The Opinions Expressed Here Are Not Necessarily Those of the Author

Humph…you might say…how can the opinions expressed in a blog not necessarily be those of the author? Well, “here’s the deal ” (as my good friend Tom always says)…the post you are about to read, see, hear, is not my own work, but the alleged work of a school in Queensland. However, I find it very amusing…even the parts I personally don’t agree with. I can understand other people’s frustrations and laugh rather than rant about the ways they choose to exercise their rights to expression. So, listen in the spirit the video is offered…lighten up and have a laugh.

Which leads me to my next video…I noticed that many of the comments regarding the answering machine message and logged through YouTube were more than critical of teachers and of parents. My advice, accept that everyone gets to the point where they “just can’t take it anymore.” Remember Howard Beale’s famous lines…having revisited that thought, I see YouTube has that clip available too. I just couldn’t resist.

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Having been above the tension line

Back from a week above the “tension line” otherwise known as Washington Island,  a 30-minute ferry ride away from the over-commercialized Door County.  We stayed at Cascio Cottages on the waterfront and loved every waking and sleeping moment! Lots of biking and campfires, talking with the locals at the bars and grocery stores. RELAXATION!

Can’t say I don’t enjoy “North Door,”  as some call it. The series of communities boast as many shops as full-time inhabitants and there I always find unique purchases. One of my “must shop” visits is Sister Bay’s Chelsea Antiques and Blue Willow Shop where I like to pick up one antique novelty (sounds oymoronic) each year. This year it was an antique English cheese dish, last year a mahogany crumb duster–you get the picture. Another preferred stop is at Fish Creek’s Bungalow by the Bay next door to Pelletier’s Restaurant, grandfather of the Door County Fish Boil. Bungalow by the Bay offers really unique home decor and bargains on artwork as well as cool furniture, modern and antique.  My other antique must shop is Egg Harbor’s Bay Trading Company with its seemingly endless collection of architectural antiques. Terance, the owner, is willing to find anything you aren’t able to put your hands on in his already burgeoning antique mall and make accomodations to ship or deliver to your door. Last year, we bought some brackets for our Victorian style home and he sent them to us via another customer who lived only 15 miles away from us. Worked great for everyone! This year, I brought home a Captain’s Wheel among my treaures. I thought it was pretty cool…now each of my kids wants one too!

Of course, we dined at Al Johnson’s famous restaurant and gorged on Swedish pancakes covered in his special maple syrup and Lingonberries. Al wasn’t there and I don’t think he is of late, but I have fond memories of his pouring bottomless cups of coffee for his patrons and that custom still continues. Al’s absence isn’t the only change in the county, but Door County continues to retain a charm that speaks to not only moms and dads, but brothers and sisters who grow to become the moms and dads of tomorrow. All in all, Door County is a worthwhile vacation destination. Of course I’m a bit biased–we have taken our familyin its evolving form to Door for twenty-five of the last thirty summers!

All Brag….

My roses have never been so beautiful! Although I have been bemoaning  the cool rainy days of June, my roses, once silent, are shouting in bloom their pleasure with this year’s spring.

Even clippings from faded blooms arrange themselves for a portrait shoot!

Danger Lurks in the Cold of Night

The lone survivors of a frosty, midnight attack...reunited.

Although all the birds are domesticated, the ducks can fly, albeit briefly, just above the trees.

 

Like everywhere else in the country, it has been cold here…downright frigid. We reached a low this month of -27, tying an all-time record. I’ve managed to stay warm with an electric heater in my office and a well-stoked fireplace. But my worry has been for my outdoor friends.

 We live on three acres of hilly, rural property bordered by a fresh water creek overgrown with bramble and wild flowering crab trees. Alongside the creek is an island sanctuary, created some twenty years ago by my father-in-law. The sanctuary is a small island surrounded by a moat, something like a little pond where birds, wild and domestic can safely nest or flee the terror of coyotes, plentiful here in the hog and corn country of the Midwest.

Canadian geese nest each year at the hatching place of the female.

We built our house on a hill just above the wild-life shelter ten years ago and enjoyed watching the Canadian Geese that flew in every March, nested as pairs, and disappeared shortly thereafter, following the creek north to a larger body of water, a lake, where their families grew through the summer. In the fall, they migrated south and we again awaited their spring return.

I so enjoyed the geese, that I bought White China Geese, domestic birds that cannot fly and so will never migrate from me. I order the geese through a catalog and they arrive on a scheduled plan through the mail. Once here, we nurture their growth in a cattle trough with a light bulb dangling overhead until they are strong enough to survive the elements on their own…a couple of weeks. When that day comes, they are put into the sanctuary to make friends with whomever else may come along, Canadian Geese and unknown ducks and herons that drop by for a visit. I usually have to teach them how to get into the water and hopefully learn to save themselves from the dangers of nature: raccoons, turtles, and other critters that crawl through the wild wire that banishes coyotes and other larger prey from the habitat.

