Good morning everyone! The BINGO word for today is: Dancing BINGO Words: 1. Romance 2. Forever 3. Dinner 4. Diamonds 5. Love Birds 6. Arrows 7. Infatuation 8. Candles 9. Valentine Doves Love Letters Boyfriend Kisses Pink Cupid Girlfriend Dancing SENT and REC'D: vina (flowergirl34) sends to carol (veeja11) **SENT** carol (veeja11) sends to annie (canyonwind)**SENT** annie (canyonwind) sends to margo (smitties) margo (smitties) sends to sue n. (suegardens2) sue n. (suegardens2) sends to treasa (uptreasa) treasa (uptreasa) sends to vina (flowergirl34) shirley (brittneysgran) sends to rose (rosemctier) rose (rosemctier) sends to em (hostarookie) em (hostarookie) sends to maryellen (mellen) maryellen (mellen) sends to beth (beth_b_kodiak) beth (beth_b_kodiak) sends to mavis (mavis07) mavis (mavis 07) sends to jeanne (sandlapper_rose) jeanne (sandlapper_rose) sends to shirley (brittneysgran) **SENT** I had a wonderful morning yesterday! :) I managed to get 150 jiffies sown. It was so wonderful...there definitely is such a thing as 'dirt therapy'. I feel all recharged!! I still have a bunch more to do...but now that its started...I'm on a roll. I'm so sorry about having the last mailing date on a holiday. I was not even thinking that far ahead...just try to mail when you can. :-) Have a great weekend! vina

I sneaked in a little machine quilting this morning with my morning cuppa. I get withdrawal if I don't. LOL. I doubt if I'll tackle it again tonight. This is the Saturday I watch my little g'son for the day. What a pleasure. He is ten months old and has been walking a month now, and very happy and curious. That keeps granny running. I'm in Ohio too, and the forecast looks gruesome for the weekend. We have food, we have heat.......I can nest. If it does come down I 'ain'ta going nowhere, nohow' for a few days. I got caught in a sudden and unexpected white out last weekend and had to abandon my little foreign car and get rescued by my DH in the 4WD and go fetch the car a day later. Not going 'there' again. If it makes you all feel better, I have crops in the g'house for spring already and they're popping they little green heads up. We have poinsettia deliveries all next week. That ought to be good for a laugh as we slide around in the mess. Perhaps they'll revise the forecast. It happens. Yes, I'll try to finish up the log cabin and then sew together the blocks on the design way before I start my wool quilt (I am itching to get it started, but promised myself only one UFO at a time now). I got overwhelmed with them this year.

De-lurking for the subject... I am the mother of 4 kids. Three boys ages 13,9, and 6. And a daughter age 12. I am also the wife of a high school history teacher. Where I live they are taught cursive. Beginning in 3rd grade. They start teaching it in the second semester. Anyhow....I am one that believes a child should write with what they feel most comfortable doing. @Jemdandy, then I guess you would consider my 13 year old son illiterate. That is where you are ignorant of one fact. Not all children can write in cursive. It has to deal with lack of a fine motor skill disability. He prints his name out. And it is false that you do need to know how to write in cursive to sign a legal document. My son is on the honor roll, receives straight A's since 1st grade, yet you would down grade his hiring position just because of that. That is wrong. My 12 year old daughter who is also a honor student and is in 3 advanced classes prefers to print. She says cursive takes way to long. My teacher's never taught me how to write in cursive my parents did. A lot of parents like to blame the school system for not teaching there children certain things. Parents are responsible for there kids education if you don't think they are getting taught the right things...then teach them at home. I do write in cursive. My kids know how to count money. My daughter who is in 7th grade is in 8th grade advanced Math. Next year, when she is in 8th grade she will be bused over to the high school for a math class. I don't think my daughter would be in all the advanced classes she is in now if I hadn't worked with her at home. My sons that are 13 and 9. The older one has a fine motor problems with his hands. He doesn't have to write in cursive and is not made to. Matter of fact, a teacher of his just got 'in trouble' for making him try to write in cursive when it is in his files that he only writes in print only. She actually humiliated my son in her class full of other students. Just because he wasn't writing in cursive. My 9 year old has ADHD and has borderline aspergers however, he still manages C's. And he is in a regular classroom. He is in the 4th grade this year. He also doesn't write in cursive. But he prints. And his printing is the most beautiful I have ever seen. My 6 year old son...is reading at a late 1st grade level. He is in Kindergarten. I actually started him a year later. So I could work with him at home before he went into Kindergarten. His teacher is thrilled with him. Says he helps her, doesn't seem bored and helps the other students when he is done. She said, he is a born leader. I don't think he would be this way if we wouldn't have decided to start him a year later. Learning starts and ends at home. If they aren't learning up to par to is time to talk to the teachers. Teacher's these days are Swamped with students. My sons kindergarten class was up to 31 students before they hired a new teacher. Now there is 19 students. However, there are 7 kindergarten classes at his school. When you have a lot of students to teach. Things do get pushed aside. It is not unusual for kids not to be able to read cursive writing. What surprises me is the amount of 'thing's that kids don't know. Like who The first President of the United States was? Or who Columbus was? It amazes me at the amount that kids do not know. I am always shocked when my husband comes home from school and tells me what his kids don't know. Another thing....My husband was with his students one day...and one of them pipped up and said,"Mr.___ You are pretty cool." My husband asked,"Why do you say that?" They told him that you never say, "You should know this stuff." The kids says that makes them feel stupid....just that little sentence. My husband told them. Thank You, and that he does that because he is suppose to be teaching them....and if they already know it then great...if not you get to learn something new. I thought that was awesome. Oh, Wow! Sorry that is so long!

A BURNT-OUT CASE SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the BahaÂi Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada. The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, "Lamumba," 30 July 2010. All of this got me back into Graham Greene who went to the Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the BahaÂi Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months. Greene wrote that: "Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years...