Sunday afternoon

Pene and I went out to Tainter to take a walk and I wanted to kayak. It turned out to be too windy to kayak and Pene thinks it was a bit hot to be walking.

back to work

It's good to be back to work. (Real, getting-paid-a-bit, not-for-family work) I made my re-entrance to the daycare with the foot of elephant for 'jungle week'. Nothing can make a person more popular with a seven-year-old than the severed appendage of a pachyderm. Two-year-olds, however, will have little to do with an elephant's foot - no matter how interesting a picture it may provide.
Both of them did wash their hands prior to eating breakfast.

karibu

Pastor Jack told of a door plaque which quips:

"If you're here to see me,
come right in;
If you're here to see my house,
please make an appointment."

I thought this was wonderful and I vowed to make such a plaque should I one day have a house.
Now I am facing the fact that not only have appointments been made - but we have invited everyone to come see the house (if I've missed you - let me know). This open invitation to our open house brings a whole new level to my definition of clean and presentable. After cleaning today for about five hours I was unsure of any difference in the amount that needs to be done - at this rate, by the 30th I will not be presentable, but the house may be.
All this stress is just funny in light of the fact that I do not, technically, have all of my walls. But I am bound and determined not to have spider webs inhabiting the sheet rocked and insulation packed corners.
I suppose the saddest possible ending to this tale would be sitting about on Saturday with no one coming - and not even a spider to talk to.

Written in the sky

Two o'clock this morning I arrived home bleary-eyed and eager to fall into bed for at least 8 hours. Five-thirty this morning I was awake and wondering which part of me didn't get the sleep memo. I did get to share a bit of the highlights of the vacation with Mom and Dad before they left for work. I didn't have to be to work until 9:30 so I went back to bed, which didn't really work. I did get to work this morning after getting back to the computer - checking emails and deleting more than half of the hundred messages waiting for me and downloading more than 500 pictures from Virginia.
The week was wonderful. Grandma and I were able to spend hours in conversation. With no schedule (other than my wanting to eat about every 3 hours), we were able to sit at the kitchen table for hours and let topics come and go as whims took us. We talked about cousins, uncles, aunts, my Grandfather (whom I had barely known), teaching, theology, authors, American history, grammar, and our dogs. The entire week was a gift. It was a relaxing vacation, photo opportunity, and delightfully blessed time spent away from the demands of my existence. Blessings abounded in all areas. I was able to complete about an eighth of my new cross-stitch, have been 'commissioned' do make calendars of the farm for the family, and simply rest on all levels before the demands of the summer. I didn't realize how much is 'hanging over my head' around here until I returned to the house today to all that needs to be cleaned up, organized, filed, scanned, painted, or built, not to mention - swept, scrubbed, or dusted.
I will also be returning to work - where I can find it. I will being doing whatever I can at the daycare - painting, cooking, changing diapers (perhaps not in that order), helping on the farm, and hopefully finishing some of the basement. I have come home feeling that paint on the walls could be a nice addition - even set off my photos a bit. I only hope that I don't lose momentum. This evening's sky and the message therein.

school's out for summer

School's out
just out
I'm done
All I have left to do is scan and load what I did so I can prove I did it and
it will only be confirming that
I'm done.

Grandma is flying me to her home to visit for a week and a half. I leave tomorrow morning early. So I should go to bed so in the morning I can remember what I've forgotten. I will not be remembering my computer or books about grabbing students by their brains, or how to talk to students so they will want to make the best of their educations, or teaching to change lives, or the hope of discipline or discipline of hope, or using love and logic to help children develop attention and behavior skills or strategies for all of the above.
These I have not forgotten, but I am not bringing them for just this week.

Did I mention?

I'm done

last day

(click the picture to get a better idea of how photogenic they truly are)

This is the middle school class holding their final recycle projects. They did a great job with their projects, but I think they were in such rambunctious moods for more reasons than that. The true beauty of this picture is that their personalities are as present in this shot as they are in class. (Of the three shots I got - this is the only one that all of them are visible.) They were a joy to teach and if, on any given day, I thought I was tired at the top of the day I left that class energized (and hungry) and ready to tackle the rest of the day. They were challenging and thought-provoking. They forgave me for my shortcomings, misspellings, and miss-counting. All-in-all they were a wonderful group of kids to teach through an introduction to teaching. With an introduction like theirs - the whole concept could be considered worth it all. This last few weeks of school I have even ceased sweating up a storm (rather literally) through this class time. I don't know if I should thank Mitchum or the kids.
There are pictured in this photo the empty Mountain Dew bottles that they downed after checking half the items off of today's to-do list. I know that "sugar does not make kids hyper" but this statement is not based on observation or experience. In any case, I do not recommend sugar on the last day in the classroom.

loved anyway

Pene is special to all of us - in so many ways.

beautiful menace

Perhaps 'menace' is a bit strong a word, but not good for the roses in any sense. Perhaps 'beautiful' is a bit strong as well. It sounded poetic though.

teaching in rural Wisconsin

It is only teaching in rural Wisconsin that you would hear this,
"I spent all of last period blow-drying my squirrel."

