This morning I awoke to a fog enshrouded lake, yesterday it was rainy. Later today, it will be sunny. We get it all here.
in homage to the last two blogposts, black and white with a pinch of color…
This morning when I first looked out, I could see as far as the speedboat – about a hundred yards, but a couple of hours later we could make out the opposite shore, barely.
I didn’t see this web until I was walking back to shore…..
the opposite shore is starting to be visible
the speed boat looks lonely
spider webs are so difficult to photograph…
I walked to the end of the dock and captured a few images, a dozen or so, before the fog lifted. I’ll let the images tell the story. Continue reading a foggy Sunday dozen→
In response to yesterday’s post W^2 – black and white, a reprise of sorts.
In hindsight, yesterday was a million and six times better than the day before.
Our nephew arrived with his wife and young children just as the storms began to roll across the lake. A few minutes later his brother, another nephew arrived. It was wonderful to see them. Since my wife’s parents died, our paths only cross for weddings, funerals, and graduations.
The kids were reluctant to get out of the car, but slowly warmed and by the end of their visit they were playing in the water, exploring the lake, toys, and all that our lake home has to offer.
It was delightful to visit, to catch up, and share our home with them.
Then storms rolled across the lake, one after another, and we stayed off the lake and out of the boats. More than once, we waded out to the boats, turning back when we saw lightning until we decided that we would get wet regardless of whether it was raining or not.
looking west northwest, as rain falls gently
While they boated, Fern and I stayed ashore. I waded into the lake and took the photos for this post. By the end of their visit every single beach towel was soaked, and the kids (and adults) were spent.
clouds over the lake, looking west north west in portrait mode
Yesterday WAS a million and six times better than the day before with family – our nephews and their kids bringing color to the lakeshore on a stormy day.
This morning began with steady rain, but the sun is breaking through and sunshine is on the way. Today is going to be an amazing day, it could be a million and six times better than yesterday. So, I’d better jump up, jump in, and seize the day. Making the days Count, one day at a time, black and white or in color.
W^2 or W squared for Wordless Wednesday, July 5, 2023
For this week’s Wordless Wednesday post I have the early morning moon setting as the sun rises.
moon setting over Lake Margrethe, Grayling, Michigan. July 5, 2023, 6:45 AM
Today is Day 30 of summer break. Time is flying and I am missing my routine. I am an early riser, so I often have the morning to myself to do or not to do. This morning, I was reading other blogs and I was inspired to post a black and white photo from my blogging friend Dawn at Change is Hard.
Life isn’t black and white as it was in The Giver, there is color and vibrancy. But a black and white photo tells a story, too. This morning’s photo tells of winds from the southwest blowing in making waves. Making waves on the lake and pushing storm clouds later this afternoon forecast bringing much needed rain and cooler temperatures for the remainder of the week.
Our nephew and his family are visiting later today. They visited us ten years ago and we had a wonderful time with them, this visit they’ll be bringing their kids. This place hasn’t seen little kids since my kids were little. It should be fun.
Today is going to be an amazing day, it could be a million and six times better than yesterday. So, I’d better jump up, jump in, and seize the day and ready our place for the visit. Making the days Count, one day at a time, looking at life through a black and white lens or making waves.
I do both, which do you do? Black and white or a wave maker?
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?→
This morning as I stumbled through my morning routine, I noted in my reflection and gratitude app that it was Friday. Normally Friday would bring joy and be amazing, but during the summer when it is summer break, Friday is simply another day.
Thursday evening’s sunset
Fridays during the school year bring joy and anticipation of weekend plans and a less structured day. During summer break, almost every day is less structured! I try to keep that in mind as I plan and execute my day and my week. As the summer winds down, structure is what I look forward to about returning to school.
Years ago, I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Reading the book was difficult. It was full of ideas about personal management and was more of a textbook for life. I finished it and every so often, I open it, and re-read or leaf through the pages. The habit I rely on most during the unstructured summer is Habit 3: Put First Things First. Reading that book, changed my life. Continue reading Day 18 – Friday, not just another day?→
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.
