Tag Archives: Education

Wool Gathering

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A Pony for Jane

A Pony for Jane

Anne was so engaged at school yesterday that she forgot to take any pictures of the sheep. Consequently, I am taking the liberty of substituting this picture of a pony that Anne took this last weekend, for the sheep. Afterwards, I’ll bequeath it to Jane, who always wanted a pony, but so far has not gotten one.

Anne is a substitute teacher in the MRH school district. As such she has a new job almost every day. She has been substituting for almost ten years now and as such has held almost every position in the district. It’s not for nothing that she was named MRH Citizen of the Year, earilier this year. On Wednesday, she added a new job category to her already overflowing resume, shepherd.

MRH has a nutritional education program called Seed to Table. This program teaches good nutrition and helps fight childhood obesity. Part of its purpose is to teach the city kids that compose most of the MRH student body where their food really comes from and no the local Schnucks grocery store is the correct answer. To this end, earlier this year, Anne helped to lead a field trip to Soulard Market, the oldest farmers market west of the Mississippi. Wednesday though her job was to be like Little Bo Peep, but this time around her job description called for her not to lose her sheep or any of her students either.

Wednesday morning, before school, Anne was a little uncertain what the job of shepherd entailed. She asked me to find her knee-high rubber boots, just in case she was given the herculean task of mucking out the Augean stables for a day. As it turns out she didn’t need her boots, maybe because she had an intern to assist her? You know what they say flows downhill. Her main responsibility as shepherd was to introduce about half a dozen classes of kindergarteners and first graders to the sheep. “Pet them on the head and stay away from their back ends, because otherwise their hooves might step on your feet and that would hurt. Also, they might pee on you back there.”

Anne’s the avid knitter, so naturally she had some yarn with her that day. The intern and Anne were able to teach the children the process of how sheep’s fleece eventually becomes knitted hats and gloves. At the end, Anne held up her latest skein of yarn.

The sheep are just on loan to the school district. The school’s garden plot is too small to sustain anything larger than chickens. After the sheep, goats and even a pony is scheduled to rotate through the school. You see Jane, if you had attended a truly enlightened school district, you would have gotten your pony fix in kindergarten, when you really needed it.

Dottie and Dave

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Dottie Welch Retires, But Her Legacy Lives On

Dottie Welch Retires, But Her Legacy Lives On

The University of Rochester produces a series of lovely looking, glossy magazines. The main publication, the Rochester Review, comes out every other month and reports news university wide. The engineering school also produces a magazine, the Full Spectrum, which appears every quarter. All the while that Dave was attending school at Rochester, both Anne and I would pour over each new issue hoping to catch a glimpse of or a reference to David. Alas, it was to no avail, he never appeared in either magazine. He worked hard, but also kept his head down, which was bad for self publicity purposes. Flash forward three years after Dave graduated from Rochester and there he is, near the center of a scrum about Dottie Welch, the Biomedical Engineering Department’s Undergraduate Coordinator. This photo, along with the Full Spectrum announcement of Ms. Welch’s retirement appeared in the latest issue. I’ve also include another photo I took at Dave’s commencement.  This picture includes, Anne, Dave, Dottie and Dave’s advisor, whose name escapes me. Except that she was so instrumental in getting his career going. Anne is apparently wearing her Queen Mum crown.

David and His Three Moms

David and His Three Moms

Somebody Else’s Baby

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Baby Pix #1

Baby Pix #1

These two photos were texted to Anne yesterday. They show Anna, wearing her new sweater and knitted cap. She looks pretty good in both of them. She looks really happy with her new cap. Anna was born last fall and while her mother was on maternity leave, Anne taught her mother’s fourth grade class until the end of the year. Anne thought that it would be a nice idea to knit a baby shower gift.

When Dave was growing up, he looked askance at Anne’s affection for other people’s babies. If we were in a restaurant and he caught Anne making goo-goo eyes at a baby, at a neighboring table, we would scold her for it. His usual reasoning went along the lines that the other people might suspect Anne of some sort of foul intentions. Anne and I both saw through this dodge for what it really was, jealousy. David is our baby. This behavior was most apparent in his tween years. He is a grown man now and a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering at Purdue. He no longer chides his mom for looking at other people’s baby, but then Anne is noticeably restrained in this behavior now, at least while she is in his presence.

Anna offers and I needed a little ray of sunshine for this blog post and I suspect that many of my readers need it too. It has been rather dreary as of late here in the Lou. We were hit last week by Storm Q, but managed to dodge the worst of Storm Rocky this week. We only had rain and lots of fog. The other day, I watched the Liam Neeson movie, “The Grey”. It is set in northern Alaska and involves man-eating wolves, but the thing that is most notable about this film is the constant overcast that persists throughout the motion picture. If it doesn’t clear here soon, I’ll soon be looking over my shoulder for a stalking wolf pack.

Baby Pix #2

Baby Pix #2

Ode in Blood

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Movie Set Photo 7
Movie Set Photo 1
Movie Set Photo 2
Movie Set Photo 3
Movie Set Photo 4
Movie Set Photo 5
Movie Set Photo 6
Movie Set Photo 9
Movie Set Photo 8
As It Appears In the Shot


Dan sent the many photos displayed in this post’s gallery. They show the movie set that he has been working on for the past several weeks. The film is a graduate thesis project at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, in Orange County, CA. The film is called “Ode in Blood“. Here is a synopsis of this motion picture:

Ekwueme (E.K.) is a West African immigrant who needs money to bring his family safely to America. He gets a job as a handy-man, working for a very traditional and stoic Ensō Tanaka, who pays him handsomely for seemingly menial tasks. The two men begin to develop a bond that is put to the test when Ensō asks E.K. to help him commit hara-kiri: Japanese ritualistic suicide. E.K. must decide if he will fulfill Ensō’s wish; a wish that goes against everything that E.K. believes in, but that will promise to bring him what he wants most in this world: his family.

Most of the photographs are of the sets, while they were under construction. Some of the photos show the back of the set’s walls and how they were constructed. The final picture shows a camera shot of a finished set. One of the actors, I’m guessing that it is Ensō, is seen in this shot. I believe that this production shot was taken on the part of the set depicted in the Movie Set photo #8. I think that the two mirrors were transformed to look like the louvered windows. A pair of doors that Dan worked on are shown in photo #7. The following video is the teaser for this film. The movie is due out in May. I believe that it will be released on the Internet.

A Night at the Museum

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The Eads Bridge on a Dark and Foggy Night

The Eads Bridge on a Dark and Foggy Night

It was a dark and stormy night, well it was. Thursday night we went down by the river, not in a van, but to the Arch. We attended the grand opening of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit at the Arch’s museum. Last night, was more party than education. I guess Anne, her colleagues and their students, had already done all of that heavy lifting. In addition to the great social vibe of the evening, there were also cookies and free Arch tram rides.

The photo with this post is of the Eads Bridge, the oldest bridge across the Mississippi in Saint Louis. It demarcates the northern boundary of the Arch grounds. For once, I can claim fog as an excuse, instead of focus, for the fuzziness of this photograph. Still, I think that it makes for a great effect.

After the show, Anne and I retreated to the Tap Room, for a light supper and a brew. The Post-Dispatch had a great article about the school’s exhibit, that I’ll link to here. Individual students are interviewed and their commentary on the exhibit is priceless. We managed to dodge the occasional rain storm, on the Arch grounds and at the Tap Room, but our luck ran out, when we finally returned home.