But that’s not all!

Spent two days at Pierce Middle School in Milton Massachusetts working with the eighth graders in Christine Charbenneau’s class doing vocabulary acquisition and helping Sara out with a couple school assemblies and a family literacy night.

I led the kids in writing some infomercials for vocabulary words ala Billy Mays (one of the exercises forthcoming in our new vocabulary book)  the first day and then participated in said family literacy event in the evening. We finished up the writing projects the second day and then Sara and I spent the rest of the weekend scoping out nearby Boston with Christine and her husband (this adventure will be expounded upon in detail in an upcoming post.)

The family Literacy night was a real cool event. Sara and I kicked the thing off with a keynote reading – performing some of our family oriented poems – then the English department lead a selection of half hour breakout sessions from which the parents could choose where they were treated to book talks and other good reading promoting positive propaganda. After the mini classes a book fair was set up in the library with the prerequisite PTO bake sale goods outside in the hallway and a good time was had by all!

Now ya see me - Now ya don't

A couple more days

and we’ll be in the month of May. May has always seemed to be an invisible month for me – the adjunct to a song about April showers. Maybe it’s because April being poetry month is usually a busy time around here or maybe it goes back to school days – May being that last full month before summer break – a time for turning in text books – washing the blackboard – final tests – film strips and thumb twiddling in bare walled classrooms.

Even May’s holiday, Memorial Day, comes at the end of the month skipping over ninety percent of the month’s days like absentmindedly stepping over a springtime puddle.

Maybe it’s the transformational qualities of the month – nobody spends a whole lot of time staring at a cocoon. We predict weather with caterpillars and plant gardens to attract butterflies but don’t notice the chrysalis affixed to a milkweed stem. The bitter cold of February or the melting swelter of an August afternoon can turn our heads – but the not really cold and not really hot sweatshirty kind of weather of this month just doesn’t snatch one’s attention.

The month of May is the low man on the calendar pole, a place holder, the opening band that nobody remembers once the headliners hit the stage.

May – a month to get through.

taiwan on

cooling my heels in Taipei airport waiting for a flight back to the states - 5 hour overlay.

I have a bunch of stuff to post - most is still in note form and will take awhile to get organized. internet access was intermittant at best and usually dial up quality in Indonesia.

But here are a couple pics:

Rice paddy in Kaliki Village, Bali and flags used to scare away birds.

Some kids playing with masks and cymbals in their yard in Ubud, Bali.

It's been a pretty amazing trip - I have at least three or four long posts and a buttload of pics!

Next stop LA.