Lee.org

Can you help me find a platform to deliver confidential recorded videos to the students of my school? We have some 20 therapists looking for the right platform.

Here are some things we are considering in a system:
– The ability to deliver videos privately from one therapist to one family
– The ability to make videos available for use by any of our district therapists for use by any student family
– Videos should not be downloadable or shareable outside of the intended recipients
– Honor student privacy as per IEP rules
– Very basic video editing would be nice: cut and paste, stitching 2 videos together
– We are currently NOT planning on delivering live telehealth services.

I’ve been playing with our School license of Google Hangouts but I’m not sure it will work for us.
Thanks!

It took a couple months to internetify this…

Our Winter Break in December 2019 was just wonderful. Here’s our happy-winter-break-blog!

What a wonderful and relaxing winter break it has been!

December 20th: Megan and Abigail made it to Little Farm to play with the animals. Later we all made it to the Tilden Merry-Go-Round with Vivi, Silvi, and Margot

21st: We made it to another wonderful performance of A Year With Frog and Toad, a fantastic kids musical!

22nd: Abigail and Megan went to make cookies with Caitlin and Ameilia. They had a wonderful time making sugar roll out cookies and chocolate roll out cookies. Made many shapes and decorated them. Abigail went to a 3-hour crafting class at our good friend SarahJane’s store, Bay-Made in Oakland.

24th: we had Christmas lunch at Penelope’s nursing home. Caitlin, Jeff, Amelia, Megan, Abigail, and Lee were there. Chaparral House had a fine buffet with turkey and fixings. After, Amelia and Abigail played in the nearby playground for a good while.

25th: We spent almost all of Christmas day opening presents! It was a leisurely affair. Most of the presents (rightfully so) were for Abigail. Megan cooked the famous Flom Cheesy Souffle that she had started the night before. After receiving the unexpected “gift” of lice from Abigail’s school, we spent much of the day cleaning house and shampooing; in many ways, it was pleasantly cleaning.

On the 26th, we went up to Gail and Walt’s in Santa Rosa. Presents, homemade tamales, cake, cookies, fun on the big backyard tree-swing!

27th: Megan went to the Kabuki Spa in San Francisco while Lee and Abigail stayed home and played with our neighbor Ana at the park.

28th (oop, we forgot to write it down!)

29th Megan and Abigail visited Grandma at Chaparral House. While there, Megan discovered Abigail had more lice! so we went home and deloused our hair and house again! Delousing made us miss Nathaniel’s birthday party. We also had plans to see Charlotte at Picante but she had food poisoning! So the day ended up being house cleaning and head cleaning instead of going out for fun :-) / :-(

30th We went to Ikea on a hint and Lee was ecstatic to finally find food storage containers that all fit together, then off to Costco, then for Vietnamese Sandwiches, the library. Then Megan and Abail were off to the Berkeley Marina for some fun while Lee chillaxed at home. Nice!

31st We went to the Lawrence Hall of Science for the New year’s noon confetti drop. We went with Abigail’s good friend Leia and her mom, Rachel. We ended up spending 4 hrs at LHS, exploring, creating, meeting a Ball Python snake, playing in the water outside, and eating a nice lunch with popsicles! Megan made salmon and asparagus for dinner. After Abigail fell asleep, Megan and Lee watched the ball drop in NYC (at 9pm). After some struggling, they were able to open a tiny bottle of Proseco to celebrate, which they drank from Penelope’s Waterford crystal glasses.

Jan 1st – Hung out at home until Nataliah (babysitter) came over. Megan visited her mom and then Lee met Megan at a games party being hosted by Peter and Mary in Oakland. There, they played games and chatted with folks for a few hours. Upon arriving home. It was discovered that Abigail and Nataliah had made a giant cardboard foosball table!

Jan 2nd – Hung out in the morning, playing at home. Then, Ruth, Megan’s psych intern from Mill Valley came by for a signature and stayed to chat for a while. Then, we all went out to run errands. We first went to Past Time Hardware for stuff to hang pictures/art and a new lightbulb for the kitchen. Then, we went to Solano Ave where we had ice cream first and then chose new calendars at Pegasus Books. Last stop was swinging by Fern’s Garden so Abigail could tell Fern (the owner) that her wish had come true. (Just prior to Christmas, Abigail had made a wish in the store — by throwing a small stone into a sandy tub. She had wished for more stuffies for X-mas and she had gotten 3 new stuffies! Fern let Abigail make a new wish :-) As we were on our way to another errand, Charlotte called to say she was at our old apartment and was available to hang out. Since we were close by, we drove over to meet Charlotte and Rick. We all drove over to King Park, where Abigail played and the adults chatted.

