What did you do this summer? 500 Words, please.

(raises hand)

hey yo, mr. nation!

up your nose with a rubber hose...

Up your hole with a metal MMMMFFFFF Mr. MMMMFFFF Mr. (MMFMFMFMFFFletMMFgo ofMMMMMFFFFmeorI'mreportingMMMMFFFFthisMMMFFFF)Nation!

Mostly I gardened.

I planted lantana, Jerusalem sage, 2 other kinds of sage, periwinkles, firebush, pacifica chrysanthemum, stonecrop, phlox, tricolor stonecrop, mondo grass, little kitten maiden grass, blue fountain grass, a couple other types of grasses, zinnias, more chrysanthemums, rosemary, Echinacea, a crepe myrtle and a few more flowers I can't think of the names of.

Before that, I filled up a huge hole with fresh dirt, manure compost and sand, and did the same with a big flower planter.

Before that, I concrete stained the walkway around the planter with a power sprayer. 3 different colors, looks all Tuscany like. I still have to do the driveway, then I'm going to paint the new patio with concrete paint and stencil on little dragonflys and stuff.

I still have time to bolt 2 wrought iron cranes down to the corner of the patio, next to all the ornamental grass, and paint some koi around them and put in some kind of low container filled with water with solar powered lily pads that will fountain water in the air.

I also got rolfed, which should really increase my energy level so I can really get some stuff done during the Fall.

(starts to raise hand, then changes mind)

Blurts out... "Mr. Nation. Chai's been drinking and puking.

Squinny: Thank you very much for your report. It's appears you have learned a lot about life this past summer. A+

Chai: I have to say I had to go look up some of the names of all those plants. How beautiful! Please take pictures and share. A+

Mr. Drewdad and Mr. Region Philbis: You are both assigned to in-house this Saturday from 8am until Noon. Bring a loose leaf folder and several working pens, Miss Marie Claire Elliot, the new intern in the Principal's office - freshly graduated from Florida State University's School of Education, will give you your assignments. Do not fail to make me proud.

Husker: I am trying to find someone who can come over and massage your resume.

Joe(so far only Big Swede is free for the weekend.)Nation

i guess i'll just take the zero....

I know you are a man of few words (and about half of those are considered unacceptable in polite society) but the above in simply not sufficent to the assignment.

I do not give zeros. You must hand in your report.

Squinney: Chai's other activities, (is puking the correct word for what she has been doing?) are a subject of concern that I will be addressing with her in private.

Chai: I will see you in the hallway.

Joe(or in the conference room)Nation

My Summer
For: Mr. J. Nation
By: Tico (the other one, without the cigar)
Date: 31 August 2007


Unfortunately, unlike that slut, squinney, nobody put their tongue in my mouth. Can we say "slut"? Unlike that chai, I did not play in the dirt or puke.

The theme of my summer must have been "electrical". Unfortunately for me that is electrical in the real sense and not the metaphoric. I much prefer metaphoric to reality. But alas (can we say "alas"?), reality won out over metaphorocity even though it is, as we all know, meaningless.

Early in the effen (can we say "effen"?) hot summer, I bought a ceiling fan. Knowing that I am a technological inept (please see last year's physics mark for confirmation), I had my friend Rob install it. Rob has several university degrees in electronics, so although I had my reservations, I had to agree with him that it was not necessary to turn off the power when installing a ceiling fan. Unfortunately, electronics does not seem to equal electrical knowledge and Rob's ass was blown across the room.

I had a stern lecture by the condominium management, and a valuable life lesson was learned: Rob is a dork. Can we say "dork"?

Last week, while making an omelette in the microwave (which is a skill that I have perfected despite refusing to take Home Ec), the microwave made a loud noise and stopped cooking. Because I didn't want to ruin the perfect omelette, I plugged the microwave into the stove outlet. Another loud noise happened and I am now without either microwave or stove capabilities. But the omelette was delicious. I hope the school lunch programme is in full effect this year.

Between electrical disasters, I worked in a florist store. It was very satisfying because I got to help many people and make them happy. For example, the time I accidentally put a Happy Birthday card on a funeral arrangement. And another time I felt just like Cupid when I explained to an upset lady who was trying to return a very beat up bunch of little roses that the man who originally bought that bouquet didn't want to spend money on the big, beautiful roses. Her words were very heartwarming.