 Just before the weather went south, so to speak on the thermometer, I was commenting to my husband on how beautiful our geese looked on new-fallen snow. If it weren’t for their bright orange beaks and webbed feet, they would go unnoticed against the winter backdrop. How humanly naive I was!

 
The coldness of this winter weather and the beautiful blanket white have joined with the coyotes in a war against my birds! Hungry, the coyotes have become even more cunning in their search for food and last week, several were able to break into the sanctuary and challenge the safety of the China White Geese.  The Geese need open water for safety, but the bone-chilling cold had frozen the pond fully over.  In the morning, when I looked to the pond  could see where the geese tried to escape into the open water, but the water, no longer open, was no longer their refuge; instead the winter freeze and the yipping coyotes had united to destroy my birds, some of whom I had tended for six or seven years

Well, I won’t belabor the story. One of the geese survived and begged me to free it from the refuge that had now become a holding room for the condemned. I opened the gate and freed it to the creek and for hours, it honked (the truly honk!) for friends now gone. One lone surviving goose. I was equally heartbroken. I checked on it hourly, even as the temperatures hovered below the zero mark. Finally, it lost its voice!
 
The next day, a full forty-eight hours after the murderous blitz of the coyotes, I heard another honking…and I followed the call into the wooded area running between the cornfield and creek. There, I found a second survivor…a White China Goose, waddling through the bramble of multi-flower rose, weak but alive.

In -20 degree temperature, I coaxed my first found goose down the creek bed to reunite the pair of old friends. It wasn’t easy. The goose I had first discovered was scared and didn’t want to move upstream. The goose I had just found was weak, so weak, he limped and lumbered; he didn’t want to move, but somehow, he had survived while his friends were savagely killed and eaten. Some left for dead, their bodies mangled but not consumed. I literally crawled beneath the overgrown brambles, coaxing the birds to move and meet. My work was rewarded. They came together and happily so!
 
I have been worried, sure the coyotes would return. But nearly two weeks have passed and still the White China Geese float on the creek, now enjoying the corn we have placed along the banks to save them from venturing out for food.

The Mother of the Bride Takes a Moment to Reflect

Shortly after the wedding, the bridal couple could not be found...ooops!!

 

I gave birth to a daughter…in 1984…and since then, I have known she would eventually marry. More than that, I have hoped for her to find a soul mate, a partner that would give her the love and companionship that I have felt in the relationship that I share with her father, my husband of more than thirty years. So why, why, why in the world does realization of that aspiration, the fruition of oneness with a fine young man, the event that I can easily say is one of the most anticipated days in my life and hers result in the post “holiday blues”?!?!?!?

 

The wedding was beautiful, and even though I am biased, take a look….it was special. The vows were on my front lawn. My daughter wanted an outdoor wedding and I said, “No one else would cherish that memory like I would! It must be, yes, must be in the yard!” And that is where she wanted her wedding to unfold, to bloom, and to continue the evolution of a growing family love.

 

And now, it is October! I can’t believe how the time has passed!

 

 

 

Blogger tag–a meme that personalizes!?!

Tagged by my teacher and mentor, Cheri Toledo, I felt like a school girl who found a chain letter in the mailbox. But once I followed her instructions–”check my blog…read the directions at the top of the post”–I realized that this was different from a chain letter. Having been tagged gave me an opportunity to step outside of my role as edublogger and share something of who I am with my readers and also, have a chance to reflect on what is or has been important to me as an individual. So, thank you, Cheri! 

However, before I post my 8 random facts, I must also confess that I checked a couple of bloggers who had also been tagged to see how they had posted their responses. The picture posts were inspired by my visit to Brian Crosby’s Learning is Messy blog are not of my own inspiration. And in visiting Lucy Gray’s blog, A Teacher’s Life, I was introduced for at least the second time to a new word: meme. And so, before I could even act on my tagging, I had to have a conversation with the Merrriams to discover the meaning of meme–an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. Now it all makes perfect sense–bloggers are spreading this behavior of tagging that allows them to step outside of a personna and present themselves in a personal and random way…or at least that is how I am seeing this phenomena.

If you’ve been tagged-here are the Rules:

1. Post these rules before you give your facts
2. List 8 random facts about yourself
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

My Eight Random Facts:

1. Before becoming a teacher, I was a free-lance writer and photographer…even took a magazine cover shot.

2. I like swans and geese.

3. I like to travel and learn about different cultures. I once studied in France at the University of Dijon for a summer stint and have since traveled there with my daughter to visit a French foreign exchange student we hosted in 2004.

4. My husband and three children traveled to Eygpt where we spent one month climbing, studying, sweating, hiking, sweating, and learning to appreciate both having nothing and having much.

5. My house burned to the ground on February 2, 2004 and so I have no pictures of my life or the lives of my family prior to that date.

6. I am returning to France this fall with my husband and so we have both been studying French all summer long!

7. I live on a farm where we raise more than 15,000 pigs each and evey year. Have another pork chop!

8. As an educational entreprenuer, I would like to establish a non-profit educational consortium in the middle of central Illinois to meet the needs of rural schools wherever they exist.

I tagged

Rich

mnakamura

Karen Dennis