What I learned in February

This is just a short break from even more vacation pictures and stories  that I’m going to share over the next couple of days to document what I learned this month.

• Bamboo can grow up to six inches in a single day.  Phenomenal.
• I learned more than I ever thought possible about Margaret Phelon Taylor and the W.A.S.P.  from editing YaYa’s history day project.  She designed a website to document the influence women pilots like Margaret during World War II had on the inclusion of women in the Air Force.  It was a huge undertaking that YaYa spent hours and hours (at least 40 hours for sure) getting everything just right.  She had a long list of sources for her bibliography, and the website included maps, videos, quotes, photographs and all sorts of great multimedia.  When YaYa gets passionate about a topic, she steams ahead full fledge.  It’s always something to behold.
• I sort of learned how to swim in the ocean, and how to operate a snorkel mask. 
• Sea turtles often get a virus that causes nasty white tumors to develop on their skin.
• A whole church coming together to purchase more than a ton of food for a local food shelf can have a big impact.  Our entire church went shopping together at the same time.  The grocery stores knew in advance that we were all coming at once, but the checkout guy who rang up the cartload of food that the kidlets and I were purchasing could hardly believe it.  Every full cart he rang up for nearly for hours straight was getting donated to the food shelf.  Every checker was doing the same thing at two different stores.  He was pretty astounded.   It really did end up being A LOT of food, way more food than any of us really envisioned, and especially more food than the food shelf anticipated.
• Ripe, fresh Papaya is amazing!  I also learned that I like exotic fruits like rambutan and soursop.
• I learned to play 10 simple (but not so simple for me) songs on my cello.  In addition I learned about how to find fourth position and play a two octave G scale and a two octave C scale.  I’m still determined to become proficient at this instrument.  I figure it will take 12 years at this rate.  (No joke).  Still, I’m not going to give up!