Treats

For Supper:

1)  Papa Murphy's Chicago-style pizza--purchased by Hiromi
2)  Freshly picked asparagus--from plants I planted a long time ago at the Trail West place
3)  Morel mushrooms (from Rani's family--great gift from a student to a teacher)  One of them was six inches tall, with a 4 1/2 inch cap.

Right after school:

4)  Raspberry cheesecake (left from the meal Music 1 students provided at noon for their class)

5)  Seeing Brandon get completely finished with his schoolwork--a good thing since it was the last day of school and he wants to graduate tomorrow evening.  He recited two months' worth of Bible memory passages in the last hour and half of school, and wrote a written report for literature.  Earlier in the day he finished up several speech assignments and took a pace test.  Earlier in the week he handed in the assignment needed to erase an incomplete in a class he took as a freshman.  Upon completion of the aforementioned projects, we teachers had some surreptitious exchanges on our in-school instant messaging system (Gox Box)--references to seismic activity in progress.  Norma pegged the intensity at 9.3 on the Richter scale.  (Can you tell that the end of school makes teachers a little silly too?)

6)  Singing "It's a happy day" for our dismissal song.

Yesterday morning before school:

7)  A delightful lecture on permaculture by Bill Mollison.  It was long and I shouldn't have started it then, but it was enormously stimulating.  I hope to listen to the whole set very soon.

I've got to pick my nephew Zachary's brain on this subject.  On Facebook, I see that he's apparently in the process of taking a permaculture design course.  I'd love to do that some time, but I may need more than one lifetime to see it happen--and more than one job to pay for it.  I've recently seen a new course by Geoff Lawton advertised for about $1,000.  He apprenticed or trained under Bill Mollison.  Both of these men are apparently Aussies, and their speech betrays them.

Zack had shared a link earlier to a Geoff Lawton lecture, and I got started listening to a series of his lectures.  I think of Lawton as a sophisticated back-to-the-lander, with a deep knowledge of how to maximize efficiency from natural processes--to create abundance.  As he says, it all begins with harvesting rainwater.

Bill Mollison has bad hair (what's left of it) and slightly rude language and manners, and is not a polished speaker, but I could listen to him all day because he knows so many things I want to know.  His lectures are free.

Here is a link to the first of the Mollison lectures.  This takes you to an 18-minute TED talk by Geoff Lawton--an excellent introduction to permaculture.  On this page, you'll find links to a number of videos about various aspects of permaculture.

Yesterday during the final child development class:

8)  Hilda brought the little princess Arwen to class and let us pass her around and hold her.  We also watched her handle and latch onto a sippy cup for the first time and observed how she snarfed down cooked carrots, which she had never tasted before.  She's quite new to this business of eating from a spoon, but she seems to take to it very naturally.  This class is the one place where grandmothering and teaching intersect most comfortably.