The Weekend Before School Starts

    This past week I've been to school every day working on getting my classroom ready for Monday, when my new class of 4th graders marches in.  For some insane reason (I can't remember why I thought that this was such a great idea) I decided that I needed to change my entire room around and redo every single bulletin board.  This has ended up taking hours and hours.  And hours.  Today was Saturday and I went in to try to finish the walls.  Bruce and Becky were angels and both came to help me, but the boards still weren't finished until 5:00.  I still have the rest of the classroom to put into at least some sort of order (there are piles of things everywhere), so I'm going to have to go in tomorrow too.  This is disappointing, as I really wanted at least one day of rest before school starts. However, I'm making the best of it and will try to get finished as quickly as possible tomorrow. 

    Despite the pressures of school,  I'm still determined to keep blogging.  Very early this morning I took a walk around the pond with the dogs.  I remembered my cup of coffee, but forgot my camera until I was too far to want to go back.  "Ah well," I thought, "What are the chances that there will be anything happening worth taking a picture of?"  Hah!  It turns out that the chances were excellent.
 
    I reached the far side of the pond, and there on the shore ahead of me were the middle group of young ducks (the ones we call The Popcorn Brigade) standing in a picturesque line on top of the fallen pine tree.  Darn it!!! So I sped up my walk and headed back to the house to get my camera.  When I reached the big gate to the house, there was our mama wild turkey with her new brood of tiny turkeys clustered around the grain pan looking extremely photogenic.

     Ack!  I ran inside and got the camera.  When I got back outside, the mama turkey and babies had melted off into the bushes; so no pictures there.  However, when I got back to the downed pine tree, I was relieved to find that although most of the ducks had jumped down, several were still aboard.  Yes! 

    I simply can't get over having ducks who like to get up on high places.  It just seems so strange.  They also seem very pleased to be surveying the world from up there.






   














 This was a wonderful way to start the day.