Shit, I just lost a post...

To recap: On sunday, we awakened once again to the sound of The Dickens dumping things out on the floor. Less that two hours (and very little breakfast) later, we hit the road, filled up with gas, and gingerly eased onto 404, headed north towards I-5. We navigated the Grapevine in the slow lane, and descended once more into the Central Valley where, after driving for awhile, the van shut itself off again. It started right up, but it's still stressful to suddenly have no power while driving down a hot freeway in the middle of miles and miles of farmland. The kids complained. After the third semi-stall (rpms dropping from 2000 to 1000 for no reason) we elected to stop using the air conditioning to see if it helped matters. It did (or seemed to - maybe it was a placebo effect). This, of course, meant that we had to lower all of the windows while driving past the Coalinga cow yards. Thousands of cows! All just standing there in their sad, barren pastures with nothing to do but chew cud and manufacture tons of cow shit. We breathed in this heady aroma for a couple of miles.
We stopped briefly at a gas station to watch the green liquid pooling under the van and scratch our heads in puzzlement at the fact that we weren't low on any of our fluids. Oh yeah, The Dickens walked over and roared at the large, white metal Allosaurus with the bird's nest in its mouth. It didn't roar back.
Back on the road, we made pretty good time until the van stalled on the uphill grade on 152, near the San Luis reservoir. I cursed a bit, and the van started up again. A short time later, and not far from where we had been stuck in traffic on the journey out, we got stuck in traffic again. At least this time there was a discernable reason. We could see helicopters in the distance dumping some sort of fire retardant onto a smoking patch of ground. We inched forward. At one point I looked to my right and saw a lone doe munching contentedly in the shadow of a huge Oak tree. That seemed to me to be a lot more appealing than sitting in traffic. Of course, if we all got out to eat grass, we would never get home, so we waited. Some time later, we passed the clusters of emergency vehicles and some helpful farmers pitching in to make sure the fire was out. The kids thought it was pretty cool.
We did finally get home, with the van behaving for the final leg of the journey. We walked in the door sometime after 7:00 pm. Two hours later I went to work.

This week I've been teaching at Vasona, which isn't as interesting as Sanborn, but we're making things work anyway. It's back to Bugology, but without the wooded trails and without the huge selection of critters in the visitors center. I have fourteen kids. This time there are three girls, as opposed to the one girl the first time around. Nobody really stands out as being really unmanageable, and there are a couple of kids who seem to have a pretty good knowledge of the subject. One girl keeps giving me hugs, and a couple of the boys get a little teary when their moms leave. One boy keeps trying to catch bees and yellowjackets. I keep telling him he has great bug catching skills, but poor judgement. I hope he doesn't get stung. Today we made Paper Wasp nests in the forks of twigs, using the left over paper mush from last week. It's getting kind of stinky, but the kids, for the most part, had a good time doing it, and the other staff members who saw the results thought they were pretty neat.

Time to nap.

cds I listened to while being sleepy: M. Gira "Drainland", Jarboe "Dislocation", and Bohren & der Club of Gore "Midnight Radio" disc 1