-tube.

Stupid dog.

Lesson: your dog may be madly, passionately, over the top obsessed with squirrels.

But food always comes first.

Are you reading this?

This year, after stepping down from Peachtree Charter Middle School's executive council, I am preparing and sending the school's weekly enews. It's amazing how much the enews has improved communications for parents. Now we don't have to rely on flyers stuffed at the bottom of backpacks, garbled translations of something heard on the PA system, and same-day "oh, yeah, I have a project/test/teacher's note to meet you today."

Interesting fact: there are approximately 962 subscribers to the PCMS E-news. Each week, I get a report that approximately 423 have opened their emails.

Perhaps some are using their email preview screen to scroll down, so their reading doesn't register as an open.

But that's a very high percentage of families who subscribe, but don't read the news.

I've been thinking about some of the enews that are in my inbox right now:

• Dunwoody High School's e-news.
• St. Luke's Highlights, our church's weekly news.
• Atlanta Knitting Guild's monthly newsletter
• Daily update from eLance, for freelance copywriting assignments
• Jim Walls' Breaking News
• Aha! Connection
• Groupon offerings
• Spruill Center art classes
• Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild classes and news

Will I read each of them fully? Okay, likely not. I just don't have the time (or desire) to sit at my computer monitor the time it would take to read everything.

Just as television news has resorted to the "bits and pieces" approach because the audience is overwhelmed by a cacophony of messages, I believe we'll see an evolution of enews as well.

If I have to scroll past the preview window, I have to be invested in the sender. If there are repeated messages, news about something too far out to worry about at the moment, I'm likely to be more dismissive.

So as an originator of electronic news and a reader, I'm of two minds about that statistic for PCMS' readership.

What can we do to make the news important enough for families to read it?

Are we giving them too much information?

It's a quandary.

What am I missing here?

I react emotionally to a lot of things. T likes to study, think, and reflect before he reacts. Somehow we arrive on the same page most of the time.

This morning, I saw the following headline on the AJC's web front page:

Child in hospital; mom may be sent home

Barbados woman's visa extension denied; daughter, 7, treated for cancer. 

Evidently Mom applied for two extensions to their visas; daughter's was approved, hers was denied. She must return to Barbados, without her daughter, by next Thursday.

Just reading that headline sent shivers down my spine. I cannot imagine leaving a child alone in a hospital, even one as stellar as Scottish Rite. And this child is anxious, ill, and in total isolation while undergoing treatment for neuroblastoma in the AFLAC cancer unit.

Sadly, it happens. When our son was there (multiple times), there were often children crying alone and inconsolable, no loved one in sight. The nurses are caring, but harried, and certainly could not sit bedside for hours, stroking arms, rubbing the restless out of legs, and giving careful hugs around medical lines and gauges.
 

Further reading of the article reveals puzzlement by  the Scottish Rite social worker who helped mom apply for the extension and the Immigration service spokesperson, as well as Mom herself.  

Gooding has been separated from a husband and 2-year-old son during the ordeal. She has assured immigration officials she isn't trying stay in the U.S.

"My life is there," she said. "The one thing driving Niamh through this whole treatment is, ‘are we closer to getting back home?'"

Is there a "rest of the story," as T often tells me? Is Mom wanted for something, or has Homeland Security redflagged her for some reason? Will we discover in the next few days that the story was "spun" to tweak our empathy?

I've decided that I don't care. That little girl needs her mom with her.

I pray that common sense rather than red tape prevails here. 

Max headroom.

Duck!

You're doing your day, taking care of the to-do list, and just when you think you have it all under control - whack! Something unexpected hits you.

I've been planning six different special events and discovered that some very critical information was not shared in the beginning. Which means starting over and changing several of the plans. I don't like do-overs. I like to gather facts, plan ahead, anticipate every possible contingency, leave room for changes and mistakes, and finish early. (I overprepare all the time.)

Major segue alert: the blog post title reminded me of something.

Does anyone remember Max Headroom? He had a brief life in the 1980's. Essentially, he offered a cautionary warning about the way television and big corporations could take over our culture ... and our thoughts and our lives. Rather prescient, as it turns out, since what we think too often comes at the speed of the internet and the spin masters.

Okay, back to getting blindsided.

My takeaway from having to re-do something as important as a special event is that I need to factor a do-over in my timelines. But is planning for trouble a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Hmmmm.

As I recall ...

I don't remember a single time in my childhood when there was a FOOD recall. The one time I got sick was after a meal at McDonald's, when the backdoor word-of-mouth mom network figured out that everyone who'd eaten at there one day had gotten sick, too. (Without the internet, they talked directly to each other, playing a variation of the telephone game until everyone around the block knew the news.)

Now I look at our food with great suspicion. We buy primarily organic vegetables, fruit, and meat, and from providers as close by as possible, so I'm somewhat more comfortable with the safety of what we're eating. Nonetheless, the latest ground beef, egg and deli meat recalls had me opening the refrigerator and checking "just in case." (No problem - all's well.)

Since we have Crohn's in the house, we are vigilant about food quality. There's no way to tell the difference between food poisoning and the beginnings of a perforated digestive tract, so we must treat both with the same urgency. Yet we don't want to be paranoid. We eat out in restaurants, our oldest teen is very fond of bake sales and pizza sold by the slice for fundraisers at school, and our peanut butter comes from the plant in Georgia that had its own recall fairly recently. (At this point, it's likely the safest peanut butter place around.)

I know food quality concerns isn't a new thing. Ever since more of us began living in cities rather than on the farm, food has gone through many hands before landing on our dinner tables. In the early 1900's, particularly in the Lower East Side tenement neighborhoods, not only was milk not pasturized and likely to spoil very quickly, some dairy farmers watered it down, added a white powder to make the resulting liquid look normal, and ended up causing many, many deaths.

Food recalls. It's always something.

Getting around is even better now.

Progress.

Some of the nicest work crews I've ever encountered are wrapping up the paving of Vernon North Drive. Truck drivers smile and wave, different workers have been available to direct residents around the heavy equipment, huge machines have actually STOPPED to let us pass ... in all, it's been an amazing sight. Allied Paving has made lemonade out of inconvenience, so not only do we get a very nice road, we've also enjoyed a series of pleasant encounters with their crews. (Of course, all that heavy equipment has been sheer heaven for the neighborhood children. I even saw two sitting in lawn chairs perched curbside so they could get the closest possible view of the massive rolling machine moving back and forth over the hot pavement.)

Now that the weather is just a bit more tolerable, AG and I have been walking again. We discovered that the crosswalk on Mt. Vernon Road between Dunwoody Village and what we call "the Chic Fil A shopping center" is now very visibly marked. Cars actually stop! Pedestrians push a button and yellow lights flash on both sides of the road. What a very welcome change to "dodge car." We also walked the block around the library and up Vermack - no overhanging branches and shrubs!

So here's to you, City of Dunwoody. Great choice with Allied Paving and thanks for making walking in Dunwoody even more pleasant.