Making the good-bye card was a hard job.
Hallie had to erase
and start again many times.
Even so, the letters were never perfect.
                                      from: Hallie’s Horrible Handwriting
                                                 written by Valerie Tripp
                                                   illustrated by Joy Allen
                                   Pleasant Company Publications, 2003

    The first word I learned to write (as opposed to print) was “it.”  I can still see itititit on line after line after line. We were taught to produce slightly right-slanted letters, to connect the up-strokes and down-strokes, and to evenly space the letters and words. We used horizontally oriented newsprint paper marked off for us with upper and lower guidelines and a dotted line between them. I usually got an A in handwriting. 
    For a while, not too long ago, cursive writing went out of favor in schools. Kids went straight from printing to keyboarding. Seemed like it would be more useful, but research proved that handwriting is more important than people thought and now 21 states require it as part of their curriculum again. Even states that do not mandate teaching cursive, allow it. Here’s a site with state by state requirements: https://mycursive.com/the-14-states-that-require-cursive-writing-state-by-state/#tab-con-11  
    While that controversy raged, I wondered how children would learn to sign their names. And how to read signatures of others. Handwriting is personal. My husband’s handwriting is almost as familiar to me as my own. I can see my mom’s handwriting in my mind’s eye. My dad’s too. I have recipes in my mom’s hand, my grandmother’s, and my mother-in-law’s. They have become precious to me.
    Did you celebrate National Handwriting Day last weekend? I did! January 23 is John Hancock’s birthday and WIMA (Writing Instrument Manufacturing Association http://www.pencilsandpens.org/handwriting.php) sponcers a celebration. A page on their website tells the history of handwriting. Another one explains its importance.
    While writing on a keyboard, like I’m doing right now, uses muscle memory, “[h]andwriting is a complex, cognitive process that involves neuro-sensory experiences and fine motor skills.” https://www.pens.com/blog/the-benefits-of-handwriting-vs-typing/  Several things work together in a writing experience including: feeling the paper against your pen; applying just enough pressure to make the ink flow; and engaging in the thought process to form the words.
    A 2012 study published by the National Institutes of Health shows handwriting is an important factor children need as they learn to read. The ability to recognize individual letters, a crucial skill necessary for reading, is enhanced by writing those letters. Speed and accuracy in recognizing and naming letters is a good predictor for the development of reading skills. And, the study continues, the parts of our brains we use for reading are more active after we practice handwriting. This is not true for typewriting. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/ 
    And each person’s handwriting style is unique.
    Graphology is the scientific study of handwriting. Discovering personality traits is its goal and forensic graphologists work to determine connections between the way a person writes and his or her personality. Taking a huge number of factors into account, graphologists can pinpoint over 5,000 personality traits. How much pressure you use, how big your letters are, how they are spaced, where you cross your ts and dot your is, if you write uphill or down, how you slant your letters, and how legible your writing is are some features taken into consideration. 
    Jung and Freud concluded that handwriting is a window to both the conscious and subconscious mind. Crime labs hire graphologists to help them gage whether a suspect is telling the truth, how much stress a person is feeling, how secretive or open he or she generally is. While crimes are not often solved by a graphologist alone, the analysis can point criminologists in the right direction. According to  Andrea McNichol “…much of the preliminary examination of handwriting is guided by common sense. Look for the abnormalities, and make educated guesses as to what they mean.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199211/the-lowdown-handwriting-analysis 
    Your signature represents the you you show the world even if it is different from the you in your private thoughts.
    Legend has it that when asked why he signed his name so large, John Hancock replied, so the “fat old King could read it without his spectacles.” In those days there was no greater treason than declaring independence from the King. 
    John Hancock lived a gregarious life. He liked being noticed, and his signature is consistent with that. His writing slopes upward, indicating that he liked drama in his life, a handwriting trait also consistent with his personality. 
    Whether or not you put stock in someone’s ability to learn about you through the marks you make on a page, by taking a deeper dive into the subject you might discover something new about yourself. The library has several books on graphology and the Internet is full of articles and quizzes. Choose wisely!
    I wonder if I practice some traits I like and change my handwriting, a personality change would follow. A blogger called GraphologyJunction says I can. 
    On second thought, I think I’m just fine the way I am!
                      -—stay curious! (and write a letter to a friend)     

