Update with cows, sharks, and The Best hats.

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  This week we had the last of Orientation, followed by Convocation, followed by the start of classes, so for me, there has been a real transition:  summer is over, and the school year has begun!  

OfSnough went to a Maritime and Sea Museum in Bordeaux, France.
This is the most ordinary of the pictures he sent me. 
Boats, maritime, of course.

I thought I was done teaching when I signed up to be Associate Dean, so I'd gotten rid of a lot of my physical teaching materials, and I find that this week I'm scrambling to reassemble them.  Now I've got my canning-jar-on-a-rope for carrying chalk (because the classrooms never have enough for all the group work I do with my students), and I've got a cute cloth bag for students to put their homework cards in, and I've made all the signage for where things go when students are turning things in.  I seem not to have completely forgotten how to do algebra (good) which puts me way ahead of many of my students (alas); pandemic-constrained education has not been kind to these peeps.  

Also the Maritime museum. 
I think the shark is throwing a temper tantrum.

And these are hats (?) at the Maritime Museum.
I sense a party theme emerging . . . 
I want to do this so bad, now.

The transition goes beyond summer-to-school, though, since my head is partly in the clouds of next year and beyond, when I'll be (per the current roadmap) on sabbatical and then retiring to . . . well, to lots of things.  I've been telling friends that I want to learn welding; several of my acquaintances have expressed a bit of jealousy, and one of them has offered to hook me up with an art/welding professor at a college down the road [yes, please!].  I also increasingly thrill to the idea of becoming a "Rubbish Rescue Artist", and the universe keeps showering with providential gifts in that vein.  For example, I've been trying to plan out how to make a set of cow shelves (that is, shallow shelves to hold my many -- many -- cow figurines that are currently jumbled across the front porch).  The window where I want to mount these shelves is 60" wide and 51" high, and I hadn't scrounged any lumber quite that long.  But then, Monday night, Prewash and I went out for a post-dinner walk around the block; Monday night happens to be trash night, and would you believe it but somebody put out at the curb a set of bed slats.  There were a dozen slats, the kind that go under the mattress and that are held together with ribbon; they're 3/4" thick and 3" wide and . . . huzzah . . . 60" long.  So now I have cow shelf material, and I can hardly wait to get started sawing some of them down and attacking/attaching them with my cordless drill and doing the paint brush thing!

Before Bordeaux, there was Lisbon with the Ale-Hop.
Neither of us know what "Ale-Hop" means.
Nonetheless, there is a cow. 

Nelson is also taking classes; he's very happy where he is right now (having moved from Metro Hope to the next place).  He has a roommate who has lots in common with him.  He says that they had a trip out to a place called "Serenity Village", which to me sounds like a euphemism not too far from "Rainbow Bridge", but was an actual cool place with about 300 people in attendance, grooving to the message.  

The Ale-Hop cow did not go to Serenity Village.

I'm hoping to bring several friends and family members together in a few weeks for our annual(ish) Pirate Dinner.  I'm getting ready to go grocery shopping for that event (and also for school-based things), which will be the first time I've been in a grocery store in . . . I don't actually know how long.  I have been very, very happy that I found and painted a little shark to add to the Pirate Cake milieu, although now I'm totally jealous of that giant silver shark, and I keep breaking into giggles imagining pirates in their special Bordeaux Maritime hats.   

So, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.