I could hear the gentle rain tapping on the roof this morning when I got up before Ivy. Yesterday the weather made a turn. It’s cooler today after several days of warm, sometimes hot, muggy stillness of the dog days of August.
Later this morning, we will be going home. It is both exciting and bittersweet.
Ivy was a puppy when I first started blogging, now she’s a senior dog, the senior dog. She doesn’t move like she once did, which is a blessing because I can remember many times trying to find her when she wandered away from the cottage and took off into the woods. We’ve learned a few things since those early days, but Fern is a lot like Ivy, but she will return when you call her. We have an Invisible Fence at home and both dogs know the boundary. At the lake we’ve been using a training collar, but that doesn’t contain either of them, especially Fern who has been known to return home with a deer leg, or two. It is bittersweet watching Ivy age, but it’s heartwarming seeing how Fern interacts with her. (NOTE – edited, last sentence added after publishing)
Fern and her deer leg from our trip here in April ’24
This morning, I woke up before Ivy and decided to go back to sleep, but before I could, I heard her stirring and quickly got up with her and got both she and Fern outside. When we were outside, I scanned the lake, and I noticed the heron was back. The heron was perched on the bow of Ely boat exactly where it was two days before. The heron didn’t seem fazed by the commotion of our morning routine and fortunately, Fern didn’t notice our visitor as she had Tuesday when the heron first appeared.
this morning’s phot, from the yard
Tuesday morning, I snapped a photo and sent it out on the family chat. Moments later W replied with a photo which he took the day before, on Monday.
Tuesday morning, my photo
Monday morning, W’s photo
Our Ohio friends are visiting this week. They arrived Monday afternoon well after our kids returned home after the race this past weekend. The race weekend was busy, and before our kids left, we took a family photo on the front steps. A family photo is something I have wanted to begin for a while, but I hadn’t done anything about it. There was a bit of grumbling, but we came together, and we have a family photo at the lake, the next time we take one it is going to include three generations, not two.
Tuesday afternoon, when we went out on the lake, we discovered evidence of the heron’s Monday visit to the Moomba on the tarp. Fortunately, it was a one-time visit.
This morning, after the dogs had finished their morning routine, I came inside and told my wife about the heron, and she got up to see it.
Normally, my morning routine is solitary – it’s just me and the dogs with my morning coffee. This morning, I had company.
It wasn’t long before H was down. I pointed to the heron, and we started talking about our visitor. While we deliberated, I remembered I had a copy of Sibley’s Guide to Birds. The guidebook was published in early 2020, and it helped us navigate the pandemic and I have a copy here and at home. It’s a great resource to have. Continue reading Day 60 – the great blue heron visits→
It’s Thursday and it has been too long since I have posted anything on MtDC. Since summer began three weeks ago, I have been posting daily or almost daily on Instagram and if you follow along there, you’ll see the progress of my summer break. If you are curious, there is a sidebar of the blog – it’s a three by three graphic on the right-side.
Since my last post from 36,000 feet, I have been to Ohio and back, logged two more baseball games, served others at the food pantry, mowed the yard, spread mulch, cleaned up after a wild storm (which I slept through), collected the ends of branches the cicadas have snipped off, and much more.
When MtDC was in its infancy, I was posting almost daily. I don’t have the energy or creativity to keep up that pace today, though I do follow a couple of bloggers who do. If you are reading, you know who you are. It also seems the blogging community I connected with more than a decade ago has dropped off and their blogs are shutdown or static. At some point that will happen at MtDC, but for now I am simply too stubborn to let happen or stop. Continue reading Day 24: Creativity→
It’s April and we are at the lake for a short weekend getaway. My wife picked me up Friday after school and we drove up as day turned to night arriving before midnight. We will leave later this afternoon. Instead of chores I am writing a post, which was supposed to be a quick post.
yesterday evening’s sunset… they are never the same… created with Adobe Express
It all started in 2010 and it is difficult to believe I am still writing (and posting) at MtDC after all these years, but I am.
Last year, before school let out for the summer, I signed up for a professional development class hosted by Adobe for their new dynamic content creation software, Adobe Express. I’ve been using it to edit and create since; almost entirely on my phone where I take all my photos. There are desktop and mobile versions of the software, but they weren’t the same and frankly I preferred the mobile app for its convenience, but that changed Friday morning.