[That] day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether or not they had one upon thars.
                              from: The Sneetches and Other Stories
                                    written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss
                                                       Random House, 1961
                                            accessed on YouTube 1/17/21
    I won first place for some lyrics I wrote back in college. A few years ago you might remember, I won third place for the challah I entered in our county fair, but that’s it. I won a ribbon at the Fair, not a metal medal. I was happy to accept it and the $3.00 prize that went along with it. (I don’t think prize money covered the cost of the ingredients, but I’d have to get back to you on that.) I guess part of the reason I don’t win much is I’m not too big on entering contests.
    Lots of medals and awards are presented for many reasons. The Olympics and other sporting events like the Super Bowl and World Series, music awards including the Grammys, entertainment accolades like Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys, and Military honors like the Silver Star and the Purple Heart, and the Nobel Prizes, as well as the Newbery, Caldecott, and Pulitzer are just some off the top of my head.
    The Presidential Medal of Freedom is our country’s highest civilian award.
    In 1963, President Kennedy revamped the Medal of Freedom, first issued by President Truman to honor “...any person ...who, on or after December 7, 1941, has performed a meritorious act or service which has aided the United States in the prosecution of a war against an enemy or enemies...(or) has similarly aided any nation engaged with the United States in the prosecution of a war against a common enemy or enemies.” (Executive Order 9586) https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=pol_fac_pub 
    Kennedy broadened the scope to include a person’s “…especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” (Executive Order 11085. See above citation.) The award is given at the president’s discretion.
    Awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a presidential duty. No one else bestows that award. Here’s a list of President Obama’s recipients. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/campaign/medal-of-freedom Other presidents awarded the prize, too. The list is very long (well over 630) and includes in no particular order Steven Spielberg, Mother Teresa, Neil Armstrong, Jonas Salk, Martin Luther King, Stephen Hawking, Toni Morrison, Marian Anderson, E. B. White, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. 
    During last year’s State of the Union address, Rush Limbaugh, yep, the right wing radio personality who coined the term “feminazi,” accepted this highest civilian honor from, starting tomorrow (January 20, 2021) at noon, the former president.
    Last week, Bill Belichick declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 
    While I won’t dispute whether or not he deserved it (I really know beans about football, but I just found out he won six Super Bowls in the last ten years, so that’s something), fact is, he declined the honor and the medal that went with it. 
    The “tragic events of last week,” when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol Building, led Belichick to his decision. He went on to say, “I was flattered … out of respect for what the honor represents… Above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation's values, freedom and democracy.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/politics/bill-belichick-presidential-medal-of-freedom-spt-trnd/index.html  
    His refusal puts him in company with very few people. My search found three. 
    Dodgers catcher, Moe Berg, was fluent in many languages including German, Italian, and Japanese. During WWII he was a spy for the United States trying to find out if the Nazis were building an atom bomb. He declined the medal claiming his “‘humble contribution’” to WWII could not be divulged.”
    Jacqueline Kennedy declined when President Johnson offered it to her in conjunction with President Kennedy since she worked with him to establish the design of the medal and its new parameters. She wanted to make her husband, recently deceased, the “focal point of the honor.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/medal-of-freedom-declined.html and
    https://www.oregonlive.com/trending/2021/01/who-has-turned-down-presidential-medal-of-freedom-question-brings-surprising-answers-including-jackie-kennedy.html 
    Bill Belichick, well, we already know about that. 
    That’s it. Three. 
    While not wanting to appear judgmental, I disagree with this previous (I know, as of tomorrow) administration’s selection of honorees. I try to avoid quoting from Wikipedia, but this list of medal winners from the Kennedy administration forward looks pretty good. Scroll all the way to the bottom to find Trump’s list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom_recipients 
    Winning is important. Being recognized for outstanding achievement is also important. Having the mettle to decline a medal, metal or otherwise, is possibly most important of all.
*mettle: the courage to carry on especially when the going gets tough https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/mettle
             
         --stay curious! (and get vaccinated as soon as you can)

