Q is for Qute

or Q is for Cute

I have a thing about "qute" spellings of words. I don't like them. I didn't used to mind, but that all changed after one year in New Orleans doing a service project with our church.

Ward and I were young professionals spending a lot of time at our jobs. We had big projects with deadlines that could only be met by spending many hours at the office. To add something else to our life besides work, we spent every Wednesday afternoon tutoring young kids at a local church. The kids were in kindergarten through second grade from disadvantaged families. A van would pick them up after school and bring them to the church for snacks and tutoring from volunteers, including Ward and me. The idea was early intervention with learning would help prevent problems further down the road.

What a surprise these kids were for us. Reading was a big part of both of our households growing up, but not for these kids. They had no reading material in their homes. Not a newspaper, not a book, not even a TV guide. None of these kids could read and not all of them even knew the alphabet. TV was the main form of entertainment and where they got their examples. "What's a word that starts with J?"
"Jack from Three's Company"

Their home life was difficult with all of them living in housing projects. I remember one day when Eric, whom we worked with, was excited because he was going to get to visit his uncle in jail. His father was no where in sight and his uncle was a special person to him.

As I saw how these kids struggled, I started to look at things differently. I noticed when words were spelled with cute spellings for advertising. All I could think about when I saw them was how hard reading was for these kids and they didn't need help with nonstandard spellings.

And I started to be less judgmental about what people were reading. I didn't realize it, but I was judging people by their choice in reading material. I didn't think as highly of someone reading a romance novel as someone reading a classic. But after working with these kids, I was very happy to see someone reading. Anything. It didn't matter what the content was. Ward and I rode the bus to work through some of these housing projects where these kids lived. Not many people were reading on the bus, but my heart sang when I saw someone reading, no matter what it was.

I'd like to say that Eric eventually went to college because of our early work with him, but I don't know where he ended up. And the saddest part of the whole experience was I felt like were already too late. We went every week, but I didn't feel like we were making a difference with these kids. They needed more help than we could them, but I hope I am wrong. I hope we planted a little seed somewhere that helped them live a better life.

P is for Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, so it seems appropriate to feature poetry for the letter P. I do not seek out poetry to read, but pick it up from time to time. A few years ago, my husband and I got a book that declared to include the 100 best poems of all time. We read it aloud to each other and I found it occasionally enjoyable and sometimes tedious. My speed is more the like the clever stylings of Shel Silversteen. However, I think my favorite poem of all time was one written by one of my childhood friends, Jon.

I was in sixth grade in Mrs. Greathouse's English class and we were writing poems. I dutifully wrote my totally unmemorable poem that I then read for the class. I was pleased with what I had written until Jon stood up and read his. Jon was one of those boys who was smart enough, but was always horsing around instead of doing his work. He tried to get away with the least amount of school work that he could. So not surprisingly, he only wrote a few lines. His poem went like this.

The thunder roared,

The lightning flashed,

A tree fell down, 

And a frog got smashed.

Even though the poem was very simple, I was impressed. With only a few words, he told a story that brought very clear images to mind. And it had a surprise ending. I was also impressed because he had spent most of the period goofing off while I slaved away on the assignment. That was the day, I developed a crush on Jon. The crush didn't last long, but the memory of his poem did.

O is for Octagons

or Man-made Octagons

When I think of octagons, I first think of stop signs. Did you ever wonder why a stop sign has an octagon shape? Well, I never did until Theo was talking about it the other day. Not surprisingly, early roads didn't have traffic signs at all because there was no need for them. However, as there more cars on the road, the need for control increased. Thus the stop sign. The first stop signs were posted in Detroit, Michigan in 1915. They were square and white with black lettering. By 1923, stop signs were standardized to be octagonal. With a standardization of shapes you could tell what the sign was signifying even if you saw it from the back.

As for the octagonal shape to the sign, there was a bit of logic to it. The theory was that the more important the sign information was, the more sides it would have. A circle, with infinite sides, was used at railroad crossings where a car doesn't have much of a chance with a train. Next up is the stop sign with eight sides where stopping is important to avoid a collision with another car. Following that is the diamond, with 4 sides, indicating information like pedestrian crossing, and last is the rectangular sign also with 4 sides, but oriented in a more traditional way with information like speed limits. Where does that leave the yield sign with only three sides? It seems to me yielding is more important than the speed limit. However, the yield sign was not added to the highway signs until 1954, long after the other shapes were established.

By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24260904

Also when I think of man-made octagons, I think about a church near where I grew up that was built as an octagon. There have been several stories as to why it was built this way the most logical one being that that shape gave it the most capacity inside for the fewest number of materials, in other words, cost effective construction. However, the story I like best is that it was built "round" so that the devil could never trap you in a corner.