I also entered a floral competition. I was very excited about my entry which was a symphony of tension, with willow branches tied in very contorted shapes among the flowers. Unfortunately, my arrangement exploded in the face of the judges. Apparently that's not allowed, however I was surprised that the judges did not enjoy the meaningless experiential shower of flowers (and whiplashing branches).

I had the opportunity to visit many friends this summer. One of them has just adopted a dog, the first pet she has ever had. It's a cockapoo. Are we allowed to say "cockapoo"? Anyway, cockapoo is a very apt name for this breed. Let's just say that her Curious George is no longer so curious.

But now summer is over and I, for one, look forward to all the classes and assignments of the new year. I especially look forward to watching certain students (BPB, DD, RP, H et al.) crash and burn, academically speaking.

p.s. there's a doobie taped to the back of this paper, because I heard that you'd prefer that to an apple.

(Why, Tico, whatever do you mean? he said, reaching for the lighter.) Please stand next to the wall and put the tips of your elbows together behind your back.

Your essay was amusing and entertaining as evidenced by the applause heard around the room. Rob is not a dork, he is a horny man who hoped by putting up your ceiling fan, you would electrify a few moments of his life. I hope he recovered. Your Grade: A+

Joe(Okay, that's enough elbow touching.)Nation

Whaddya mean, summer? SUMMER??

We've just finished a bloody cold winter, and even had some rain - in itself a rarity - but we're still in drought!

Today is the first day of Spring! Wheeeee!!!!!!

I'm on holiday at a beach south of Sydney and it's t-shirt weather! Yipppeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Probably still some cold weather to come (as in next week) but not today.

The summer started and ended with me trying to scramble around for extra work. I ended up spending the free time I had doing two things: gardening and homework. Between those times I took care of my niece and nephew and we were really lazy.

The gardening was fun. It'd been years since I spent that kind of time out with the plants. I was mostly doing demolition-gardening on the cape at the beginning of the summer. I was pulling out a field of weeds for a woman who is dying of breast cancer. It's her third round of chemo, the cancer has metastasized, she was supposed to be dead years ago. She brought me grapes and cherries as I worked. I liked her. She also gave me a raise immediately. I might never see her again. But, maybe I will next year. She's a trooper. I ran into (literally) a shrew nest while ripping up the field. I must have killed or burried one or two pups, because I watched the momma move all her babies into the hollow tree trunk and then she kept returning to look for the lost babies. I went home and looked up the shrew. It has a venomous bite so as to stun the vicious earth worms it eats.

I also weeded and mulched at her neighbor's house. They have a huge german shepherd puppy. He was involved in vigorous anti-digging training and looked over my shoulder as I was pulling up weeds. He looked at my hands digging, looked at my face, looked at my hands.... he seemed to be asking me,"Who gave you the right to dig when I'm not allowed to. Just wait until my parents see THIS!" Poor silly dog. In this yard I picked up a tick and a mild case of poison ivy.

On my last project I moved a bunch of dirt of the roots of an oak tree so it wouldn't die (the dirt was dumped there when they resurfaced the road). Then I built a retaining wall by myself. I think it came out pretty darn well. The really cool thing about all this gardening was being on antihistamines. They made me thirsty and suppressed my appetite, they made me fall asleep at 7pm and stay awake until 2am. And in between I couldn't really think about much else besides ("this is a weed, this isn't" or "oh ****, this was poison ivy" or "OW! It really hurts when my finger gets caught between two large rocks").

In school I learned how to make differentiated lesson plans to accommodate special needs students and students with different learning styles. We learned all about IDEA, EIP, 504, ADD/ADHD/ADWO, NVD, etc. We got to watch movies and sit at tables ALL weekend times 2.

With my niece and nephew, we ate a lot of popcorn and watched movies over and over and over again.

This was the year that I developed a taste for sea urchin naughty bits. They are quite salty, no surprise ther what?
Not all sea urchins have gonads that are worth even a second look let alone devouring them with a loud sucking sound and some wasabi. Outside of that, I was pretty much a loner and worked on some stuff and did a little bit of this and that and went here an there. I remember a coupla trips to a WAlmart to buy some stuff and then there were some boat trips .
If I were abducted by aliens do I get any extra credit? Im not sure about anal probing but my ass is sore for some reason.


