Work, Speeches and Dying Ponies.

I haven’t blogged in a while.  No excuses; I just haven’t.  I do have a life you know!  A life that’s full.  Between being a scout leader, working, commuting and helping kids with homework I’m a little pressed for time.  My new endeavor is competitive public speaking.  In fact I’m entered to give my first speech tonight, at the club’s annual humorous speech competition.

The sad news is that my daughter’s pony passed away last weekend.  He coliced sometime during the night, my wife had the veterinarian there by 9:30 a.m. but it was too late.  He was a halflinger/Shetland cross and had an awesome temperament.  His name was Scout and he was a GREAT pony.  I was sad that the horse died, but seeing the tears run down my little girl’s face was almost more than I could stand.  I held her in my arms for hours while she sobbed.  It’s a tough lesson that all kids have to learn; I just wish she didn’t have to learn it so soon.  She’s only eight years old.  She spent Sunday night crying and didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 a.m.  Going to school the next day was obviously out of the question.  She’s doing better now and things are kind of back to normal.  I’m just wondering how she’s going to handle the empty stall in the barn when she goes out there this weekend. 

Busy, busy, busy!

I'm still spending most of my free time crafting speeches for my Speechcrafters Class.  This Thursday I have to do a three-bullet informative speech about anything I want. I have the floor for three minutes.  I'm going to talk about the infamous "Prince of Nigeria" e-mail scam.  I was delving into the history and immediately found two interesting things. 1) Nigeria is a constitutional democracy and has no monarchy whatsoever.  Odd, since there are about 28 Nigerian princes on LinkedIn right now.  2) This scam used to be a fax machine scam in the '80s and before that it was a letter writing scam and can be traced back to the 1920s!  Who knew?

The bug bites are just about gone. Yaaaaaa!

I normally don't blog about my kids unless it's something interesting, cool or funny.  With that in mind, we took them to an outdoor survival class last weekend.  It was basically a half day class designed to teach them what to do if they get lost in the woods.

All the exercises were about keeping them warm, dry and increasing their chances of getting found.  Here's a picture of my daughter's final test.

She found a high spot (to prevent being flooded in the rain) under a tree (to keep her dry) and made a small bench out of dry leaves and branches to keep her off the cold ground (if it were winter time and not 90 degrees.)  She then blew on her whistle three times (universal sign of distress) every minute until the teacher got there.  GOOD JOB!

We went to a small nature museum, after a picnic lunch, and found this interesting thing:

Can you guess what it is?  I'll put the answer at the bottom of this post.

We stopped at this cool country store.  It was a 200 year old, 3 story barn.  This is what I imagine when I think of a New England country store.  They had home-made onion & peach salsa!

Later that night my wife found this HUGE frog in our garden.  He was there to eat the beetles and he had a reservation.  We let him stay the night.

On Sunday morning my daughter's pony, Scout came out of the closet...

Monday found me back at work and doing a series of environmental inspections through Keen and into Brattleboro, Vermont.

Downtown Brattleboro...

That brings us up to today, which has been filled with speech writing, grant contract amendment writing, customer service voice mails to answer and e-mail questions to reply to.  By this time tomorrow the week will be more than half over.

Oh, and for those who made it all the way to the end...that odd thing in my hand was a tooth from a sperm whale.

Skipping School and Giving Speeches

I’ll be playing hooky tomorrow!  It’s amazing how I still get a thrill saying that.  It’s not like I’m in High School and I’m cutting class or anything.  I work in a state office building and I accrued leave time, but it still feels dirty.  All my coworkers will be stuck at their desks while I’m paddling my kayak down a river under the hot sun.  I’ll post some pics on Monday.

In other news I started my first session of Speech-crafters today.  I’ve wanted to join Toastmasters for a looooong time but I just couldn’t fit it into my schedule.  I’ve been doing structured outreach & education for about five years now and this is something I really need to do.  I have to do one public speech every week for five weeks (today didn’t count.)  It’s going to be very educational…and interesting.

Oh, and I'm planning a bonfire for Saturday night.

Interagency Recycling Committee

I Co-chair my Department's Green Team and today I was asked to sit-in on the State's Interagency Recycling Committee, because the two people who usually do it are on vacation today.  I was notified after the meeting started and therefore walked in 18 minutes late. I announced myself and began flipping through paperwork that was not mine and had no apparent order or continuity whatsoever.  The chairman said, "Oh good, you have hand outs."  I just laughed to myself and said, "No, I don't think so."  Despite being a complete catastrophe,  I still managed to somehow procure $6,000 for a pilot project I just found out about a couple days ago.