There are probably lots of other man made octagons out there, but it's time to move onto P.

https://didyouknowfacts.com/stop-signs-8-sides/

http://www.trafficsign.us/yellowyield.html

N is for Nothing

Nothing. I've got nothing. I've hit a brick wall with this A-Z Challenge. I've been thinking a couple of days now for an N topic and have been drawing a blank.

I thought about telling you something about my Nose, but could only come up with I've never had a nose bleed. And it's never been broken, but it was black and blue once when I was a kid and fell while I was playing volley ball. That really hurt!

I thought I might talk about my Name, but that would be a problem with the anonymity that I'm trying to keep on this blog. I guess I could tell you that after two girls, my parents only had a boy's name picked out because they were sure that I would be a boy. Didn't happen. So after the nurse insisted that it was time to fill in the birth certificate, they named me after a neighbor they liked.

I thought I could talk about Navy beans and how I cook them to avoid the gas problem with them. However, everyone already knows that, so I thought I could tell the story when I was a kid I called them Army beans and all the grownups thought it was very cute. To this day, I'm still annoyed with them smiling and laughing at me for that mistake even though they did it in a nice way.

I thought I might share how I am very prone to motion sickness along with my other sisters and how we all got Nauseated riding along the crooked roads to visit my grandmother. However, I thought it would be too gross to develop that story.

I considered doing something about Needles and sewing, but that topic was covered pretty well in the knitting post. One of the things would have been that my mother had a rule that you couldn't be on the sewing machine until you were in fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hildreth, had had a sewing machine needle pierce all of the way through her finger which made a big impression on me. I was very cautious when I started on the machine.

If I had wanted to leap out of my Neutral position here on my blog, I could have talked about the News today. But that subject too infuriating to many, and I just didn't want to go there.

Actually, Nature would have been a good topic for me. It's a subject that makes me happy and is important for everyone. If only I had thought of it earlier, I would have done a post about it. But now it's time to move on to O is for... It will be interesting to see what I will do for that one. So far, it's a lot like N and I've got Nothing.

But until then, here's the start of a nature post. If only I had thought of it in time to make it my N post

The ornamental pear in the front yard is in full bloom.
In the bottom of the picture is Ward with the neighbor resetting our mailbox.

I turned around yesterday and found our neighbor's cherry tree in full bloom.
Our apple tree in front of it is not quite there yet.

M is for McDonald's Pizza

McDonald's is known for fast service and predictability. That's why people eat there even if they're not big fans of the food. You always know what you're going to get. However from time to time they waver from this predictability and try new menu items. Sometimes those work or sometimes they don't. For example, breakfast burritos are going strong but the Hula Burger isn't.

Source

One of the new items they tried was pizza in the late 1980s. However, it was gone by the early 1990s. It didn't seem to fit the fast food model since it took 10 minutes to prepare and it literally didn't fit through some of the drive through windows. The plan was that it would be a dinner item and families would come into the restaurant to eat, but they didn't. Thus it was discontinued.

That is all except two places--one in Ohio and one in West Virginia. Both stores were owned by the same owner and year after year he kept making pizzas. And people kept eating them. One of those McDonald's was in my home town. I had already moved away by the time they started serving pizza, but ate it many times while visiting my parents. In fact that was one of the things we'd do, get a pizza from McDonald's when we visited. There were other places to buy pizza in town, but Micky D's was my parents' favorite. They had their little ritual. They'd order a pizza with everything and my mother would pick off the meat and give it to my father and he would pick off the veggies and give them to her. The McDonald's pizza was not bad and certainly a bargain at $6 for a large.

These two locations served these pizzas for years with no fuss until they got word of it in Canada where the McPizza was first tested. Three young men made a trip to WV to try the pizza and the idea went viral. Traveling to have McDonald's pizza became the thing to do. And when the corporate office got wind of the whole thing, and they said the pizza had to be discontinued. That was how they could control the predictability that was one of their trademarks.

Last summer the last pizzas were served and my mother got one of them. Her friend got her one and brought it to her in the nursing home for lunch. Sadly, this time my father wasn't around to exchange toppings with her, but she enjoyed it all the same.

Time marches on and things change. That's the way it was for the Micky D's pizza and as trivial as it seems, the pizza is missed.

Note: There is a McDonald's in Orlando that started serving pizza in 2016. The store is 18,000 square feet and is one of the largest McDonald's in the world. There are many other items on the menu besides pizza that are not on a regular McDonald's menu.