Jan 3rd — Abigail came into our bedroom around 6am and said that she had wet her bed. After getting her cleaned up, she crawled into bed with us and snuggled until about 7am. Meg and Abigail got up together and hung out on the couch. Lee took Abigail to Dr Takao for a flu shot and then played at a nearby park (in Orinda) and then went out to sushi lunch together. While they were away, Megan organized several rooms in the house. For the afternoon, Megan spent much of the time in the kitchen. She made tuna casserole, molasses cookies with brown butter icing, and Chex Mix. Abigail and Lee had a craft competition, and every few minutes Abigail would stand up and yell “Makers, you have 9 hours left!” to count down the time until the judging. Dinner was amazing! And so were the cookies!

Jan 4th – Abigail woke us up around 7:45am — we all slept in! Then, Megan and Abigail made a Christmas tree out of pipe cleaners, from a kit received from Zeke. Mom did one last lice treatment while Lee and Abigail had bfast together. Then Abigail got a treatment. Haircut for Abigail, then lunch at Saul’s with Caitlin & Amelia. Play at a park.

Jan 5th – Lee and Abigail went to a birthday day party for Carter (from school) at bowling alley, then Megan and Abigail went over to Juniper’s house for a playdate. Lee stayed home and worked on Abigail’s legal name change (it’s way easier to decide on your daughter’s name before you leave the hospital!)

Wow, what a Winter Break!

The 5 stages of grief^H^H^H^H^H pandemic:
1- panic buying toilet paper
2- spending a trillion dollars on your staycation
3 – panic buying flour, yeast, butter, & eggs
4 – baking bread
5- acceptance

Today I ate the best sourdough I’ve ever had, and it came out of my own oven, from sourdough I cultivated from outside my back porch! It’s a REAL San Francisco Sourdough!

Crusty (but not too crusty!) crust, moist, supple interior, a perfect “tear it in your mouth” crumb, and the sourdough flavor was… indescribable! Dare I say that it tastes more “healthful” than other breads I’ve made and had!

Instructions:

Briefly:

Make a wet dough with flour, water, salt, and sourdough starter. Let it rise 14 hours-ish, cook hot (475… 500) for 50 minutes with a pan of hot water in the oven.

Detailed:

Make sourdough starter, I started with this recipe from King Arthur Flour. What I actually did was: in a mason jar, mix about 3 parts flour, 2 parts water and stir it til it’s all wet. Leave it on the back porch for a couple hours to catch yeasties. Cover it and let it sit in a consistent temperatured, warm part of the house (my kitchen counter). Each day, pour off 1/2 the mixture and add more flour & water. Do this every day for 7 days. Done!

To make the bread:
Put in a big bowl 3 cups water, 1 1/2 cups water, a big o’ gloop of sourdough starter (maybe 1/2 a cup?). Mix with a stick until it’s a big gloopy mess (about 30 seconds?) Cover and let sit for an hour. Pour in 1 1/2 tbsp salt and mix with the stick for 30 seconds. Cover and let sit overnight (I left it from 5pm to 10am.

Preheat oven to 500 (all the better to brown your crust, my dear!). Using sprinklings of flour to keep things from being too gloopy and sticky, shape the dough into… I don’t know… a shape!

Put a pan of hot water in the oven (I’m still not convinced it helps but hey). Cook at 500 for 20 minutes, 425 for 30 minutes, oven off for 20 minutes (I could have left it in for another few minutes but it was coming on lunchtime!)

Followup:

One remarkable thing is that after eating it, I don’t feel that slightly addiction-y feeling of NEEDing another slice of it. I’m guessing the yeast have done their job so well that I’m eating more yeast and less of all the other stuff that’s in wheat.

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Yesterday afternoon I was in the middle of trying to make this bread and I became SOOOO frustrated! I had looked up all kinds of recipes for sourdough… trying to get the percentages of ingredients right, the time and temperature, the kneeding schedule. And I was literally at my wits end! I gave up. All I knew was that some people do a long rise (Hi Jen! Sarah!) and all these recipes had these elaborate strategies for making perfect bread. (try googling “sourdough bread percentages”, or “best sourdough bread”). I had watched a video the other night from Pro Home Cooks called 15 Mistakes Most Beginner Sourdough Bakers Make and while I was watching it, I was thinking how beautiful and rewarding artisanal bread was. The moment I turned off the video and thought about applying the hundred or so bread-making tips he offered, I knew in my heart that I could never make good bread at home. Never. I knew that it was important, nay, essential that I forget everything he said. I knew I had to just bake. And it worked!

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It was wonderful hearing Megan and Abigail chime in with oo’s and ah’s as they ate it!

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I was really into bread a few years ago. So much so that I taught bread making classes all over! It was a blast! I stick by my original philosophy of making bread easily (but wow, it’s easy to forget when you watch enough Youtube videos of people making bread!)

Here is the cheat-sheet I made for my class. It’s a terrific primer on bread making: Real Bread in 10 Minutes Cheat Sheet

Here is the Intertek report about the Molekule air filter
molekule-third-party-Intertek-test-report-vocs

We just paid off our 6 year car loan. Hurray!