It’s Day 8 of summer break and I have completed one FULL week. Mostly it’s been catching up on the tasks that I said I’d do when school ended or working on the things that needed to be done to close out school, like packing my classroom and moving to another classroom, my twelfth classroom in twenty-two years. Moving is incomplete and I’ll finish moving later this week when I return home.
Oh, I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
I have spent Days 4 through 7 (and Day 9) at our lake house.
day lilies, drenched in June rain, awaiting July blooms
Our daughter is spending the summer by the lake working at a local veterinarian. The lake house is about a two-hour drive to where she attends university at Michigan State. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but by the time I finished high school I had changed my career path to being an engineer, and a couple of years later I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. It wasn’t until I went back to school in 1997 that I finally realized my middle school career aspiration of working with animals. Yes, there is a joke there, a dad joke, but a joke, nonetheless.
It’s been a dry spring in the Midwest and throughout southern Canada. Dry understates the problem.
Oh, I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
Wildfires have ravaged southern Canada and for the past month the air has been filled with smoke particles. The skies, normally a brilliant sky blue, have been a grayish white with the sun’s rays scattered as they pass through the atmosphere. Last week major league baseball cancelled three games in the northeast due to wildfire smoke in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
Last week Saturday, June 4th a wildfire, sparked by an untended campfire, burned over 2000 acres near our lake house. Our daughter was here, she sent photos of Forest Service fire planes scooping water from the lake’s surface and helicopters filling buckets filled with water to douse the wildfire’s flames.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
It is Day 1 of summer 2023. I’ve been looking forward to this day for several weeks as my sixth graders began to ‘blossom’ into seventh graders. It happens every year and the answer is an eleven week break to rest, reset, and restore for new year and new crop of students.
Day 1 finds me in my ‘summer office’ plotting and planning the today and the remaining 75 days of summer break. This will be my fourteenth summer of this blog. I have chronicled every summer and fall, winter, and spring since that first post thirteen years ago.
I am trying something new with this post, a response to the daily prompt through WordPress. Today’s prompt is
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Muhammad Ali once said,
“A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
I suppose if I had answered that question 30 years ago, or maybe even next week, the answer might be three different books, but at this moment there are three: the Bible, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella.
The Bible I’ve been reading the Bible most of my life. This past winter, I was watching a football game and watched a commercial produced by an organization called, He gets Us. It was a commercial for Christianity and it got me curious. Who is He Gets Us?
After clicking, reading, watching, and clicking some more, I wound up here You Version: Jesus – He Gets Us. I read, clicked, watched, listened, and downloaded the app. I began reading the Bible in a year. Since January 1, I’ve been following a plan to read the Bible in a year. There is so much to learn from the wisdom of the Bible, and I feel like I am only scratching the surface. If you are curious, it’s there for you to be curious, and less judgmental. Continue reading first day of summer ’23→
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
It is Day 1 of summer 2023. I’ve been looking forward to this day for several weeks as my sixth graders began to ‘blossom’ into seventh graders. It happens every year and the answer is an eleven week break to rest, reset, and restore for new year and new crop of students.
Day 1 finds me in my ‘summer office’ plotting and planning the today and the remaining 75 days of summer break. This will be my fourteenth summer of this blog. I have chronicled every summer and fall, winter, and spring since that first post thirteen years ago.
I am trying something new with this post, a response to the daily prompt through WordPress. Today’s prompt is
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Muhammad Ali once said,
“A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
I suppose if I had answered that question 30 years ago, or maybe even next week, the answer might be three different books, but at this moment there are three: the Bible, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella.
The Bible I’ve been reading the Bible most of my life. This past winter, I was watching a football game and watched a commercial produced by an organization called, He gets Us. It was a commercial for Christianity and it got me curious. Who is He Gets Us?
