It's been a while since I checked my trail cam to see what the local wildlife has been up to. Imagine my surprise when I came across this documentation of willful raccoon vandalism:
I wished I had some footage to help him, especially since he was nice enough to fix the camera! But unless the raccoon was an accomplice to the crime, I had nothing but leaves.
"I know you just got out of the car," our pet sitter said when we got home early this afternoon from a wedding in Richmond, "but how would you feel about giving me a ride home and meeting the kittens?"
"Who can say no to kittens!" I replied. She and her family had just adopted a pair of 10-week-old Siamese littermates from a rescue organization, and the friendly little purr balls did not disappoint.
As I was cuddling with one, the other trilled from Heidi's arms. "She's calling her sister to play!" Molly said, so we set them down, and they dashed over to their toys where they leapt and rolled and wrestled, knocking into things with abandon.
"Adorable!" I gushed. "Just don't show them Lady and the Tramp!"
The wood guy came by the other day. "I know it's still kinda warm," he said, "but we were in the neighborhood."
I had answered the door in shorts and a t-shirt, and we had some wood left from the spring. We probably wouldn't have a fire for a few more weeks, but the leaves in the woods across the way were tinged with rust and gold, and acorns blanketed the ground beneath the oak. He was there, and the season was changing. "Let's fill the rack up," I agreed.
This morning, the thermostat in the dining room read 63. It was a little chilly even in my flannel and slippers, but I was hesitant to turn the heat on; I knew it would involve switching the vents, closing all the windows, and changing the filter in the air handler. Still, we were going away for the night, and a sitter was staying with Lucy and the cats. We might have bundled up and slept under extra blankets for another night or two, but for her, I made the switch from summer settings to winter. She is coming, and the season is changing.
"Um," I started as I placed Heidi's trail runner on the shoe repair counter, "this..." I gestured at the dangling metal eyelet, "is broken."
"Oh!" the friendly repairman laughed. "The hooky thingy came off!"
"I knew there was a technical term for it!" I agreed.
"Boot hook," he told me, "but this one's shot." He showed me why it was unusable and went to fetch a few replacement options from the back.
Ten minutes and fifteen bucks later, a new hooky thingy was in place.
I felt lucky that the math teacher I was subbing for yesterday had a planning period before her classes, because I needed it to review linear equations, particularly plotting parallel and perpendicular lines. But once I recalled how to determine the slope, I was feeling much more confident. It also reminded me of how fascinating I found the perpendicular rule when I first learned it —the whole notion of using the negative reciprocal of the slope for the new line just tickles my brain the right way. It also reminds me that there is an elegant order for so many things, if only we recognize the patterns.
I had the same feeling last week in a sixth-grade science class when the teacher explained how the early periodic table was stumbled upon by Dmitri Mendeleev in the 1860s. Mendeleev was a chemist and card collector who designed a set of cards based on the known elements. He arranged his cards by atomic weight and then in columns by common properties. As he played with the arrangement, he saw gaps in his table, predicted they would be filled by elements yet to be discovered, and described the characteristics of those future elements.
Mendeleev is widely considered a genius not for creating the order, but for recognizing it.
"Didn't you retire?" an eighth grader asked me this afternoon in the middle of a particularly rowdy math class. And when I nodded, he added a salty little follow-up, "Then why are you back?"
"I was just asking myself the same question," I laughed.
To his credit, he looked abashed, but unfortunately, it didn't make him any more productive.
