Field Trip Number Two in two days...

Well -- The thing in the middle of the picture is an Australian Skink (on the small side). The fuzzy stuff at the bottom of the picture is someone's hair and then there's the pair of knees at the top of the picture.

This is one of the very few photos that came out (I keep telling you, my skills with the camera are shaky at best) of the first part of a two part field trip last Friday. We visited a local natural history museum where there were mock-ups of different California habitats (with real stuffed animals staring nose to nose at you -- including a full sized Puma / Mountain Lion / Cougar..).

The second portion of the trip was a nature walk in a semi-local State park with a guide. It was GREAT! Unfortunately, many of the kids were either unimpressed or spent their entire time worring about dirt getting on them. Rather sad. Most of the parents enjoyed it, and number two son (who had come last year to the same park with the same guide for a walk for cub scouts) was having a great time getting more detail than he had absorbed last time. Too cool.

Yesterday I tried to get a picture of the large black carpenter Bee that was buzzing around the mock sweet pea (I think) bush in front of the house yesterday, but again.... my skills with a moving object...

here's the best shot:




The plant is the one with purple flowers. The bee.. well even as big as it is to my eye, you can hardly see it here... it's to the right of the plant and it's the black flapping thing on the underside of one of the flowers. Boy do I wish I had a real camera with a telephoto lens and some real skills. Nice plant though.

Yesterday was supposed to be a finishing day to get the books covered and boxed for the Book Fair this coming weekend. Well, I spent two hours covering, but not boxing and the bookcases which were supposed to come down & get stacked ready for the van haven't been. I'll try and get some more done after this. Right now I'm sending out my monthly newsletter with a note about the fair. Probably way too late, but that's the way it's going around here this month.

Hopefully, I'll spend more time tomorrow boxing and preparing than trying to enter new books into the database. At least, that's what I NEED to be doing.

Now it's off to baseball.

Field Trip Season

Hopefully I'll have at least one usable photo of our field trip today. We'll see. I do TRY to take decent pictures, but, you know...

We took two classes of fifth graders on an hour long trip to Sacramento (our state capital) to visit Old Sacramento and the Railroad museum (by the way, if you get the chance to visit the Railroad museum -- AWESOME!!!)

This time I got to sit at the back of the bus and be the dampening influence on the rowdy bunch. Yippee. And the bus had a distinct tendency to jounce (especially at the rear end of the bus) which got to be very interesting after a while. The nice thing about fifth graders is that they still somewhat obey the voice of authority. Somewhat. Especially when it comes from a body the same size as theirs.

Next year, I'll have a bigger problem being proper parental authority when they are definitely bigger than I am. But then, for a bunch of these kids (mainly the boys) I either have worked with them in Cub Scouts, know their moms (horrors... and I can tell tales on them :) ) or I can use my bony heels on them to good advantage and no one is about to tell the teacher on me.

Or.... or.... or.... I could start wearing five inch heels. Nah. That's never gonna happen.

I will try and check the pictures I took with my phone later to see what came out. But I can't really do it right away as the NEXT field trip is TOMORROW.

Luckily, that field trip is closer to home, and it is with son number two and the much sunnier, sillier bunch of third graders. I can still face them down any day. Hopefully, I'll take incriminating pictures there too.

Wish me luck.