    “Okay, listen. To stay in synch with the Earth’s rotation, sometimes they have to fiddle with how we keep time. So this August, we get a free extra second of future. Think about it. It’s a colossal gift. Nell, we can’t waste it. We need to catch that special second and make it officially ours.”
                                             from: Every Single Second
                                                    by Tricia Springstubb
                                            illustrations by Diana Sudyka
                                     Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 2016
    Since Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, and probably earlier than that, people have been measuring time. From grains of sand falling through an hourglass to the precision of a Swiss watch, we mark the momentous occasions and trivial pursuits of our lives by noting seconds, minutes, and hours. 
    Being more and more precise about time measurement has been a goal for many scientists. The first atomic clock was invented in 1949 by Isidor Rabi, a physics professor at Columbia University. He showed that measuring the vibrations of an ammonia molecule would produce an accurate measurement of time. His discovery has been improved on through the years, and since 1999, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), uses an atomic clock that measures the frequency of the element cesium. The clock is accurate to about one second in 100 million years. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/how-do-atomic-clocks-work.html 
    But as the saying goes, time is relative. When I asked about that, my mom described her understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity. If you touch a lit match, a second seems like it will never end. But, when you watch a sunset, minutes pass without giving time a thought. I’m sure there’s lots more to it, but that definition worked for me. Actually, it still does.
    And ten years into the future always seems longer than ten years ago. When I wonder where I’ll be in ten years (assuming I’m still alive!) it kinda seems like forever from now, but looking back at the last ten feels like a blink. So in my mind, time is fluid.     
    Turns out, time really is kinda fluid. While it takes our Earth 24 hours to rotate on its axis as we orbit the sun causing day and night, that varies from day to day. OK, only by a fraction of a second, but scientists around the world have noticed that Earth instead of trending slower, has been spinning faster lately, faster, in fact, that ever before. 
    Up until now, one complete rotation has taken a little longer than 24 hours (about 86,400.002 instead of 24 hours x 3,600 = 86,400). Twenty-seven seconds have been added to our clocks since 1972, about 1 second every year and a half.    
    Called a leap second, it is added periodically, either on December 31, or June 30, to keep our clocks synchronized with the time it takes for Earth to complete one rotation on its axis. The last one was added on December 31, 2016. Here’s a chart: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/leapseconds.html     
    Earth’s 28 fastest days since 1960, all occurred in 2020. https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/01/earth-is-spinning-its-fastest-in-decades-heres-how-scientists-are-addressing-the-issue.html Scientists have discovered many reasons for the fluctuation, including the pull of the moon, snowfall levels, and mountain erosion. As the snow caps and high-altitude snow continues to melt, some planetary scientists wonder how much of an impact global warming will have on Earth’s spin. 
    The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth. It is made of 30 million cubic kilometers of ice: about 30 quadrillion tons of material. It’s located between 8000 and 9000 feet (2400-2700 meters) above sea level. Every time some of that ice melts or calves into the ocean, it not only causes sea levels to rise, it redistributes Earth’s mass so that it’s closer to the central rotational axis. And just as a figure skater can control her rate of spin by raising and lowering her arms, fluctuations in Earth’s rate of spin change according to how much mass is located closer to Earth’s center of gravity. So the changes in ice and water storage on Earth may be responsible for both the current speed-up in Earth’s day, as well as newly observed wobbles in Earth’s rotation. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/01/07/why-does-the-spinning-earth-speed-up-if-the-tides-are-slowing-us-down/?sh=7c851f0b343e 
    A leap second was scheduled for December 2020, but was not added. If the speed-up continues, some scientists predict we may need a negative leap second.
    So while 2020 seemed like the longest year ever, it was anticipation that made it feel that way. Waiting for an end to the pandemic, the end to a political crisis, the end to this non-normal lifestyle, I didn’t notice Earth moving a little quicker than usual, skipping almost a whole second. 
    I guess time really is relative.
    Mom taught me to live in the moment. We can’t change the past. We can only plan and hope for the future. It is here, right now, this moment that is always becoming the past, that is meaningful. We are allowed a finite number of seconds to live on Earth. We don’t know how many. We may even get an extra one now and then. 
    Do, contemplate, relax. Most important, though? Pay attention to as much as you can.
                                             -—stay curious! (and aware)

