The days are long and the years are short

The headline on a recent local paper, "County's minorities are now the majority". It says (based on census data? since all the comparisons are done to 2000?) that minorities make up 50.7% of the population. The greatest percentage *increases* are in Hispanic and Asian populations; the greatest absolute number of minorities is in the black population.

Just as an observation, I'm seeing more and more Asian kindergarten students with younger siblings. More than I saw two years ago.

The lunchroom has rotated some of the tables, which allows me to see more students at once. There are definitely students of just about every shade of skin tone in the lunchroom. However, with the long winter, some who would normally look more brown are looking more gray. It might also be the lighting in the lunchroom or the clothes colors they are wearing.

I sat behind a family at church on Ash Wednesday that were more Native American-looking than Hispanic, although they spoke Spanish.

Chips Olé again. Oh the smell!

Since it is Earth Day, the school tried an expanded recycling program for lunch-related trash. So the kindergarten children had to ask to figure out where their trash went. There was a speech about it, but ... it was a lot of information.

It will be tried again next Wednesday. I hope it will go a bit smoother with the memory of how it was to be done today in their minds. The older grades did better.

It has now been 4 hours since I left the lunch room. I can still smell the lunch of the day (Chips Olé) on my clothes. Oh my. Those poor, poor children. The clothes just stink from the wafts from the ovens cooking reheating them.

And they have grape icies. Yuck. The worst part is if you actually save them for last, they melt and are harder and more dangerous to open. Fortunately most little kids will (ask us to) open them and eat them first thing, even if they are dessert. I did manage to drip one down the hair of a second-grader. Yeah, she was NOT happy.