Louis

Today I told my 4th grade students about our new dog, christened Louis.  They loved the pictures of our newly rescued Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, but when I told them what I'd named him, the nine-year-old consensus was that this was a terrible name.  "Boring!" they  cried.  I explained to them about cavaliers, the kings of France and the nobility of the name "Louis."  This fell on deaf ears. Louis is so not a cool name -- when did this happen?  Well, by the very fact that "Louis" is so very uncool, I'm more smitten with it than ever.  And my plan is to watch my class fall in love with Louis the dog -- and then they will fall in love with his name.  That's how these things work!

We're calling him ...

                                                                           Louis

We'll see if anyone calls for him next week.  The way this little guy likes to take off, I can see how he found himself utterly alone and soaking wet by the side of the road.  He's adorable and extremely loving, but part of me would be relieved if he was claimed by a broken-hearted owner.  Right now, we're looking at the cost of fencing off the area outside the back door because Louis enthusiastically takes off as the mood suits him.  It doesn't help that he nicely fits through the cat door.  Without extraordinary vigilance on our part, I'm afraid that he's going to again become the lost dog he was only yesterday...

Birthday Surprise

Oh, my goodness!  We appear to have a new dog (of the very small variety). 

Today was Bruce's birthday -- nothing special planned because we'll be having our birthday dinner tomorrow when the family can come up.  So this morning we drove around the roads by our place, just looking at all the new water our recent rains have left. 

Up on Gopher Ridge, Bruce saw a small dog running across the field towards our car.  Afraid he would hit it, he stopped when he couldn't see it any more.  Where was it?  I opened the car door and there was a tiny Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  He never hesitated, but crawled into the car and then up onto my lap -- cold, muddy, soaking wet, and shivering.  No nearby houses.  So we took him home and Bruce called Animal Control and left a message that we had found this dog. 

As soon as he came in the house, he lifted his leg and peed on the wall.  Our boy has obviously never been in a house.  He then hopped from a chair onto the dining room table where he stood looking at us and wagging his adorable tail.  I put him back on the floor and explained that the table was not for walking on. 

He was filthy, so he got a warm bath.  Vast amounts of dirt washed down the drain.  He didn't like being bathed, but put up with it like a trooper.  I dried him off with several fluffy towels and he was grateful.  We then found and pulled two ticks off his head.  The cats were interested, but decided he was OK.  And then he slept and slept and slept. 

Sooo...it looks like we may have our fourth dog.  He has no name yet and is a diamond in the rough.  He appears to be between one and two years old, but doesn't seem to have ever been inside.  He's intact, so that will have to be remedied.  I'm so amazed at his desire to do everything right, even though he doesn't know what to do.  I don't even really like small dogs, but have already fallen in love with this small, brave soul. 

Bruce fell in love even before I did.  Happy birthday, Sweetheart!

Tornado?

                                                         

My friend, Dorothea, called me from down in the valley to tell me that the weather radar had issued a severe weather alert and a tornado warning for the area right over Frogpond.  From the porch I could see a mass of some rather angry looking clouds a bit to the north with occasional flashes of lightning followed by rolling booms of thunder, but nothing more ominous than that.  I went inside and checked the computer and saw that she was telling the truth -- a scary yellow rectangle had been drawn smack over us.  There also was a trapazoid drawn a bit southwest of us. 

I'm happy to report that no tornado ever materialized, so I didn't have to follow Dorothea's half-joking (I think) advice to get in the bathtub and put an ironing board over me.  

It's a Jungle Out There

It took several hours of stooping, tying, untangling tendrils and trying not to step on plants, but the sweet peas are now strung up on their tepees.  As happens every spring, they went from tiny seedlings to vast sprawling monsters in the course of a single night.   


In name, this raised garden is a vegetable bed.  Tell that to the sweet peas, cornflowers, field and California poppies and alyssum that duke it out there every spring.  I'm a bit too soft-hearted to be an effective gardener.  It's difficult for me to  weed out the bounty, even when it's in the process of strangling everything around it by its own excesses.







Some progress was made, though, and a large cartload of "weeds" made the long, sad journey over to the compost pile. 

The bed is still a rank jungle,  but, where yesterday it was an uninterrupted thicket of green, today one can see the top halves of various cats plonked in the middle of it.

A modest success (by tomorrow the cats will again be lost to view).

Happy Spring

A rose by any other name......could be a tulip...

                                                                               

 

...or an iris, or a daffodil.

    Or....

 

...a slightly surprised bouquet of broccoli that bolted before I got a chance to eat it.

Or an even more startled poinsettia plant that bravely hung on since Christmas and found itself miraculously replanted in a real pot at last. 

Only in California...

