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Today was a very surreal day at school. The students put on a series of assemblies to celebrate Black History Month. I have been looking forward to seeing the performances for a while now and considered it my good fortune that I had an opportunity to attend the performance during second period.

About halfway through the assembly, one of the assistant principals came to the front of the auditorium to ask the teacher sponsoring the event to stop the assembly and allow him to announce that they needed to evacuate the auditorium. I heard the words death and dying a couple of times, as I was sitting right behind them.

The students were evacuated due to a “medical emergency”. To make a long and emotional story short, one of our teachers collapsed at the back of the auditorium. Although EMS was called in immediately, they were unable to revive him and he subsequently passed away. It appears to have been a heart attack.

I did not know him well, but I did know his reputation. The kids were fond of him. He had a lot of close friends at the school. In any event, to look over and see one of my peers, someone not much older than me, receiving CPR – it was sobering. As I rush through my days, allowing fatigue to steal time away from my time with my daughter, or my hobbies, or my friends, I have been allowing days to blend into weeks until months have passed in the blink of an eye.

Each day counts. We all know this on an intellectual level, but we are hurried along by the rigors of life. I decided to take the situation and learn from it, reaffirm that I need to slow down and look at the world around me, enjoy my daughter’s childhood, savor the things I learn from others every day.

Girl Scout Cookies are in for my daughter’s Daily troop! Yay! This is another first in our home and my daughter and I are both so excited.

Back when I was a Girl Scout, I had to wait to start with Brownies, which I think was second grade. We did not have Daily Scouts then. Now girls can join Scouts in kindergarten. Most of the events are really just practice for the more advanced levels, but Gigi is learning the tenants of scouting, the pride of unity with other girls, and the joy of being part of something bigger than our local community.

Girl Scouts and Girl Guides are a worldwide network. I was a Girl Scout. My sister was a Girl Scout. Both of Gigi’s grandmothers were Girl Scouts and so was at least one of her Great-Grandmothers. It’s a family tradition, an American tradition, a worldwide tradition.

And so, back to those cookies. I am going to design a cute Thank You not for Gigi to sign. She can give them out as she goes with her dad to deliver the cookies at his office this week.

The mainstream media is finally comfortable using the word recession. I’ve been saying recession for a long time now and, in fact, I am comfortable using the word depression as well. Take an honest look around you. The jobless rate is frightening. Prices for food and other necessary items are going up instead of coming down. Housing prices might be more affordable for purchase now, but millions of people are losing money when they sell – or just plain losing their homes. Rental prices for homes and apartments are still sky-high and are not coming down to meet the demand for lower cost housing.

A depression could not be far off. Now, think about stories you have heard from people who were alive in the depression era. My grandparents are mostly dead, but I do have one grandmother who is still around to tell me stores of how she and her family survived. Also, my parents were both raised depression-era parents and were instilled with values of frugality and self sufficiency. Thank goodness they passed those values down to me.

Up north we always kept large gardens. My mother canned fruits and vegetables. I see now the value of growing as much of my own food as possible and “putting it away” for later use. I am ready to learn how to can. However, I live in Florida now and I have to re-learn how to grow a successful food crop. I know I am going to have to have good soil brought in. I will need to build a tarp to make sure my crops do not burn up in the sun. I will need to learn about planting season here and what foods do the best.

Fruit is an easy option to start. We have a large yard and although the grapefruit tree was cut down a few years back, the star fruit tree we trimmed to the ground this year will be back within two years. We have lemons and oranges in pots that are ready to go into the ground. We have apple trees of a variety that grow well in the Florida climate. I have looked online and found suppliers for Blueberry and Blackberry plants that should do well here. All of these things can be canned and will also provide a good deal of fruit to be eaten fresh.

It does not matter if you are single or married, a mother or childless – women need to give themselves the time to spend with other women in a social setting, free of stress, and focused on fun and relaxation. When I was newly married, I went out with girlfriends who were also newly married. When I had my daughter, I made time to go out at least once a month with other moms from my MOPS group.

