What's the Buzz?

This hot droughty summer has produced a lot of reports of  climate change and what we might expect from a warmer planet. Long term and short term predictions of "the new normal" are dire. Just the other day I heard that because of the warm winter and the hot summer, we were looking at an insect population explosion that would probably last into November.  "Just think of the mosquitoes!" the report ended.

I didn't have to think too hard. I've never seen so many as we saw when we were in Maine in June. Even the locals were complaining. On the other hand, the bees in our garden have been plentiful, their colony strong, and yesterday on the ten hour drive from our home to Atlanta, I saw more butterflies than ever before, hundreds of yellow wings pressed into the August sky. There have been lots of dragonflies around, too, probably because they eat mosquitoes, and the chorus of the cicadas is strident, invigorating the lazy summer afternoon.

More bugs? Doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Slippery Statistics

Yesterday when I was setting up my calendar for the coming school year, I took a minute to review our snow day policy. Several years ago, after we got socked with a huge snowstorm that kept us out for over a week, our system responded to the lost time by adding 4 minutes to every school day, and they never took them away. That's why even though we only go 181 days, we have four days to spare and still make the state mandate of 180.

Admittedly, that calculation is just another example of the fuzzy math we educators are encouraged to use when "objectively" measuring just what it is we do all day. Still, I won't complain. According to Accuweather, it looks like we just might need those extra minutes this year:

Big Snows for Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York Next Winter

Baby Steps

Last week I ordered my planner for the 2012-13 school year, and today I filled in all the important dates that have been published so far. It was a simple enough task, but I confess to feeling a twinge of excitement for the year to come.

Especially when I wrote "Last Day."

I'm getting there, though.

No News

This afternoon when we were on our way home from seeing The Bourne Legacy, our local public radio station broke into programming to alert listeners to the fact that there had been another mass shooting, this time near the campus of Texas A&M University. We sighed, and spent a few minutes speculating about this recent rash of attacks. Copycats? we wondered. Could the fact that some recent gunmen have survived encouraged other unhinged souls to plan their own offensives?

I considered the movie we had just seen; the body count was high. We live in a society that not only views violence as common and often justified, but also as entertainment. Not only that, but firearms are readily available. Survey after survey has shown that, collectively, we do not have the will to curb gun access. The second amendment is consider a third rail in electoral politics. In the wake of recent shootings pro-gun sentiment has actually risen, along with some catchy tag lines.  

100 million gun owners didn't kill anyone last week.

Things would have been different if someone else had a gun in that theater in Aurora. 

I braced for the gruesome coverage of the latest tragedy, but it didn't come. There were reports of yesterday's PGA tournament winner, Gabby Douglas and Michelle Obama visiting the Tonight Show, and Helen Gurley Brown's death at 90, but there was not a mention of any shootings on either the local or national news programs that I watched this evening. Its omission was so glaring, that I checked on the internet to see if perhaps the radio station had somehow been the victim of a hoax.

But, no. People died today in Texas when a gunman open fired on them. It just isn't news.

I ♥ Ratatouille

And it's a good thing, too, now that our garden is finally coming in. Tonight I was able to prepare the dish completely with homegrown ingredients.

Now that's fresh and local!

Hail to the Chief

The news that Romney was announcing his running mate this morning definitely piqued my interest. Maybe it's our proximity to Washington that engages me in politics, maybe it's something else, but let's just say I was the only adult of five in our group today who had any interest at all.

I'm not sure what I was hoping for when I tuned in, but I don't think it was Paul Ryan. As a liberal, I think I should be happy: Ryan is polarizing, but substantive, his record will frame an interesting debate that I think will ultimately wind up in an Obama victory. We'll see.

It's much more of a gender thing that's beginning to irritate me, though. Why can't the United States elect a woman to the executive branch of our federal government? With the current tickets set as they are, we will have to wait at least four more years to join these countries:

Argentina
Australia
Bangladesh
Bermuda

Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzogovina

Brazil
Bulgaria

Burundi
Canada

Chile

Costa Rica
Dominica

East Germany

Ecuador

Finland
France

Gabon

Georgia
Germany

Great Britain

Guinea-Bissau

Guyana

Haiti

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Ireland

Israel
Jamaica

Kosova

Kyrgyzstan

Latvia

Liberia

Lithuania

Malawi

Malta

Mauritus
Moldova

Mongolia
Mozambique
Netherlands Antilles
New Zealand

Nicaragua
Pakistan

Panama
Peru

People’s Republic of China

Philipines
Poland
Portugal
Rwanda
Sao Tome and Principe

San Marino

Serbia
Senegal
South Korea

Sri Lanka

Switzerland

Tannu Tuva
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkey
Ukraine
Yugoslavia

Cooperative Story Telling

By Evie and Jonah

Some flowers are different from each other. Some flowers are alike. Eyeball, eyeball, angry bird angry. Jonah and Evie ran to the angry birds and flowers. They saw a tooth fairy in a beautiful sparkly yellow flower dress. Her hair was orange and she was carrying prizes to put under the pillows in a pretty basket with pink silk roses all over it . "You are stupid children!" she yelled, and then they realized that she was the rotten tooth fairy. She changed into a blackish-grayish for a quick minute and then she waved her wand and turned back. AND she turned good accidentally. Her name was Rosie Kayons. She reached into her basket and pulled out a rotten egg. She held it up and pinched her nose. "Ew! Rotten, rotten!" she said and threw it down and it bounced away. Jonah and Evie laughed and ran away.