Little Enstein

Rosie really like's scientists. She's fascinated with paleontology as well as archaeology, but she's also really interested in insects. Michelle says it's my job to teach her that subject, and I'm doing my best.

Weeks and weeks ago, when it first got cold, Rosie found this funny looking caterpillar curled up on a leaf and wanted to save it. Since then she's found more of them, and is so curious about what they are and what they will be.

The other day when I was outside with her, she found another one of these, now hibernating creatures, and wanted to examine it closely. I'm curious as well, what it is, and what it will be. I think we will find out together.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Rosie's curiosity, I found out what this insect will be. The fuzzy thing you see is called a "gall" and it this one was made on a the underside of a leaf from our Post Oak tree, by a cynipid gall wasp.  

There are as many species of these wasps as there are species of trees, they infect oak, willow, and many evergreen trees. Sometimes they form one or two of these galls on the underside of the leaf and other times you will see many on one leaf.  The galls these wasps make can look very different, depending on their species and the type of tree they are attacking.

The best protection against these insects is keeping your trees healthy by making sure they get enough water, give them vitamins and protective feed and other general care.  These insects have increased in their damage over the past several years due to drought and other out-of-the-ordinary weather patterns. This is a native species of insect, and increases in strength when trees become weakened over the stress of severe weather, both wet and dry. 

If you see these insects after they hatch they can form a large nest and begin feeding on the tree. This should be cut out of the tree and burned, so as to not infect other trees in the area. 

Rosie says she doesn't want to kill these insects, but just wants to make them want to go someplace else to live, since their galls are so pretty. I'm fine with that - not letting them live here. Now if I can figure out which trees need to be treated so that these insects won't thrive after they all hatch. That will be the challenge. 

Which kid is the funniest?

Being outside is a must for all kids - and Obi is no exception. He has to go outdoors every day, if possible, or he just doesn't get out all his energy. Rosie and Obi love playing outside with the dog.

Obi especially like's playing with the baby goats. He thinks, because they have to climb, it means he does, too. He likes to butt them off their stump and take their spot.  He's a good little goat. 

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One to many

It has been a very busy month. Margaret Jane was born on November 16, and that officially started our "kidding season" for the year. Margaret, the only human baby, was followed by twenty *(YES- I said 20) four-legged kids out in the barn.   Due to an overly exuberant buck last spring, we bred far more goats than intended. I typically like to breed four or five, but this year, TWELVE goats delivered babies. One had four babies, while others had only one or two.  A total of twenty kids arrived within just about 10 days.

Right in the middle of all that I broke my leg just after helping out deliver three of those. Talk about making things complicated....I haven't been out there since, until yesterday.

Now that the babies are 3 (almost 4!) weeks old, I really wanted to see them. William helped me hobble out there and I got to see and hold quite a few. We've already sold 10 of the kids that were born and I wanted to see the ones that were left before they, too, found new homes.

We got some pretty kids this year.  Human as well as Caprine.

PS Geektalk - Auto populate Homeroom field with Period 1A Teacher

Sorry to those of you who don't care about this stuff.

I've been trying to figure out how to auto-populate fields in PowerSchool - I wanted the Homeroom field to automatically populate the name of the teacher into that field, called Home_room, by which many reports allow you to sort.

This is a very useful feature for when student schedules are printed. I took it in stages.


Stage 1:

I used to tell customers that they can manually grab students by a period and mass change that field - it's not horribly time consuming, a school with 900-1000 students will take a couple of hours to manually add text to that field with a mass field update using Student Field Value (after selecting a group of students). But, if students switch classes, and the secretary or data manager forgets to update the Home_room field then all is lost and the field is no longer up-to-date with the data.

so I graduated to the next phase:

Stage 2:

To mass assign homerooms try exporting the student's student number, teacher name and room via DDE (or List Students). If 1st period was going to be the Homeroom period:

Student_Number
LastFirst (this is for validation only and gets removed before importing)
*period_info;1(A);Teacher_Name     (or in some cases *period_info;1(A-B);Teacher_Name)
*period_info;1(A);Room

I prefer doing this in DDA or DDE - more control than List Students, IMO.

If you want the teacher's name AND the room number use both * lines above. Be sure to include the * when you conduct the export.

1(A) is the Expression for your homeroom hour. It must look exactly as it does in List View or Attendance.

