Sifting The Debris

This is another of my back yard pics. Plain old thistle weed. They say you can eat the stalk like celery if you scrape off the spines. I've never tried it, but maybe this summer I will. I've always foraged wild food for fun, but maybe some of us will resort to it out of necessity.

Several months ago our son Derek agreed to swap bedrooms with us because Marcy was having too much trouble getting upstairs. I coordinated the move with our kids & their friends doing a lot of the grunt work. Our upstairs bedroom's arrangement had been the result of nearly 18 years of Marcy getting it just the way she wanted, which was totally disrupted by us guys clearing it all out, stacking it all wherever was expedient at the moment and then getting Derek's gear in. Lately Marcy & I have finally got around to putting our now-downstairs bedroom into some sort of order. Several bags of her clothes & shoes have gone to the local thrift store. Today we dealt with lots of old pictures, certificates, memorabilia, etc. I still think of her late father a lot. The news today of reviving rail service at Cincinnati's Union Terminal and street cars downtown would have thrilled him.

It was Derek's first day at Lifeskills. When we picked him up after he was not impressed. Sounds like the inmates run the asylum. But he started in the transition lab or some such, where they get assessed and get their bearings. Some will fall out. If anyone knows of a free school, either physical or online, where he can earn high school credit at an accelerated pace please let us know. He wants to get his diploma and move to Finland and attend Sibelius Academy and study music theory & composition. He is pretty damned determined, and I wish I could do more to help him make it happen.