I hadnt had any potato chips since June and Im still on a potato=chip-free diet . The head wound is pretty much all healed up and they got the guy that broke in but hes already out on bail cause he daid it was all an accident and a misunderstanding and he thought that it was his house and when he caught me sleeping he thought I actually broke into his place . Ive been a bit confused so Ive taken to carrying aluminum baseball bats, and I like to keep them all shiny and polished ,

Goretex isnt as waterproof as they all say, cause if you fall in wearing a goretex jacket you get just as wet because it comes in around the sleeves and the bottom.

I f ound the US on a map. Course it already had a title that said that it was a map of the US but still, I can find it . Its in the kitchen table drawer in the RV.

I decided against being made a made man this year, first off, nobody asked me, and when I asked around over at the IGA, the guy kept sending me over to kousewares. I think we had a miscommunication. So Im gonna let that go till maybe the winter when I can devote more time to practicing being made.

Thats about it , except for the big fossil, but thats more for religion and philosophy I think. Im admitting that I dont fully understand these topic headings so Ill jsut hold off until we have a fossils and ancient sediments forum.

Well, its soon time for bed and my dogs are ripping something apart out in the pasture, I can hear it and I think Id better go see what they are doing before we have another 2000$ vet bill and have to deodorize all the dogs because, while they may kill a skunk, the skunk always bats last.

Name: Stephen
Date: Aug 31st 2007

Early this summer I attended a funeral with my parents, as I approached the casket at the gravesite, I noticed that the boards we were walking on {under the fake grass...green indoor/outdoor carpet} to keep the family from falling into the hole, were not secure. Coming from a construction family, I am accustomed to walking on shaky scaffolding, so it was not a biggie, but suddenly the board under my right foot was simply no longer there, as if it had, after years and years of scrutiny finally decided to totally reject all things ontological, and simply became non-existance. For a split second I stood on nothing but air, much like I have observed Wile E. Coyote do on so many occasions. I quickly shifted all my weight to my left foot, which a few months prior had suffered a severe sprain, and grabbed the casket rail with my right hand.

For some reason this did not stabilized me, this is when I noticed located at the other end of the remaining board, was a person. Said person had been been drinking heavily all afternoon, and he was doing what looked to be an Elvis impersonation...he was wobbling...a lot. So, I had a choice to make, step off the board and let "Elvis" take his chances, or try to balance the board with all my weight bearing down on my still very tender left ankle...I sucked up the pain, and went for the balancing act, which is odd because I'm a Virgo not a Libra.

My mother, who had been walking along beside me on firm terra, had been mesmerized by "Elvis", as women are apt to do, and had not noticed that I was no longer walking along with her, but was now doing my own little Chubby Checker {twistin'} dance trying to keep the board from slipping further. When she figured out that I was sort-of-falling, she tried to pull me away from the casket, while I was trying my best to stay put, keeping "Elvis" in this plane of existence, I doubt I could take losing the king again, especially right in front of my eyes.

My mother and I proceeded to play a little game of push and pull, for what seemed like half an hour, but was probably more like three to five seconds....and my best estimate of four pulls, five pushes, and at least one generous shove....while "Elvis" at the other end of our graveside seesaw, was amping up his act with even wilder gyrations. His end of the board had swung completely out onto the ether, and it was as if he were standing on one end of a diving board, with me on the other doing my best to simply be ballast.

Under the strain {he must have been doing the later years Elvis, because he was quite heavy} I could only utter a loose broken monosyllabic sentence...."board...fall...no....move". My mother finally got a grasp on the situation, and sprang into action with the reflexes of a Jedi, well, actually more like a blonde/blue eyed Sigourney Weaver {they are both quite tall, and have that no nonsense quality about them} ran to the other end of the board and threw "Elvis" to safety. Relieved of my duty as an anchor, I jumped into the air, and landed with one foot on the ground and the other on the rail of the placer {casket lowering device}, which left me spanning the chasm, in an awkward variation of the Captain Morgan stance....as the board slid quite noisily into that great lumber yard in the sky.

When my mom helped me get back across, we shouted warnings to the other family members, then quickly exited the tent, slightly embarrassed, and quite angry...when my mom told my dad what happened, she said a lot of naughty words.