For a week now the hallways have smelt of dead fish - compliments of the same taxidermy class that requires blow drying squirrels. I have been told that if you need the hair on your squirrel to stand up a bit, mousse works well.

We were encouraged in our university courses to time labs that emit delectable aromas for important advertising days like the day that students sign up for their next year's classes -
apparently the ag teachers aren't worried about declining enrollments.

Tanzania choirs

Choir in Mgori church where Mom grew up
The music and the people were both truly beautiful.



Another choir, this one with electic keyboard accompaniment.

Sheryl communicating with rutting wildebeest

This is one of the photos that I took at the same time. We call it 'Wildeboost Peep'.

pillow weight

"...If your pillow is six years old -- which is apparently about the average age for a pillow -- it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of "sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung,"to quote the man who did the measuring." (Short History, pg 365)
So,if you happen to be sharing pillows I suppose the fraction of its weight that is comprised of biological matter could be considerably higher. (I do actually sleep on the pillow that is beneath the two top pillows - but it is much older than six years old.)

why I teach

Today was a day that for every class I 'taught' I demonstrated another reason that I may not want to consider teaching as a career - it was just an 'off' day. So when I came home and had these pictures taken yesterday during Sunday School in my email, the timing was perfect. This is DJ and me. Every day that he is in Sunday School he encourages me with his answers to questions to the class. He is insightful and honest as only kids can be. He was also, this Sunday, helpful in letting me know that if I saw a black patrol car on the way to church it was definitely a sheriff's car. His mom told me later that he plans on working for the city police as well as the county and he is a bit concerned about where he will park all the vehicles.This picture looks good, even if I'm not looking at all. The class went out to the playground and we acted out our story for the day. (For reasons that will be apparent, we read the story prior to coming outside to act it out.)
One night after Christ had risen from the dead, the disciples fished all night, but with no luck. Many of the disciples had been fisherman before Christ had called them, so they were very good at it. But all night (according to the pictures in our book) they had caught only weeds and a shoe, but no fish. In the morning they saw Jesus on the shore. He told them to lower their nets on the other side of the boat. They listened to him and brought in a net-breaking haul. They had breakfast with Jesus and then went hiking up a mountain. From there he left them to rise into the air and go to heaven.
So we climbed up in the jungle-gym, our boat. We threw a laundry basket with ropes attached overboard and hauled up our 'catch'. It took us several tries and repositioning to the top of the boat before we learned how to haul up the 'net' without flipping it over before it could be reached over the railing (or under the platform). Because my helper, Josh, often seems to think on the same wavelength (or even slightly before the same wavelength) as me we also hauled up a shoe. Then Josh, with his great multi-tasking abilities, acted the role of Christ and stood on the shoreline. He told us to the throw the basket (er - net) over the other side of the 'boat'. I led the grumbling and the catty remarks that we knew how to fish and that if we had not caught anything all night it was not going to change now. We threw the basket and Josh changed roles again to load it up with the construction paper fish that we had made for the exercise. It was a windy day and many of our fish blew out of the net and had to be chased down. Somewhere in there I attempted to remind them to listen to Jesus even when it might not seem to make sense. Immediately following our grand 'catch of the day' one of the parents came and took pictures on our 'boat'. It was fiercely bright out (perhaps that is why the fish were not where we could net them), but I like the pictures.

from behind the daffodils

Just looking at this picture makes me feel ticks crawling all over me.

have you hugged a roly-poly today?

Today I learned that it has been hypothesized that life began to leave the seas to escape an impressive, ever-increasingly-efficient predator - the shark. I now know why my sister is so completely terrified of sharks, it has to do with her ancestors' exodus to land.

And I learned that the first animals to make the journey to the land were not, as is often supposed, fish with lungs (like mud puppies) or amphibians, but pill bugs (or roly-poly-type critters). It would seem that we owe our existence as terrestrial beings to the roly-polies. This is also confirmed by the fact that Sheryl and I liked to play with them when we were little. I'm not sure that they enjoyed being played with, but we didn't ask. I am now certain that they deserve more respect than to be roly-polied and flicked about.