1. Paste this in to Excel as Text. 
2. Look at the export info and verify if needed
3. Remove the LastFirst column
4. Concatenate the teacher name column and the room number if needed, adding a space in between
5. You only need to have, in your final file, the Student_number and the one column with teacher name and/or Room

Delete all columns except the Student_Number and the new Home_Room and save as a .txt file.
Do a quick import into the Student table and everyone is updated.

But what if you want all this to happen automatically?  Yes Virginia, there IS a way.

Then, go to Stage 3 - the most efficient method for doing this:

Set up an Auto Send to export data for the student_number and the period 1 class.  The Auto send will have only 2 fields in the entry and will pull from the Students table. I only wanted the teacher's name so am using just that for my auto export.

student_number

*period_info;1(A);Teacher_Name

Then set up an Auto Comm, which will import the data.  Again, use the Students table. The data path is mmdata.txt

Fields to use are:    

student_number

home_room

Set a time to execute, and that's it. 

Works beautifully. 

Best friends

This boy sure does love his puppy. He cannot get enough of her, any time of day or night.

SALUTE

Autumn fun

It took forever, it seemed, for the autumn leaves to fall this year, but once they did, there were a ton of them.  Every night, just after dark for over a week, I would go outside and make piles with the rake, and the kids would run from pile to pile, jumping in them and squealing with laughter.  Abby was right there in the middle of it all.

In the day time the kids couldn't get enough of autumn fun, either.

I had a hard time choosing photos, so just decided to put them all here.

I am invisible

Cats are one of the smartest animals. Still, sometimes they make you wonder about them.

Bailey truly thinks no one can see her. There is a heater vent there and she spends hours "hiding" from the kids. We moved the chair to sweep and she didn't budge, thinking, I'm sure, that we didn't notice her.

Baby time

Sunday we had a new arrival. Margaret Jane joined us at home around 4 pm.

At the same time we've been expecting the goats to have little ones and today the first if those arrived. Cocoa gave birth to quadruplets - one girl and 3 boys. The girl is all dark brown and small, maybe 4.5 lbs. The boys are huge, 6-7 lb each. One boy, the largest, did not make it so Cocoa only has to worry about feeding three.

I am very glad Cocoa waited until our arctic freeze passed. It was a sunny and 48.

Happy Halloween

We've been decorating for Halloween and Autumn for weeks.
This is the final adaptation for October 31, the fabulous Friday feast.

Halloween Dressup

We went to the neighborhood Trick or Treat downtown, Rosie and Obi had costumes but I waited until the last minute. I was going to wear my Nana Dog costume but then I saw my Wizard hat on the shelf, so I improvised.  Of course no one looked at me anyway so it didn't matter - but everyone loved the  kids as usual.  Rosie was a fairy and Obi was Captain Hook.

Michelle was Mother Earth and William was Peter Pan (to go with Captain Hook). Check Michelle's blog later this week for pictures of that.

Puppy fun

My dear companion

A dear friend left us today. Andy, who has been with me for 16 years last month, passed away from us. What a wonderful, loyal companion.

We got Andy when he was four months old, from the local pound. Our other dog, Toby, had gone missing and we went to the pound in search of him. As we looked in the cages, this little face looked up at me and I was instantly in love. We never found our other dog, but were comforted in gaining Andy. I had wanted a Jack Russell terrier for years. He's truly been the best companion I could have ever asked for.

Andy came home from the pound with us that day and has been one of the family ever since. Loyal from the first moment I held him.  If I could do it again, I'd do everything with and for that dog just as I did. We all loved him very much, and he, in turn loved us.

Good bye, my friend. I will never, ever forget you.

Princess Abby

From rides in her car seat to bedtime on her own feather pillow, Abby enjoys every minute. Spoiled and loved. Could not ask for a better life.

Funny guy

I took this video the other day and have had the hardest time getting it uploaded and posted.
It's probably not worth all the work but this just makes me laugh.

Obi watched it with me a few times and each time he is able to quote what he's going to say before he says it in the video. That's somehow even funnier to me.  This is a quiet afternoon at the house.

Abby at 10 weeks

Abby loves her new home. She watches the kids play and wants to get them. Right now though, until she learns not to jump on them, she lives her life on a leash. She doesn't really mind all that much though, as long as one of us is nearby.  Smart, adorable little puppy. She's already house trained, and can sit on command.

 

Bath time naps are the sweetest things.  Happy puppy and kids.