I have looked at life a bit differently since that day.

2 {One foot in the grave} Packs

head wound?

LittleK wrote:
First of all, the class and I would like to express our appreciation to you for your wonderful essay. Your attention to detail and descriptive use of words brought the stories to life for all of us. The combination and contrasting of the life and death struggles of both the little shrew and her family and the woman with breast cancer was particularly moving or maybe I'm just a little depressed this morning and am easy to please.

Please be careful in the future as I am reliably informed that fourth graders possess a venomous bite. A+

As to your question "head wound?". Your assignment is to look up the word 'apocryphal'

Which brings us to Farmerman and his work. So as not to make LittleK's assignment any easier, I will only say "Well done." I am only taking two points off for the overuse of 'this and that'. This is an assignment about expressing the details of your experience. A.
(Oh, and Farmerman, we are both founding members in good standing of the Fossils and Sediment Club. At least, I feel that way this morning.)

I didn't know what to think about Stephen's essay so I called his mother. She confirmed all of the details, but I hasten to add that most mothers will lie like rugs for their children and it was this morning at about 3AM, so she was also yelling and upset and using those naughty words he referred to so I am using that circumstance to further confirm the story's authenticity. Wonderful use of detail and drama, excellent progression to the crisis of the story and a very fine denouement. A+

Margo is correct class. There are some people in the world who do everything the opposite of what is right and rightside up. They call themselves Australians. I thought for a long time they were just really big fans of Paul Auster, but it turns out he doesn't know anything about them.
I hope we can get some of them to share what they did this past "winter" (wink, wink, say no more, say no more.) and I for one am looking forward to those essays.

Joe(I have a rock I want to show to Farmerman)Nation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk5UnA7aQ4s&mode=related&search=

I did bugger all, of note. x 494.

x

oooohhhhhhh :wink:

O.K., this is 505 words. That's as much trimming and editing as I could do. Speculation about what we found will be almost as useless as trying to refind a particular needle in a stack of needles as high as a house. Oh well ....
_____

Early this summer I saw a map showing what appeared to be a dry lake northwest of Rio Rancho, New Mexico. There were no roads shown leading to the area, and the 20 miles was over some pretty rugged terrain. Due to its inaccessibility, not many people have probably walked that ground in historical times. This was just the sort of challenge to appeal to my friend Joe.

We put together the supplies and equipment we would need to spend up to two weeks in the wilderness. Using the GPS system In Joe's four-wheel drive we were able to make our closest approach to the area in a little over a day. We set up camp and started our hike early the next morning before the sun was over the horizon.

The going was far rougher than it appeared on the maps. After three days we were tired, sore and had barely gone five miles. Our packs had worn our shoulders raw, and every muscle ached. On the evening of the eighth day we camped on a high, rocky ridge and could see a large spot of green along an arroyo below us. The dry lakebed still wasn't in sight, and we were very discouraged. The next morning we headed down hill towards the green oasis hoping to replace our dwindling water supply.

It wasn't much of a spring; just a little dribble of water into a small pool. Around the pool there were hundreds of animal tracks in the mud and sand. The low shrubbery provided us with cool shade from the harsh mid-day sun so weate a small lunch and took a siesta waiting for the day to cool off. We camped a short distance away from the spring intending an early start on the tenth day. That evening we seriously considered turning back, but left the decision for the next morning.

We awoke early and rested as the sun came up. I made coffee while Joe went down to the spring for water. Joe began to shout for me to come and see what he had found. I didn't expect much, perhaps some ancient petroglyph, or the tracks of some larger animal. I found Joe squatting over the sand staring down at a set of small tracks. I looked closer where he was pointing and could see what appeared to be a line of small horse tracks. Not just small, but tiny tracks belonging to a horse that couldn't have been more than twelve inches tall. Obviously these were not the hoof prints of a horse … right? As I was trying to work out what animal might have left such strange markings in the sand, Joe tugged at my sleeve and pointed at the mud immediately beside the still pool. There we saw a set of "human" footprints that seemed to have been left by a rider dismounting from the miniature horse.

We left immediately, but it took a week and a half to find our way back to the truck.

Whoa, Asherman, that's trippy.