Janet's Blog

Conforming is easy--you just follow the crowd. Wear the newest fashions, cut your hair in the latest style, use the currently popular slang. If you can afford it, you can do it. If you're unsure about what to do, just check any school. The most conforming schools insist that kids wear uniforms: polo shirts in the prescribed colors, khaki or navy pants or, for girls, a coordinating navy or plaid skirt or jumper. But even schools with lax dress codes are full of students and teachers who conform by wearing the latest contemporary fashion. T-shirts and jeans remain the most popular clothing, with shorts, sweats, and even pajama pants in the running for the most comfortable school attire. For people who want to conform, smart phones are a must; flip phones are sadly out-of-date, and we shouldn't even mention corded house phones. Young kids whose parents give them talk-and-text-only phones are careful to keep that information to themselves as they struggle to fit in with their peers...

My husband, Bill, has always been good at fixing things. Over the five decades of our marriage, he has rarely called for someone to fix something he is able to fix himself. That includes most plumbing repairs, even though he always reminds me, as he gathers up his plumbing tools, that he hates plumbing. Even as a young child, he was inquisitive and precocious, often taking things apart and constructing useful items from found objects. Bill's mother shared that he was a hard one to raise because he couldn't sit still, and was always into things. Over the years, he has repaired and constructed a variety of things, always working on some project or another. I guess there's a good reason he decided to become an electronic engineer. Have I mentioned that Bill holds several patents that have been widely used in the Cable TV and Internet industries? Both of our biological daughters have inherited their dad's ability to fix things around the house and work on significant home ...

All of my life, whenever anyone asked me to name my favorite color, I had a hard time answering. I would usually mumble something like "I don't have just one favorite color," or "any color except green."  To tell the truth, I have always liked lots of colors: red, blue, purple and, in my later years, even certain shades of green. I chose red as the color for my wedding attendants to wear because we were getting married right before Christmas, so it just seemed right. I became so tired of the dingy, pale green that adorned the walls of our hotel apartments that it was a long time before I was willing to embrace any shade of green. I love certain colors of pink and peach, but I am not really a fan of bright orange. Purple has always been a favorite, and who doesn't like blue? God has made so many gorgeous colors on this earth that it has been impossible for me to pick just one favorite. It was probably only a couple of years before Dad died, when we were all g...

Here it is, the middle of February already. Most years, I would be gritting my teeth and wishing for this month to end, because March should certainly bring some signs of spring. At least, I could hope. But this year is different. This year, I haven't been longing for winter's end because it feels like winter has hardly begun. Except for a couple of weeks--one in December, and the other in January--we've had no snow and no sub-freezing daily high temperatures. We've had more cloudy days than usual, and some horrific windy days that we could all do without, but most days have boasted highs in the fifties or sixties. It's been so warm that the squirrels have been skittering around outside for weeks, scurrying across the street in front of my car and scrambling up and down trees and fences. Instead of hibernating, it seems like they've been taking cat naps this year. The weather has been so mild that Millie's puppies have been able to play and poop outside near...

AI--Artificial Intelligence--can be a wonderful aid to research. I no longer have to spend hours at the public library, pawing through card catalogs and searching through the stacks to find the book I need. Instead, I can just type a simple question in the search line of my browser, and the answer will magically and immediately appear. If I need an idea for a recipe that uses the ingredients I have on hand, AI will produce one. If I want to converse with someone who speaks a different language, AI will translate. When I want an answer to some trivia question, I can simply ask Siri, or Google, or Alexa, and a calm voice will respond right away. When I asked Google the simple question, "What is AI?" this is how it responded:  Artificial Intellligence (AI) is a field of computer science dedicated to creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning from past experiences, problem-solving, and understanding language...

When I was in the fourth grade at East Ward School in Fairbury, my teacher's name--by some coincidence that would only become apparent to me decades later--was named Mrs. Bauer. She was a good teacher, patient and kind. Her classroom was invariably calm. My classmates worked hard and generally did everything Mrs. Bauer required. (As I look at the photo below, I can't help but think that the overall class character was heavily influenced by the overwhelming number of girls in the class.) After all these years, I'm surprised that I remember the names of 90% of the kids in this photo. I'm standing in the middle row, second from the left. I was a good student. I loved to read, and arithmetic was always easy for me. I remember how Mrs. Bauer would assign our daily arithmetic assignments, always giving us ample time to complete the work in class. That year, long division was the newest, hardest thing we had to learn, but I caught on quickly. Not everyone did. Mrs. Bauer direc...