End of the Week

Our second full week of school was one of those "long-short" weeks -- it went by quickly and had a lot packed into it. Gayle and I are on a new committee, the mentoring committee, at TCS. We helped in the formation of this committee over the summer and now Gayle is mentoring a brand new kindergarten teacher and I am the facilitator for the four mentors and their mentees. We had a brief meeting on Thursday before school just to see how things were going. Time is always a problem; the first days of school seem to have lots of changes in the schedule. We are finding that our mentoring document will need some tweaking -- reality has a way of doing that! My fifth graders were in charge of chapel on Friday, so we had to find time this week to practice. The focus this year is on the names of Jesus, so our chapel looked at many different names that we use during the week and then we came to the very best name, Jesus. I used some of the New Mexico pictures I had taken a couple of summers ago in a PowerPoint presentation I put together for a recital of Psalm 8 that the class did at the end of our chapel. I also had a spectacular picture of the Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble telescope. That didn't hurt either! Gayle had a birthday party for one of her third graders on Friday. The kids got a little goofy with the frosting, but then it was the end of the day.

This is the tall and the short of things in third grade!

We took a trip to De Leon Springs State Park on the motorcycle this morning. We left the house at 7 AM and were home again before noon. It was a round trip of about 110 miles. We met Vern and Linda Stauffer, & their daughter Monica at the park for breakfast. Inside the park is a restaurant, The Old Spanish Sugarmill. They have griddles built into the tables and we cooked our own pancakes and eggs. They do the bacon/sausage in the kitchen; everything else is right at the table. Gayle got blueberries for her pancakes and thought that one pancake reminded her of one of Bob's watercolors. We did take a couple of stops on the way back; it's a long sit and we needed to

stretch. We did get back before the afternoon thunderstorms hit. We've been in a more normal
cycle of morning sunshine and afternoon rain the last couple of days after almost four weeks of hot
and mostly dry weather. It made my commute to school on the bike a dry run in the afternoons, but we do need the rain. Next week we should be at 40 to 50% probabilities for rain so I may just get wet...or I'll ride with Gayle. That's the joy of teaching at the same place! I'm getting about 40 MPG, and the 5.5 miles to school is just a fun ride. I find myself reciting Psalms and songs of praise as I ride to school.