After clicking, reading, watching, and clicking some more, I wound up here You Version: Jesus – He Gets Us. I read, clicked, watched, listened, and downloaded the app. I began reading the Bible in a year. Since January 1, I’ve been following a plan to read the Bible in a year. There is so much to learn from the wisdom of the Bible, and I feel like I am only scratching the surface. If you are curious, it’s there for you to be curious, and less judgmental. Continue reading first day of summer ’23→
It’s Sunday and I am sitting at my summer office and listening to the gentle whirrrrr of the hummingbird at the feeder to my upper left. It’s Sunday morning quiet and except for the occasional car, truck, or airplane I can hear the birds singing in the trees. Fern and Ivy laying nearby enjoying the time outside.
Friday evening, I noticed it seemed darker than normal at 8:15 PM. Early Saturday morning, I read the morning New York Times email which confirmed Friday evening’s observation, summer is waning.
Sunset in NYC on Wednesday is at 8:00pm. The sun won’t set later than 8:00pm in NYC again until May 9th, 2023.
Confirmation of my observation piqued my curiosity so, I researched. As it turned out, Wednesday August 9th was also the final 8 PM sunset for this summer where I live. The next 8 PM sunset won’t occur for another 274 days or until May 9th. Being curious, I researched further, here are some lasts and nexts, in case you are wondering:
the last 7 PM sunset 9/15/2022, the next 7PM sunset, 3/17/2023
the last 6 PM sunset 10/22/2022, the next 6PM sunset, 3/12/2023
change in daylight savings time occurs 3/11/2023
the last 5 PM sunset 11/5/2022 at 5:41 PM but the shift away from daylight savings time makes the sunset on 11/6/2022 – 4:40 PM, the next 5PM sunset, 1/27/2023
the earliest sunset occurs at 4:21 PM between 12/3 to 12/14/2022
If you are curious, you can research your location using the Time and Date sun calculator. There is a plethora of information: sunrise, sunset, sun angle, and more.
I am an early riser. At the height of summer, the sun rises early, and it is light before 6 AM. The sunrise has been later each day, too. Summer is waning. Continue reading last day of summer break→
As a kid I never gave thought to what teachers did over summer break. I was free. I could sleep late, stay up late, and read what and when I wanted.
I am finishing my twenty-third summer break as a teacher. That first summer, 1999, really wasn’t a break at all. It was spent applying for jobs, and interviews, and finally landing a teaching job in the middle of July.
photo courtesy of the Express – click to read the article – King of the jungle: Dramatic moment ferocious lion kills wildebeest in just 60 SECONDS
I remember that interview well, it was more a conversation than an interview. I remember walking out of the principal’s office and seeing the eleven o’clock interviewee waiting and thinking that I had nailed the interview. Actually, we both did. Both of us were hired that year and will still teach at the same school, today.
Now twenty-three year later, I know teachers are busy but I can still do those things I did as a kid. But school is coming and it’s like a lion.
In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight
In the jungle the quiet jungle
The lion sleeps tonight
The end of summer is like the lion, it sleeps and then roars. School begins next week, and I’ve spent summer doing those things I said I’d do when school was out, and I had more time. I’ve also spent time thinking and re-thinking how I am going to approach this year. I took a class, and I taught a class and though it all, I am ready to get back to school next Monday.
Last week, I taught a class. It was a one-day teacher’s camp, and it was optional for all of us – teachers and learners, though only teachers came. The class I taught was titled, Lions and Wildebeest – using Puzzles to Engage 21st Century Learners.
The class was based on a lesson that I taught last spring. It was a Monday lesson before spring break. My science classes had finished a major unit the previous Friday and taken the test. We had five days before spring break with three days of state-mandated testing set for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Experience taught me not much beyond testing would be done that week and I needed a lesson to encourage my students to be curious and full of wonder and be ready for the fourth quarter which would begin the Monday after break.
at my summer office… the tools needed to solve the puzzle
So, I introduced Lions and Wildebeest. It’s a riddle. The riddle challenges students to think and collaborate. Exactly what was needed for our students. The premise is simple, Continue reading Tuesday’s Tune – The Lion Sleeps Tonight→