“Help!” cried Toad.
“My list is blowing away.
What will I do without my list?”
            …
“I cannot remember any of the things
that were on my list of things to do.
I will just have to sit here 
and do nothing,” said Toad.
                             from “A List” in Frog and Toad Together
                                written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel
                                         Harper & Row Publishers, 1972
                                                    Newbery Honor, 1973
                                                accessed YouTube 1/3/21

    Orderliness is my 2021 word of the year. I’m feeling optimistic, but I’ve felt that way before. Lists are helpful. My grocery list, on paper or in my head, is organized either by grocery aisles or alphabetically, depending on how many items I need to remember. My to-do list is usually better off in alphabetical order. When I organize it in the chronological way I’d like to accomplish the activities, very often it doesn’t work out well. I tend to write my errand lists from farthest point to the place closest to home. List making is a chore, but one that I enjoy.
    My mom and my dad were not really opposites in the organizing realm, although they looked like it. Mom was a minimalist. A place for everything, and everything in its place was her mantra. Dad, well, he liked his stuff. He had collections: stamps, newspaper articles (mostly about stamps), old envelopes (waiting for their stamps to be soaked off). But he was methodical. His stacks of stuff, while plentiful and difficult to dust around, had plan and purpose. He could put his finger on anything you asked him for at a moment’s notice. 
    A few years ago, the Huffington Post ran an article called “14 Habits From Organized People That We ALL Should Borrow” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/habits-of-organized-peopl_n_4921454 While not really habits, these qualities are still relevant and important. Here’s my take on them. (I divided “list makers” and “sorters” to end up with 15.)
    Goal oriented. They know what they want. They plan how to get it.
    Optimistic. They believe the world is mostly working the way it should.
    Conscientious. They have a “can-do-ness” about themselves and prefer plans to spontaneity.
    Decision-makers. They’re good at prioritizing and keeping the big-picture in mind.
    Not perfectionists. Good enough is really good enough.
    List makers. Whether written on a calendar, other dedicated space, or kept in their heads, organized people seldom forget an important task.            
    List checkers. They really do the things on their prioritized lists and check them off.
    Sorters. Like with like is the way organized people keep everything in its place. Knowing where to find things is a real time-saver.
    Do-it-now attitude. If a task takes fewer than five minutes, an organized person will get it out of the way. Procrastination, when it happens, is sometimes inevitable.
    Planners. They like to leave a time cushion big enough so that if something else comes up, it will work into their schedule. (see above)
    Not afraid to ask for help. They think about time as a resource with value, and effectively allocate tasks among others so everyone can work efficiently.  
    Uni-taskers. Multi-tasking is a myth. Really. We think we’re doing more than one thing at a time, but that’s a trick our brains play. Actually we flip nano-second by nano-second from one task to another, taking our attention away from both. (see post from 1/1/2019)
    Tuned-in to their biorhythms. Knowing the optimal time for getting a particular task done increases productivity.
    Habit formers. Habits are important. Doing something without having to think about it is a real time-saver, even though it can be a creativity stifler. 
    Know how to de-stress. Practicing yoga, meditation, visiting a counselor, or escaping into a good book, organized people know when and how to “get away from it all.” 
    
    This is a long list. While some of those qualities are already habits, I found a couple points to keep in mind as 2021 marches on. I hope you did, too.
    But, lest you think all I do is make lists, please know, I also keep my spices alphabetically arranged. (I keep a running list of those little jars that have mysteriously multiplied, too, so I don’t replace dried basil or marjoram two weeks in a row.)  I have my socks separated into winter weight and summer shorties, seasonally rotated because my drawer is pretty small. My bookcases are arranged by subject, then by author, just like at the library. 
    And, while I’m prone to procrastination and diving into rabbit holes, I like to think of myself as organized when I need to be, mostly because I don’t like to waste time looking for stuff.    
    Science has shown that people who live in messy, cluttered spaces are less able to concentrate and focus. When distractions abound, our minds tend to wander. While this may be a good way to get the creative juices flowing, it really can hamper our ability to be productive.
    Is habit really the opposite of creativity? I don’t think so. My habits allow my brain the space it needs to be creative. Now, where did I put my pencil? 
                              -—stay curious! (and sort a junk drawer!)