"Are You Afraid of Bees?"

"Are you afraid of beeeees?" a voice shrilled at me as I got out of my van in the parking lot behind my apartment.  It was, I found upon careful inspection, coming from a doorway into the back alley.  The new owner of a cafe in front of my apartment building was calling out the back door of her cafe, through the screen.  

Being a man, I said "no," (of course I wasn't afraid of anything) and walked over to see that there was a huge cloud of wasps around her garbage pails.  She had had the delivery of a box of lettuce which was heating up in the sun, and was afraid it might have wasps crawling around in it.  She got me to kick it hard a few times, and when no wasps flew out, I carried it around front for her, to the Robin's Nest Cafe.  She was grateful.  

I took a look today at what I'll be teaching and even went into the school.  I made up a bunch of classroom signs and posters to get printed.  My "common errors to avoid" one for 14 year olds now looks like this.  

I swear if I could get them to stop making any of these errors on the poster, that would be most of their writing problems fixed as to errors.  Formal language is a foreign language still, of course.

I've been taking hour-long walks down dark farm roads around here like I used to do when I was a teenager living at my folks' house.  Very calming.  I love when there is a strong wind blowing like there was tonight.  It was very dark, though.  Not a star or moon visible.

I picked up some tablets of melatonin on a friend's suggestion, in order to try to get my sleeping clock somewhat back to a diurnal pattern.  Interesting to try out.  They are supposed to trigger your brain that it's sleep time, even if your brain isn't getting the "it's dark now" cues to shut down, nor the "the sun is shining, so it's time to wake up now."  Seems to work.  Watching House reruns to get to sleep, with the occasional James Burke's Connections 2.  Doing a lot of happy thinking about teaching things fairly differently this year.