Essentially, I feel like it is important to spend time with other women who share your current life situation. I’m not discounting friendships with people who are in different places in their lives, those are also important relationships. However, you just can’t blow off steam the same way you can when surrounded by girls who really get where you’re at in life right now.

I’ve got a couple of single friends I went thought my teacher training program with a couple of years ago. They are both a little younger than me, but most of the of the women in that class were married and don’t take the time to get out with the girls very often. I’m having dinner with these two girls tonight.

One also works in the same sort of teaching position that I do, but at another school. The other is looking for teaching work, but toughing it out at a publishing company right now. She and I have similar degrees from back in college. In any event, we are all pretty close to the same place in life. Of course, I am the only one with a daughter, but that is not what we focus on when we go out together.

I can talk to my other friends until the cows come home about the shortage of jobs in education right now, but they don’t fully understand. My teacher friends get it, but you only want to do so much venting with co-workers. I try very hard not to gossip in the workplace and once you start talking about the job situation, someone inevitably brings up one or more of the teachers at school that they do not think deserve to be teaching. It’s never safe territory once that topic arises.

Makes sure you are getting out of the house with your friends from time to time, ladies. A husband or a boyfriend should indeed be a best friend to you, but there is nothing like sharing time with like-minded women. They will understand you on the most basic level and that is important.

When I was growing up in Virginia, we had fire drills in school. However, I do not remember ever having air raid drills, or lockdown drills, or tornado drills. It was fire drills, and that was it.

Here in Florida, we have all kinds of drills in the schools. This week all of the schools in the district had tornado drills, for example. Face-down on the floor, knees up under your chest, hands up covering the back of your next. It seemed oddly pointless since the drill happened while I was in a classroom with a full wall of windows.

Even so, we are training our kids to understand the right way to react in the face of a crisis – be it dangerous weather or gunfire on school grounds. It’s practical and it’s absolutely part of educating our children as they head into a society that seems to modernize at a quicker and quicker rate each year.

It seems cliché to write about the weather on a personal blog, but at the same time the weather feels very relevant to live in Florida right about now. I have lived in Florida for a little over ten years now. Most of that time has been in the Tampa Bay area, save for a tad over three years when I lived in Gainesville. For the most part, I seem to remember that most winters we get a cold snap or two and if you add all of the really cold days together, it totals about two weeks.

This year has been very different. We’ve had hard freeze warnings over and over. Most mornings in the past three weeks when I have left for work/school at about 6:30 a.m., it’s uncomfortably cold. I have had to chip ice off of my windshields all too often this year. And the truth is, we just don’t keep ice scrapers in our glove boxes down here! Along the same lines, I have a woefully inappropriate wardrobe for this long stretch of cold. Thank goodness I found a pair of Birkenstock clogs in my closet. My poor feet were getting quite fed up with my insistence on wearing sandals every day.

We had the Superbowl here this past weekend and I felt a little bad for all of the people who made plans to be in town to see the game. I imagine many were expecting a little fun in the fun. Instead, it would have been quite acceptable if they had worn their northern coats and scarves. Don’t even think about the beaches, either. The air coming in from the water makes the temperature feel all the chillier.

And so yes, I am talking about the weather. And as mundane as that might seem to you, this extended period of very cold weather is big news here in Florida.

Oh, man. I completely thought we were set for the halftime commercials being aired during the Superbowl tonight in 3D. I had a couple of pairs of the glasses we got when we saw Journey to the Center of the Earth in the theaters. My daughter and I had them, all set to see the commercials in 3D…and they did not work.

*sigh*

I guess that means I am out of luck for tomorrow night’s episode of Chuck, too.

I never bothered to pick up 3D glasses in the Supermarkets, because I thought the ones I already had would do the trick. What comes to mind is that age-old adage about the word ASSume.