ScrapHappy Saturday PURPLE

I love new months. New colors are so much fun! Not that I have been able to fully enjoy sewing time recently, but I have enjoyed thinking about sewing time. We are watching and waiting for a Isiais. So it might turn into a rainy weekend. Just one more week before teachers return to school. They are giving us two weeks to work at school, and we will need every minute of that time and more. I just wish I was sure how long we will last in the classroom before being sent home for good. Watching how things are going with other large scale organizations opening up, I am predicting that it will happen fast. Three entire graduations have been quarantined from our county, and baseball has been fascinating. Our local stat representative popped up positive right after visiting our school. I have no control over any of it of course, but I'm not working too far ahead on in person teaching plans.

New Month -- New Color

I am so excited to switch to PURPLE for August.  I am ready for a change.  

ScrapHappy Saturday - Last Blue Day

I finally got a camp update from Anna.  She loves sailing tutorials, she rocks at wake-boarding, and she wants a care package. 
Sewing time has still been difficult, but I am planning to devote the morning to playing with some blue scraps.  I got them all ironed and organized before I had to clean everything up for a ZOOM job interview.  I've been tutoring two Chinese girls in the evenings and that is taking up lots of time right now.  The rest has been spent trying to figure out how to get all of our teachers ready to teach kids in person in class and at home simultaneously when school starts again.  I am happy that we have moved back the start day by two weeks.  Maybe by then they will have figured out that the virus is out of control in Florida right now and we are only going to make it worse by cramming a bunch of people together and shuffling them through different classrooms all day.  Maybe.  They did cancel the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, so at least there is starting to be some acknowledgement that it is a real thing and not just fake news.  My list of people I know who have it is growing.  I'll try hard to to add myself to that list. 
I might make some more masks today too.  The pretty ones all seem to have disappeared. It makes me glad that they are getting used.  I know the college kids are both going to need a good supply before they go back as well as it is a requirement for both of them. 

ScrapHappy Saturday - Trying not to be Blue

 We saw our first new baby sea turtle of the season making its way to the ocean. 

 Some days there are funny surprises

 Some mornings just make you appreciate life for a while. 

Yesterday we stopped to talk to a recent graduate of UCF as she was surveying a newly hatched nest.  She counts all the egg fragments and looks at the embryonic stage of each unhatched egg.  

I am so thankful for morning beach walks to keep my world centered right now as everything seems to change on a daily basis.  

Last week the proposal was to send kids back to school on a block schedule with no mandated masks.  This week the masks are "expected" and the schedule is still a block, but the teachers will be simultaneously teaching the kids who are in school and those who are choosing to still stay home.  

So with three weeks left before the start of school, I am to redesign my curriculum for multiple classes to fit into a single semester, develop a robust digital plan and figure out how to manage virtual and physical students at the same time while trying not to let everyone get sick and die.  Someone did the math and decided that statistically only 17 students in our school district are likely to die.  

I've been actively applying for online teaching jobs, but I really do love what I do and virtual teaching seems so impersonal.  I ended up with a tutoring job out of the search, but I'm not sure that I can keep it up when the school year starts.  

No pressure. 

So maybe a bit of sewing will soothe my soul.  

ScrapHappy Saturday Feeling Blue

No sewing for me this week!  I was in school working on the curriculum for homeroom and got caught up in all of the school reopening drama.  I know that all the moms and dads out there are going through some serious soul searching right now.  Figuring out what is safe and what is best for our kids right now is HARD.  As a teacher, it is even more difficult. I'm fortunate to be younger than some and in good physical shape.  Even if I do get sick, I have pretty good odds of surviving.  So many of our teachers are not young or have serious medical concerns.  They are in a much rougher spot. 
The administrative staff was briefed on the plan on Tuesday and Wednesday.  They weren't allowed to tell us yet what it was, but they were all looking shell shocked.  Then Thursday there was a board workshop where the plan was presented to the board. I love the elementary school plan!  Parents can choose 100% virtual of course, or 100% in person, but they can also choose any blend of the two.  They can send their kids in for language arts and then bring them home to do online math in the afternoon.  Apparently that choice has always existed, but we just haven't advertised it.  The big change though is that parents can choose "virtual at school from home".  They are in a class with a regular teacher and follow through their entire day and normal schedule with the teacher online.  Then, whenever things get better, or if it isn't working well, they can choose to transition back to the classroom. 
Then for the secondary, they would like to switch all schools to a block schedule.  Again, I love the idea!  Half as many students every day, half as much risk, half as much to make work when we all shut down and end up at home anyway.  I now understand why the principal and assistant principal were looking so green around the gills.  This is a nightmare for them.   They have to completely rebuild the master schedule, have students choose extra courses, re-shift staffing.  It is simply too much to get done in a month.  The school board will vote on Tuesday, so there isn't much to be done yet.  I'm not good at waiting though.  Maybe I can use some of this nervous energy to get some serious sewing done this week. 
I hope your blue is going well.  I am grateful to have another chance to try to get the blue bin under control.  Why is it always the one bursting at the seams and ready to explode?