Sometimes, learning is difficult.
It’s been a couple of days of figuring things out. I’ve tinkered a little and used it to create a couple of images learning as I go.
When I started writing and posting, I wanted a logo that fit what I was doing. I created my first logo in 2010 and it stuck around until 2014. I changed it again in 2016 and it has been the site icon since.
created 2024
created 2016
created 2014
created 2010
first attempt…
I still have these blocks….
Earlier this month I was tinkering with Adobe Express and created a new logo, the above logo. A couple of weeks ago I added it to WordPress as my site icon and planned to write a post but didn’t. This morning, I changed all my social media to the icon.
Every year, I go back to my seventh-grade geography class when I first learned of the horror of that morning. It was son’s first day of school of school and his excitement was dashed when he saw his mother, my wife, standing television set crying as she watched the news unfold that Tuesday morning twenty-two years ago. She comforted him when he asked,
“Why are you crying momma” he asked.
She collected herself and replied,
“It’s just bad news.” She replied.
It was bad news and we have come together and moved forward since that awful day.
a replica of the fifteen star, fifteen stripe flag which flew over Fort McHenry on September 13, 1814.
I am reminded of the names on this day, some two thousand nine hundred seventy-five men, women, and children who perished that morning.
This summer I stumbled across the 9/11 Memorial of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. Earlier in the day I had visited Fort McHenry and seen a replica of the flag which had flown the night the British bombarded the fort. It had fifteen stripes and fifteen stars. The memorial moved me to create a movie of me reading each the victim’s names.
Todd Beamer, LeRoy Homer, Wanda Anita Greene, and Honor Elizabeth Wayne
It is Monday, the first day of a new week. It’s raining for the first time in weeks, and it is going to be an amazing day. I know it and I. can feel it, so I’d better jump up, jump in, and seize the day. Making the Days Count, one day at a time, saying their names, so we never forget.
It’s Monday, Day 21 and I wasted yesterday. Really wasted it. I spent the entire afternoon on things unimportant and certainly not urgent.
One day summer won’t be summer break, it will be life in retirement. I’ve often told folks who marvel my summer break (envy) that I think of summer break as an audition for retirement. If so, I am not going to get a call back.
In my last post I referenced the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I was replying to a comment and I found a great resource from the folks at FranklinCovey, it’s an overview of the 7 Habits – click if you like. I’ve been using their products for over twenty years to plan my day and organize my daily and weekly tasks. Every year I get a little better at it learning from my failures and successes.
my stats as of Monday, June 26, 2023
One of the parts of my daily routine playing the New York Times Wordle. I don’t remember how I started, but I did. It could’ve been my daughter, or the buzz on social media as folks posted their solution to the day’s Wordle. If you haven’t played it, it is a simple game. You have six guesses to guess the day’s word. The word is five letters long and with each guess you get feedback.
Green squares mean that the letter you guessed is in the correct position in the day’s word.
Yellow squares mean the letter you guessed is in the word day’s but not in that space.
Gray squares mean that the letter you guessed is not in that day’s word.
According to an article in The Ledger, there over 158,000 five-letter words in the English language, but the Official Scrabble Dictionary puts the number at about 9,000 words. Somewhere I read the Wordle game has a dictionary at just over 2,300 words and doesn’t use plurals as solutions.
I find Wordle challenging, and I find it frustrating, too. Most mornings, playing the day’s Wordle is the last thing I do before getting started on the day – showering and heading off to school. But in the summer, I have more time and less urgency (and thus more time to write and dream).
Some days, the puzzle takes five to ten minutes or as quickly as two minutes like it was this morning. And there are days when I can’t see a solution and come back later.
Last summer, I began to track my daily results and approach playing the game as a scientist. At the point, it took an average of 4.46 attempts to solve the puzzle. Since then, my average slowly declined and is currently 4.05 attempts to solve the puzzle, though the month of June has been awful with a miss and several five and six attempt days and a monthly average of 4.23. Continue reading Wordle, is it a game or a challenge?→
W^2 or W squared for Wordless Wednesday, June 21, 2023
For this week’s Wordless Wednesday, I have two, errr three, images of summer captured in the spring. I chode baseball, but I could choose just about anything as an image of summer.
