What I learned this summer

Linking up again today with Emily P. Freeman for her What We Learned feature....


1.  You write your own swim number on your arm... with your own marker that you bring from home.

Photo by Angelo Pantazis on Unsplash

I had previously observed that swimmers in the local meets have handwritten numbers on their forearms, denoting their identification and which races they're in.  What I did not realize was that you're responsible for doing that yourself.  And it's BYOSharpie.


At our first swim meet I stood with dismay at the race chart, wondering what to do, when an experienced mom walked straight up to me and knowingly held out a Sharpie, for which I was immensely grateful.


2.  Chickens are kept loose in the chicken house and are gathered by machine.


I was incredulous until I saw evidence in the form of this Youtube video.  I always pictured chickens caged up inside those houses, but apparently they herd around freely in there.  Then they get vacuumed up when it's time to move on to the factory.

3.  You can really fry a phone in a hot car... battery, charging port, speaker, the whole bit.

Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash

This one wins the prize for "most painful lesson" this summer.  I was four days without a phone, which is the same amount of time we were without electricity after the derecho when I was nine months pregnant with my fourth child during a huge heat wave, and missing a phone was worse.

I drove somewhere using GPS and forgot to take my phone from its holder on the dashboard, where it stayed, parked in the sun, for several hours.  It wasn't dead when I returned, exactly... it displayed a message that it needed to cool down before I could use it.  But after that it seemed fine.

Until the next day, when it seemed to lose battery power unusually fast.  And then the next day it wouldn't even charge.  I blamed the old power cord, but Jason's cord didn't work for it either.  I was mystified for a while, honestly.  It seemed to recover so nicely after cooling down.  

Jason took it to techno urgent care and they ordered a new battery.  Then they ordered a new charging port, which I didn't even know was a discrete part.  When they put the two together, I briefly had a working phone again... until I realized it didn't make any kind of sound anymore, ever.  This time Jason went to work on it himself, but, sadly, the patient did not survive the operation.

Being without electricity six summers ago was terribly HOT, nerve-wracking to think of my freezer stocked with casseroles for after the baby came, and inconvenient to eat nothing but peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

But being without a phone was like losing my mind.  It was terribly isolating.  It was a bit humiliating to borrow my 13-year-old's new phone when I was desperate.  I couldn't work, I couldn't talk to anyone outside my house, and I lost my grocery list.  

Note to self:  never forget the phone in the car again, never never.

4.  Our church's security alarm goes off at 11pm.

Photo by Katarzyna Kos on Unsplash

Fortunately, I did not have to experience this firsthand, other than getting shooed out at 10:50 with dire warnings of it the night before Vacation Bible School started.  

We had started VBS work that morning around 11, organizing all staff to set up the building, and then staying after set-up to do buckets of administrative prep.  It went later and later, alphabetizing got harder and harder (someone finally wrote out the alphabet at the front of the room to stop the incessantly murmured alphabet song from every corner), take-out dinner was delivered and taken away, name tags were stuffed into plastic holders and color-coordinated, zillions of papers were printed and sorted... 11:00 loomed and we still weren't ready for hundreds of families to drop off their precious littles the next morning.

But the 11:00 alarm warning and visions of the police arriving to question us all drove us homeward.  I didn't quite make it back to church at 6, as some did, but I wasn't that far behind.  

No alarms sounded, no children lost or miscategorized for long, and Jesus preached.  All good and well.

What did you learn this summer?