Gratitude X 2

Holly pointed out last Friday or Saturday that I had missed doing a Wednesday gratitude post. I knew I had. I had known what I wanted to post about, but other things came alone. I told her I'd do it, and I thanked her. She reminded me again a couple of days later. So it's Wednesday again, but it's easy to be grateful for ten things. I'd be grateful if I hadn't procrastinated, but... (how to turn that around?) I'm grateful no one was harmed by my procrastination.

In the first half of the year I was worried, because Keith was worried, about money and my continued employment as a rarely-paid unschooling missionary, and I mentioned it somewhere, about the cost of my website, and some very nice people contributed. I wanted to thank them and couldn't figure out how to do it without seeming like a further and continuing begger (or heavy-hinter), and I thought about maybe setting up a thank you place on my main page with contributors' names. But on what kinds of pieces of art? They do bricks and tiles at the zoo and the museum here. They do chairs in some theatres. Park benches, but that's mostly for the deceased. And webpages don't tend to have chairs or benches, and thanks to The WhoPink Floyd, nobody wants to be another brick in the wall, not around unschooling. Flowers? Like the grocery store windows when people donate to cures for diseases the government is not at war with? Ah, sheesh.... the time passed and then it was too late to do something current and cool. And the real everyday maintenance and growth of the site seemed more important than stopping to thank financial contributors, and that made me an ingrateful bum.

#1 Shell in NZ (which isn't her real name) paid for a month of SandraDodd.com in March 2008. She has a blog called Unschoolers Anonymous, and three happy children, one of whom seemed happy to paint himself blue recently. Perhaps he's already been informed that there's a future in that.


Thanks again, Shell, and thanks for being such a good error spotter!

#2 Someone in Europe who wishes to remain anonymous very kindly sent me enough to pay for a month of website fees, and I would rather say thanks to a name, but thank you anyway, anonymous donor! It's a good thing to know that even people who want to be quietly invisible do read and benefit from my collection.

#3 Schuyler Waynforth contributed $11 to further my missionary position (ah yeah, just saw "The Ladies Man"—sorry), but Schuyler... I'm always grateful for Schuyler, whose words and clarity go way beyond money and the site is full of her writings! Thirty-one quotes today, and I keep adding more.

#4 Jacki Knouse who has written well and happily over the years on unschooling discussions paid for two months' worth of ever-growing unschooling web exposure, and so for that I'll tell you why her posts always say Gold Standard. It's because she runs Gold Standard Board Preparations Systems, with products to help people get great scores in the USMLE and COMLEX! And I guess if you don't know what those are, you didn't need to know, but if you do know then here. She's never said, but when I got a Pay Pal payment I followed her back to her business nest. I'm sorry I didn't think of a smooth, artsy way to thank my donors sooner.

#5 For positive feedback, which I collect in a box on the shelf near my computer, and which is quoted in brief snippets here: sandradodd.com/feedback

So that's my last-week's gratitude list. Here's this week's:

#1 I'm grateful for groceries. I'm glad Keith kinda likes Costco and will go hunting there for us sometimes, and that the people who used this house before us turned the coat closet into a pantry, because we need that for grain storage (sort of, y'know...) I'm glad we're easy walking distance, out the back gate, of a grocery store and that Marty and Holly are willing to walk with me up there sometimes. Each has done so in the past week. Very sweet.

#2 I'm glad the article on how my kids learned math was accepted by unerzogen Magazin, a German parenting magazine. When I didn't hear from the editor for a long time I thought maybe they hadn't liked the article. I was prepared to just stick it at SandraDodd.com, but then I got e-mail yesterday that said "Ich haben found the time to thank you yet. Tahnk you!!! Your article is wonderful :-) We are translating it - a friend is and she has a few questions. I gave her your adress to contact you. The rest is fine, I might come back to you about the fotos. For now everything is great." I was relieved and happy.

#3 I'm glad that unerzogen Magazin gave me permission to mount up the article they published by Kelly Lovejoy. I haven't done it yet, but I want to. And they interviewed Joyce Fetteroll. So I can lift that one onto my site and link it from the Joyce page. They're PDFs. I'll announce them at aboutunschooling.blogspot.com when they're up and ready.

#4 I'm grateful that the Certificate of Empowerment has been translated into French, and I was notified of that in the same early-yesterday e-mail session in which I learned the math article was a go. It's here: http://blog.korrigans.free.fr/index.php/2008/11/18/certificat-dautonomisation/. The word "empowerment" isn't in the text, it's just what I had entitled the document, and it's on the originals (which I used to distribute when I spoke, all printed out frameably, and hand-signed). But that doesn't translate, and so it is called (in the title of the blog post) something having to do with "autonomy." That is not my favorite of words or concepts, and I need to process my thoughts about that, which I'll probably do on the Always Learning list, but I'm going to be out of town for 20 hours on Thursday and so I'm stalling about starting that. And the link above has a clear note about why the translator made the choice she made, so that's very cool.

But #2 and #4 combined to make me feel grateful that my words will help some people in France and Germany, not just this season, but maybe years down the line when someone finds a webpage or a printout or an old magazine. That might not be immortality, but at least it increases the effects of my life geographically and temporally.

#5 I'm grateful that I was able to come up with this on short notice yesterday:



I wanted to send it to help clarify something I wrote for the German translator. She was impressed I had it and could get it to her so quickly. "Thank you a lot for the effort to scan it for me! (Amazing that you keep these things and, moreover, can find them if necessary.)"

That gratitude involves being glad I'm a packrat, and a relatively organized one, and that I have a scanner and am not afraid to use it. (Here's some of my more creative scanner stuff: SandraDodd.com/scannerart.)

After next Wednesday, I can stop being grateful. y'think!?