MSI Press Blog

  They say 65 is the geriatric threshold. I say: thresholds are for doorways, not identities. I didn’t suddenly become fragile when Medicare kicked in. Yes, I have osteopenia—thanks in part to years of “normal” omeprazole doses before anyone warned me it was quietly eating my bones. But I still climb ladders, carry cats, and troubleshoot household systems faster than most twenty-somethings. My bone scan may whisper caution, but my life shouts resilience. So, if “geriatric” means I qualify for discounts and confuse algorithms—fine. But don’t expect me to sit still, wear beige, or fade quietly. This Ninja has decades of stealth left—and a few choice words for the formulary. Grandma’s Ninja Training Diary  is the inspiring true story of a septuagenarian grandmother who dares to dream big—by training for  American Ninja Warrior . Teaming up with coach and trainer Brittany Renz, she embarks on a three-year journey to build strength, resilience, flexibility, balance, and end...

  Today's publisher's pride is  Super Spunky Grandmas and Other Amusing Stuff  by Ken Mogren, which reached #94 on Amazon in the category of limericks and humorous verse. Description A follow-up to highly acclaimed  Spunky Grandmas..and Other Amusing Characters ,  Super Spunky Grandmas...and Other Amusing Stuff  features many of the same type of clever stories about comical human behavior that entertained readers of Mogren's earlier work. It adds dozens of amusing, tongue-in-cheek observations about human nature and the world we live in, all written in sonnet form. Illustrator, Joella Goyette, is back with cartoonish drawings that introduce the themes of each of the book's 13 chapters. Keywords Funny short stories,  Humorous character sketches,  Comic poetry book,  Mini stories in sonnet form,  Illustrated humor book,  Books about quirky characters,  Funny grandma stories,  Ken Mogren humor writing,  Funny grandma boo...

Every January, while the world is busy making resolutions it may or may not keep, something quieter and more durable unfolds in the background: National Mentoring Month . It’s a month dedicated not to reinvention, but to relationship — to the slow, steady work of showing up for another human being. Mentoring rarely looks glamorous. It’s not a movie montage of breakthroughs and tidy life lessons. More often, it’s a series of small, ordinary choices: listening when you’re tired, asking one more question, offering a story from your own life that you hope lands gently. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t trend, but it transforms. What I love about National Mentoring Month is that it doesn’t pretend mentoring is effortless. Instead, it honors the people who keep doing it anyway — the teachers, coaches, neighbors, aunties, uncles, faith leaders, coworkers, and community elders who invest in someone else’s becoming. It also reminds us that mentoring isn’t a one-directional act of charity. It’s...

  The consensus across ILR documentation, second‑language acquisition research, and government training notes is that between ILR 3 (“Professional Working Proficiency”) and ILR 4 (“Full Professional Proficiency”), interlanguage doesn’t disappear, but it changes character: errors become rarer, more subtle, more stylistic , and increasingly tied to register, discourse norms, and sociolinguistic expectations, not grammar or vocabulary gaps. 🌱 What Happens to Interlanguage Between ILR 3 and ILR 4? 1. The Big Picture: The Interlanguage Shift At ILR 3, learners still have a stable interlanguage system with: Residual grammatical errors Occasional lexical gaps Register mismatches Non‑native discourse structuring Pronunciation that is intelligible but not native‑like At ILR 4, the learner’s interlanguage becomes: Highly stable, highly automatized Error‑rare, but not error‑free Native‑norm–oriented, especially in formal registers Sensitive to genre, audience, and pragmatic exp...