To begin, this definition from Wikopedia OnLine Dictionary:

veg·e·tar·i·an/ˌvejiˈte(ə)rēən/

Noun:	A person who does not eat meat, and sometimes other animal products, esp. for moral, religious, or health reasons.
	So now we are clear on exactly what a vegetarian is.  This brings us to this egg carton: Yoiks!  The Niman Ranch hens are fed a diet of vegetarians - as stated right on the label.  The fine print also says that this is sustainable and humane.  Now I don't mean to question the folks at Niman Ranch, but I've watched my chickens attack the scraps on our compost heap, as well as the occasional unfortunate mouse that is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Not humane in the least.  And as for sustainable...well, we do have a lot of vegetarians in California, but chickens are hearty eaters and I imagine that the supply of willing vegetarians will be dwindling rather quickly.  It's also interesting to note that these eggs from vegetarian-fed hens are Kosher (note the "U" in the circle).  I don't know what to think about that.  I'm assuming that my own troupe of cannibalistic, rodent-eating, compost devouring hens would not be able to earn that "U".  Definitely not Kosher.  However, I can guarantee that any vegetarian who comes to visit is safe at Frogpond Acres and will be able to leave alive and in one piece.  At least, this is what the hens tell me...

 

First Day of Spring Break!

Yippee!!!  As you can see, everyone around here's as excited as I am about it.






I've got a full slate of things planned for my time off: house cleaning, cheese making, seed planting, garden weeding, loom weaving, cat to the vet-ing, friend visiting, .  And that's just today's list!

No, not really.  While all of this is on my list, I won't be doing it all on my first day of break.  Or even get to some (or most) of them by the last day.  But this is my list.  I'll also have to put in a day reaming out some of the chaos in my classroom.  And do lesson planning and correcting papers. 

Today I'll make goat cheese, work outside in the garden and take a cat back to the vet. 


Two weeks ago, Max, the stray cat who moved in, got claw-swiped by one of his loving feline housemates (none of whom have claimed responsibility. Such a surprise).   He developed a nice abscess on his rear end and, voila, our free cat suddenly turned into a $300 cat. We've been flushing out the wound with antibiotics this week and it's healing nicely.  We take him in for a final checkup this morning.


Arby says he didn't do it.

Yeah, right....

Tulips

It doesn't seem quite in character for me, but I have a thing for green-streaked tulips.  I find them irresistible.  Last autumn I bought an assortment of several hundred and tucked them in our center bed.  There they have to fight it out with the poppies and other wildflowers, but they do pretty well.





Species Tulips: Not green, but adorable anyway

The tulip blooming time here is so fleeting.  I come home from school in the late afternoons and do my best to get in a full day's worth of admiration in the short time remaining before the sun sets.

Writer's Notebook

There's a method of journaling called Writer's Notebook that I tried out with both sections of my language arts classes this year.  There's a whole philosophy behind this system, but the two main elements are (1) a teacher's red pen will never "bleed" all over the students' work making corrections and (2) the students are held accountable for practicing different writing strategies and putting real thought into their entries.  When I evaluate their work, I'm required to confine my comments/scoring to a rubric that they've pasted in the back of the journal.  The theory is simple:  Creativity cannot flourish if a person's afraid of making mistakes. 

Last week I collected all thirty-three notebooks and read and commented on every child's entries from February 15 to the present.  At seven entries per week times five weeks (I should have collected them at 3 weeks), that's approximately 35 entries per student.  With 33 students in all, that makes approximately 1,155 entries.  That's a lot of reading. 

Maxie putting in his best effort

Luckily for me, I had help.

Arby diligently focusing on the job at hand

Lots of it!















Reading all of these was a bit more involved for me than it was for the cats, however I learned a lot. 

Some gems:

* "Long ago, when I was nine..."

* "Question: Was Rome built in a week or a month?"

* "I'd like to visit Rome someday.  I hear it's astonishing, breathtaking and unforgettable and if it's made out of marbles, that's pretty cool."

* "The only chocolate I don't love is white chocolate.  I honestly think it's insulting because it looks like vanilla."

* "What is a quantaray?  Wait for it...Wait for it...Looking in the dictionary..."  {and here the entry just stops, so I'm still waiting to learn what a quantaray is}

* "WHEN I WAS SMALLER, I WROTE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS."

* "Ping pong is pretty long to write, so I'll just write 'table tennis'."

* "If you think I'm pretty, you should see my step-mom."

* "O my God! Today my baby brother is five months old!  One more month and he gets to eat Gerber! Yay, Yay, Yay!"

* "Life is Life and it isn't always the way you want it to be.  I've come to learn that a long time ago."

Yeah, I enjoy being a teacher...