So I've also learned that sharks eat roly-polies - I had no idea. Pretty big day for me. Give me a few more thousand years and I'll get the entire evolutionary process figured out.

(Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 338)

bein' human not always a liability

The days at school that seem to go the best are those days when I am so ridiculously human that we can all only throw up our hands and laugh. My whole aura of 'teacher-who-has-everything-under-control' is usually lost the first day when I stutter through sentences and deliver lines inverted and inside-out. I have also proven that an effective way of distracting the students from the fact that I am trying to remember all their names as I pass out their papers is to walk into desks and chairs and, if possible, trip over things that may or may not be there. Today I was asked to cut up leftover doughnuts into pieces small enough to provide a snack for a class of 20 students. I managed the cutting part of the task successfully - carrying the box of doughnut pieces into the classroom was not so successful. Turns out that the 30 second rule applies to all forms of pastry. (The students were well aware of the fact that I had dropped the doughnuts - there was no uninformed exposure to the possible germs on the floor.)
But for all my slip-ups and ample opportunities to bring smiles to the faces of those who happened to hear what I couldn't quite say - I graded the design class's first quiz/test today, and they have learned something. I can know that they learned more from lecture than the fact that when I was 7 years old I dressed up as Princess Leah (for Halloween) and paraded through town with braided buns on my head. (The link to class was that all the walls painted in colors that advance would make the room seem smaller - like the trash compactor in Star Wars.)

yeti poops

It is a good idea to run trials of the recipes that the students will be making in foods class. Especially when I can't remember the last time that I beat egg whites - or if I have ever beaten egg whites. Tomorrow, to get practice for making angel food cakes from scratch, the class will be making meringue cookies. So this evening I got to make meringue cookies. I'm not sure what they are supposed to look like, but I have renamed them yeti poops. It would have to be a small yeti. But I think a small yeti is as likely as a large yeti.

wimps and machos

I am now two and a half weeks into my second student teaching position in Bloomer, Wisconsin. Bloomer is a larger town than Boyceville, the jump rope capital of the world, and home to Main Street Cafe which makes really good pie. The drive is longer and coming home into the warm sunshine can be quite a challenge. If it weren't for the cost of gas and the fact that I am currently not working I would completely enjoy the drive. So far my car seems to be making an effort to keep me awake. I've had oil lights flashing, the cruise control resuming at will (not my will), and strange rumblings and bumpings in the suspension. Although I have appreciated the jolts back to wakefulness, I hope that the car perseveres past 250,000.

I am listening (during this lovely commute) to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (I heard the first chapter in January) and am learning a lot of terribly useful information. I now know (but may not remember next week) that there are subatomic particles called wimps and machos - neither of which may actually exist. There is a large crater impact in Manson, IA. Australia is sinking. You should not run around Yellowstone Park in the dark without a flashlight. Mount St. Helen erupted from its side. The catastrophic destruction of the earth is 'overdue' on several fronts (or faults, supervolcanos, or meteors showers). In the twinkling of an eye a landslide carried away the tent of the parents of a family, leaving the children sleeping and unhurt. Every year 30 000 metric tons of space dust land on earth. Scientists are now more certain about the age of the earth (~4.5 billion years) than they are about what causes gravity. (although there is ample evidence of its existence). It seems reasonable to assume however that in 4.5 billion years from now - we won't be here.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known we were coming. --Freeman Dyson

changing gears

Come Monday I'll be student teaching at Bloomer Junior/High School rather than Boyceville. My cooperating teacher at Boyceville reminded me once that "the students don't like change". I don't know how much any of us like change. I know that I enjoy the challenge of being flexible with and for the students. In this sense I recognize that I need change, but at this point am not certain of my fondness for it. There is much I am looking forward to. The drive is beautiful and enjoyable. There are several sections of the road that remind me of riding in the back of our '75 SAAB 99. (The same car that facilitated an extended visit in Beach, S.D.) Sheryl and I would press the buttons that would control the roller coaster ride that my father provided as he straightened the curves and left our stomachs at the tops of the last hill. It was on the county back roads of Wisconsin that I may have first learned that sudden changes in direction and even altitude can be exhilarating and adventuresome.
I am only hoping that this next shift in direction is exciting and not the alternative - a bit nauseating.

try, try again

I have received written confirmation that I am free to seek employment elsewhere. I didn't quite have all my eggs in one basket, it was just the first basket I've tried. So - on to new baskets.


I'm sure that often after graduation there are more basket options than a person could know what to do with.