Brain Frez

Up until a few months before her first grandchild was born, my mother-in-law was a teacher in the public school system. The grandchild’s birth didn’t really have any influence on the timing of her retirement, but it all worked out pretty nicely.

Especially throughout the last several years in the schools, there were many inducements to retirement, from the benefits of being done with full-time work (from freedom to travel at any time to no longer having to deal with “opportunities” at school) to the negatives of continuing on (from the minor annoyances of every day to the much more serious issues with the leadership). And yet, with all those nudges toward retiring, topped off with the anticipation of a grandchild expected to arrive shortly after start of the new school year, she was torn, even brought to tears at the thought of leaving. She loved to teach and knew she would miss working with the children.

At the same time, she knew there were many things she would not miss, especially all the reports. As a reading specialist, she had more reports required of her than a standard classroom teacher, and those reports were, at times, the very bane of her existence. I often wondered why the school district didn’t make it easier for her and her colleagues. It seems as though some of today’s technological gadgets could have made life a little easier for everyone involved. For example, along with the standard issue I.D. badge and lanyards, each teacher could be given a school flash drive—a custom USB drive personalized appropriately for the school—to be used for transferring school-related files, as necessary. It could even be pre-loaded with general information that would be useful (or even necessary) for all faculty and staff…information like the snow chain, if they still use such things, or the class schedules for the year.

A laptop for each faculty member would probably be far beyond the budget for most school districts, although it would definitely make life a whole lot easier! Of course, the only drawback would be the training and technical support required to help get everybody started and keep everybody going. Therefore, something more complicated like a computer for each teacher would require much more investment, although the big-picture benefits just may make it worthwhile for some school districts.

Much more practical for quick, easy, and affordable technology to help the teachers would be the bulk flash drives to be handed out during Teacher Orientation, at the beginning of the school year. If handled that way, they could even be explained, en masse, and there would be very little technical support required.

In the grand scheme of things, my guess is that a little bit of technology update, though requiring a bit of up-front investment, would return chartable dividends in employee productivity (not to mention heightened morale). After all, if you make it easier—pleasurable, even—to work, people are more likely to work and to work better…. That’s just human nature!

You feel as if you have been violated in the deepest sense. Who could have done this to you and why? What did you ever do to them? What caused them to pick your house instead of the neighbor’s house that has been sitting empty for the last month since old Ms. Maple went to live in the nursing home? And now, that sinking, sickening feeling in your stomach is about to boil over to sheer anger and rage. Yes, the burglar who entered your home and ransacked your house has caused upheaval, turmoil and anxiety in your little world.

Is there anything you can do to prevent this? Will it happen again? What were they after? What did they take and will you ever get it back again? You’ve called the police and they will be coming shortly, but there’s a good chance that they won’t have a clue as to who has caused this chaos. Oh, they’ll lift prints and process them with the slim possibility that it may turn up a name but then there’s the prosecution and the one in a million chance of sentencing. In all reality the likelihood of getting your treasured items back is about slim to none.

You’re scared and you’re angry. You swear to yourself that number one, if you ever find out who did this, you’ll kill him yourself; and number two, you are going to have an alarm system installed. But wait; remember when you priced the alarm company monitoring system a couple of years back? It was outrageous for them to just sit around and wait for an alarm to go off just so that they could delay in calling the cops and then have them respond only to find out that you forgot to close the garage door on your way out the door in a rush this morning. Oh and by the way, the police are going to leave you with a fine for responding to a false alarm courtesy of your local county commissioners . . . such sweet people they are.

Is there an answer to this vicious cycle? Can something be done to be an effective deterrent? The Home Automation Store thinks there can. They offer a wide variety of electronics that should deter even the keenest of burglars such as X10 Eagle Eye Motion Sensor, the X10 Surveillance Cameras, the X10 Door Window Sensor and a whole lot of other cool gadgets.

Take a look at what they have to offer. Consider what you may need to protect your home, family and valuables. Do the math. Can the cost of the items from The Home Automation Store amount to more than you spending the hundreds of dollars to have the big alarm companies come in and install a system and then charge you that $50 – $60 a month monitoring fee? Make the wise choice – get your protection at a rate you can afford.

We had a small party last month…a small party. My husband was running to the store to pick up a few things, and I asked him to grab a half gallon of ice cream or two.

I should mention, at this point, that my husband is wonderful about grocery shopping. Though we both prefer to go together, if he ends up doing the shopping, he gets the best stuff! One of our favorite grocery stops is a nearby grocery outlet with the expected deals, on food that’s perfectly fine (we often wonder why it’s there!). This time ‘round, I was folding laundry when he got home from the store. He started unpacking and mentioned, off hand, that he couldn’t decide which ice cream to get, so he didn’t. While he was talking, he started pulling ice cream out of the bags—not one, not two, but six half gallons of ice cream!

As always, he had made excellent selections, and especially at the price he paid, I certainly wasn’t about to criticize! We had plenty of ice cream for the—did I mention?—small party, and we’re still enjoying the results of his shopping adventure. With all the ice cream in our chest freezer, my guess is that we’re going to be eating ice cream for a while, even when it does get cold outside. We’ve gotten a little bit adventurous in our ice cream experiments, but our favorite standby is baking individual brownies (love the fat free “No Pudge” brownie mixes!—make individual brownies with a couple tablespoons of mix and a tablespoon of yogurt…stir ‘til shiny and microwave for 1 minute—it just doesn’t get any easier than that!) in custard dishes or cappuccino cups, then topping the still-hot brownies with ice cream and chocolate syrup, sometimes with a whipped cream garnish.

Thankfully, although we have lots of ice cream, there’s lots of variety, with only one exception. Among his selections were two half gallons of the same flavor, one of the Edy’ Girl Scouts ice cream series—Thin Mint. It’s chocolate ice cream with a generous sprinkling of pieces of the Girl Scouts Thin Mint cookies. Although I generally don’t buy Girl Scouts cookies, this ice cream sure is good! We have agreed that we particularly like ice cream add-ins that are not quite so hard, more along the texture of the cookies in cookies ‘n cream ice cream than the hard chocolate chunks that show up in many ice creams. Since we’re in the middle of using a chocolate mint brownie mix, it works out very nicely, since we have extra Thin Mint ice cream to enjoy.

We’re definitely not ice cream addicts, but we just as definitely do enjoy a cup after dinner. Maybe (okay, no “maybe” about it!) it really was a good thing my husband couldn’t decide, and maybe it really was a good thing we were having a small party. We don’t often get in such a stash of ice cream, but we often crave just such a dessert after dinner. It’s nice to have the really good stuff, so we can satisfy those cravings with just a little bit. Add a brownie foundation, and life really is good!