Endings and Beginnings

The school year is over for me now. I had originally expected to go back to working nights for the last couple of weeks but I ended up staying in the field instead, which is fine by me because working nights in late Spring is kind of a pain in the butt because the sun wakes the campers up nearly an hour before their official wake-up time. The problem with that is they're supposed to be quiet and I'm supposed to enforce this. It's very hard for fifth and sixth graders to stay in bed and be quiet for any amount of time. Most of them can't handle 5 minutes, let alone an hour.

My two final weeks in the field for the season went by in a blaze of sunshine and dust. The first week, I was impressed by the kid who chose to carry a car tire all the way back from the reservoir so he could throw it away (he carried it for probably around a mile), and the last week was notable for the number of bats we saw on the night hike (not really a night hike, but more of a crepuscular crawl, since it stays light so late this time of year) and the fact that Lake Ranch Reservoir is so low that we could walk all the way around it (usually, the far side is more or less impassable due to the water level and the lack of a trail). It was the first time I've done that. Several of the kids sunk in the mud near the shore, but they all managed to get out again. We found Killdeer eggs too, as the mom pretended to be injured so she could lure us away. At one point, I turned around and one of the boys was holding a Killdeer egg. At first, I was upset with him because I thought he'd taken it from the "nest" (in quotes because Killdeer don't build nests, they just lay their eggs on the ground), but he claimed he'd found it by itself in a shallow depression nearby. I put it down close to the other eggs, and the Killdeer looked confused as she returned to sit on the other ones.

Before these two weeks, I spent a few days in Baltimore for Maryland Deathfest, a 4-day music festival. I'm working on a report/review for my other blog, and I'll add a link here when it's up.

Tomorrow, we start summer camp set-up week. Thursday, Willow graduates from the fifth grade, and next week summer camp begins.