It is summer, officially at 10:57 AM CDT, but it’s felt like summer since school let the kiddos free June 2ndand me free the following Monday, the fifth.
a summer game played in the three seasons – April 6 at Target Field Minneapolis, Minnesota. Game time time temp low fifties. Beautiful day and great game Astros 2, Twins 3 in 10 innings
Last summer I got serious about my bucket list goal of visiting every major league baseball stadium with a seven day, seven game, six city, and ten baseball team trip beginning in New York City winding west finishing in Cleveland before driving home to Chicagoland. In all last year, I attended ten ballgames and watched one half of the teams in the MLB. I finished the 2022 season having seen 20 of the 30 present day ballparks.
T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington. Looking to left field. May 6th, Astros 5 Mariners 7.
W^2 or W squared for Wordless Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Last night I was on my way home from purchasing a lottery ticket, two tickets, one for last night’s drawing and one for tonight’s drawing. I know, the chance of winning is minuscule, maybe even infinitesimal, but I purchased them anyway.
the waxing crescent moon and Jupiter over Danada Forest Preserve, Wheaton, IL, December 27, 2022 8:41 PM
On the way home, I looked up to see the setting waxing crescent moon and Jupiter. A cloudless or less clouded December sky is a rarity here in northern Illinois and I suppose my four-dollar purchase of lottery tickets could be construed as an admission ticket to a Tuesday evening light show.
I pulled to the roadside and waited patiently for traffic to pass while I snapped photos of the prairie, the moon, and Jupiter; all of which are reflecting our sun’s light. It takes the sun’s light 5080.32 seconds to travel from the sun to Jupiter and reflect toward Earth so we can see it. That’s an hour, twenty-four minutes, and forty seconds.
My last post was titled ‘light’ and I almost named this post ‘light, again,’ but I decided that the title above would be better. Things take time and cloud free nights in winter are rare. This morning the sun rose, as it always does, and we welcomed a new day. Today is going to be an amazing day. I know it and I can feel it, so I’d better jump up, jump in, and seize the day. Making the Days Count, one day at a time, being patient with the universe.
When was the last time you looked up to see the light of a night sky?
W^2 or W squared for Wordless Wednesday, September 21, 2022
A couple of weeks ago, I was mowing our lawn on a Wednesday evening after school, when I looked up to discover this young boy and his mom investigating the handprints in our sidewalk. His mother was patient as the young boy placed his hands in each of the handprints and repeated the process.
a young man investigates the handprints in our sidewalk, When, IL, Wednesday, September 7, 2022 6:18 PM
The first was the handprint made by our daughter who was four almost five years old and the other, our son who was eight years old at the time. Beneath each handprint, my wife had scratched their initials and the date. The year was 2007.
Our kids are grown. Our son is married, our daughter in college, and one day this young boy will be making his way after leaving his mark somewhere along the way.
We all leave a mark, sometimes it’s visible and sometimes it’s not. It’s in the things we do, the way we made people feel, thew tings we say and write, and the contribution we made along the way.
Today is going to be an amazing day. I know it and I can feel it, so I’d better jump up, jump in, and seize the day. Making the Days Count, one day at a time, leaving my mark.
What a great week! I am back to school for a twenty-fourth year of teaching. It was a great week for so many reasons, but I am going to share three BIG IDEAS – eight, hike, and inspirational. It was so good I think I am going to go back on Monday for another week.
the early morning air from my summer office
A few weeks ago, I read a blog post by Beth at I Didn’t Have My Glasses On. Her post was a clip of an article about a decree by the president of Turkmenistan concerning the cycle of life. According to the decree, life comes in cycles of 12 years and the cycles are:
Childhood (birth – 13 years)
Adolescence (13-25 years)
Youth (25 to 37 years)
Maturity (37 to 49 years)
Prophesy (49 to 61 years)
inspirational (61 to 73 years)
Wisdom (73 to 85 years)
Old Age (85 to 97 years)
I find myself on the cusp of prophecy and inspirational. However, when I look in the mirror, I can see all of the cycles, but I can identify with childhood and adolescence. I believe my kiddos see me where I am on the cusp of being prophetic and inspirational. For the next ten months that is where I will spend most of my weekdays working with kids teaching and learning, but mostly learning, bouncing between cycles.
