Thursday, October 05, 2006

Pond Research and the True Purpose of Phone Books

It was 2:30. Sweetling and I were doing school. More accurately, Sweetling was reading the "explore" section of her science lesson...which presented facts and information and whatnot. Sort of like reading a section in a text book. (I transferred a load of laundry.) Sweetling got to the activity section of the lesson. Now the lesson was "Freshwater Ecosystems". And the activity section was called "Pond Research". I thought....COOL, pond research. And in my mind I was envisioning a scavenger hunt of collecting and wading and trying to glimpse the frogs before they jumped into the water and you hear their telltale splash.

But no, apparantly pond research was fill out this boring paper about the reading section. I said aloud, "That's boring. It would be cooler to actually go to a pond."

Sweetling said, "Then why don't we?"

"Get your shoes on," was my immediate reply. Nevermind that the temperature outside is in the low sixties, that its drizzling, that I'm wearing clothes for a court appearance that was supposed to happen earlier that day. (A friend is going through a divorce and a child custody battle and asked me if I could be a character witness for her. They were actually able to settle on an agreement and it didn't have to come to a battle in front of a judge. So, I made a nice round trip to downtown today...which was absolutely better than the alternative and I am NOT complaining. My friend wound up getting everything she was asking for, so it was a good day.)

Sweetling and I head out to the van, me in my little dressy flats, and head to the Nature Preserve. We saw tadpoles, discussed what might live in the various nesting boxes set up around the ponds perimeter, visited the gift shop, and, the highlight of any fall outing, collected lots of leaves.

Leaves which are now pressed between paper towels in the residential section of my white pages. I mean, really, who uses the residential section of the white pages? Even with an unusual last name, there are way, way to many listings to be useful. Whose number do we ever look up there? Schools, churches, sports teams, and other organizations usually put out their own directory for parents, 'cause everyone knows that the residential section of the white pages are useless for actually finding a phone number.

Which is why my white pages are now full of fall leaves.

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