ScrapHappy Saturday - Dark and Blue

My first dip into the blue this month was a group of string blocks.  I'm getting close to being done with this collection.  

I tried hard to remember that today was Saturday.  It gets harder to tell the day apart.  

Monday was a good day.  

 As we enjoyed our morning beach walk, I saw sand flying into the air from the dunes.  We sat a respectful distance away and waited patiently until this Mama sea turtle emerged from her nest after laying her eggs. 

By the time she had lumbered her way back to the tide line, a group of the beach walkers we see on a regular basis were gathered to cheer her on.  

Feeling Blue?

I know that we took a shot at the light and bright blues earlier this year.  Blue is one of those colors though, that I can never seem to get under control.  Here is our chance to whittle down the stockpile of blue.  Hopefully you will have a bit of the darker shades of sea and sky to occupy your sewing time this month.  

Sunday Reorganization

I am slowly moving back into my sewing space.  It is taking some time because I am cleaning and reorganizing as I move things back in again.  I had a nice little stash of everything in the main bedroom while all the kids were here for Covid lock down.  We are back on lock down again, but we have lost Anna to summer camp.  Honestly, right now I'm thinking that she is safer in Maine than all of us in Florida.  They tested all of the campers and counselors before they left and after they got there and then are isolating for two weeks to make sure everyone is safe before opening up all the regular camp activities to mixed groups.

In Florida the governor has closed the bars again and reduced the capacity of restaurants to 50% starting Monday.  Honestly, given his choices so far, I am surprised he chose to step back from the original opening plan. I hope that it will help, but schools will be opening very soon and I'm not feeling super safe right now.  A few of our older and sicker teachers retired at the end of this year which makes me very grateful that they won't be exposed to classrooms in the fall.  

So yesterday I remembered that we had not caulked the new baseboards before throwing everything haphazardly into my sewing room for temporary storage as we refinished the rest of the floors last summer.  I have no plans to refinish the floors right now, but I did spend yesterday very up close with several tubes of caulk.  the wood trim is gorgeous now, clean and tidy.  That led me to notice several spots where the paint had been dinged or dented in the past year.  So today it was me and a can of touch up paint getting busy.  I do lead a glamorous life as you can tell.  

After all that though, I started to reoccupy my sewing room.  I felt that there was too much wasted space on the bookshelves and wanted to squeeze in a few more scrap baskets.  So I stacked my yardage for each color under the corresponding basket and moved the neutrals down to the bottom.  This is my entire stash on one bookshelf.  Isn't it pretty?  Mostly scraps, but that is what I tend to use, so it all works out well.  

I did a grocery pickup yesterday and they were out of the pizza dough I ordered.  I decided to make some in the bread machine instead and used up the very last of our yeast.  I haven't been able to find any in the local grocery stores.  I guess I'll start making more cookies and fewer loaves of bread.  Life is full of difficult decisions after all :)

Still giving thanks everyday for a morning sunrise walk.  Its been super hazy the last couple of days.  Kurt thinks it is the dust storm. 

ScrapHappy Saturday

It is the last pink Saturday!  Where has the time gone?  

Not a bit of sewing happened for me this week, but I had planned on that.  It was supposed to be the week when I flew to Texas to do AP Capstone training.  Instead it became the week when I sat in front of a Zoom screen all day every day for training.

I am done with work now for a solid two weeks, so sewing will happen.  First thing on the list though, is to reoccupy my sewing room.  Anna made it safely to Maine for camp and successfully passed her lifeguard test.  That makes her room available again.  She will come home from camp just long enough to pack up for college.  Though I don't know how long college is going to last this year, the plan is to go back to life as normal.  I'm not going to comment on how normal life is right now other than to mention that Florida had almost 9,000 new cases yesterday. 

We are still getting in a beach walk each morning.  Yesterday there was a motorized glider going back and forth.  This morning there was a virtual race.  The beach is surprisingly busy right around sunrise.  

Scrappy and Happy on Saturday

Of to a super late start today!  I have been working all week to grade AP Biology essays and forgot that today was Saturday.  The weeks get all out of whack sometimes.