Today was a LONG day. For the kids, it was pretty short – they were dismissed at 11am. Rather than have normal classes today, we had a series of workshops that kids signed up for on cool things they could do in the summer. Neat idea. I signed up to work in the room that Barefoot Canoes was doing their sessions on. I sat for the first two sessions and then the other teacher in the room let me go to the Brukner Nature Center workshop.

I liked the sessions I observed and the Brukner one was doubly cool cuz she had critters. She brought a snake, a salamander, a teeny little screech owl (adult size), and a juvenile possum. These were critters from their wildlife rehabilitation clinic – if the critters get back to 100% health, they’ll be returned to the wild. The snake isn’t an Ohio native (too cold in Ohio for it), the screech owl was blind in one eye, and the possum couldn’t smell, so I doubt if they’ll be returned to the wild. But they’re very well behaved critters, so they are great for the nature center for taking them around to schools.

After the kids were gone, the staff had a carry-in lunch. I brought brownies. Mmmm, brownies. I baked ’em myself! Lunch was tasty and it was nice to chat with co-workers.

I spent most of the rest of the day working on LPDC stuff. I’m the chair of the local professional development committee at work and we were having our last meeting of the year today. So I got all of the paperwork ready for the meeting and chased down a few people who really needed to get paperwork in today. Normally our LPDC meetings are 15 minutes or less. Today’s meeting was 45 minutes and we were all sore in our signing arms when we were done. Towards the end, I was getting my initials confused with dating and my signature. Sheesh.

I made copies of all of the LPDC paperwork of the day, filed stuff in folders, and returned originals to staff members. And then I finally had time to work in my lab. Our superintendent was great – he gave us the option of working til 6pm today and getting tomorrow off, or working a regular day today and working tomorrow. I left shortly after 6pm. Sleeping in tomorrow – woot!

I’ll pop into the school a few times this summer to work on lab stuff, but I don’t actually work this summer. My first summer off in years. Woohoo!