Brilliant. Just brilliant.

So... I'm typing with sore fingers... Because I worked in the garden today without gloves. Scratch that. I mixed quickrete in my kids' green turtle sandbox with my bare hands because I couldn't find a trowel and built a garden wall out of marble & granite chunks mortared together with the quickrete.

When I was done, I got up to make sure it looked right (though, who was I kidding? It's not like I was going to change it at that point.) and found the trowel in the grass about eight feet away. Huzzah!

I washed the dirt and concrete off my hands (I say dirt. I mean composted manure, peat moss, and dog crap. Because my dog decided that one foot behind me was the perfect place to drop a turd.) and showed the scrapes to my husband. He said, "Why didn't you wear gloves?" It was one of those questions that instantly make you feel like a complete moron. I didn't even think about walking over to the storage shed to get gardening gloves.

So I told him, "Because they're dirty and would have irritated my hands anyway, especially since I was working with wet concrete." Which was totally true, and I'm sure that somewhere in my psyche the thought of getting gloves was evaluated and dismissed for exactly that reason. (That sounded convincing, right?)

Anyway, my garden's a little bigger now, so I can have four varieties of tomatoes, grapes, berries, squash, cucumber, watermelon, potatoes, stevia, and even more herbs. (My garden can kick your garden's butt.)

Right now, I should be writing out what I'm teaching this week or loading the dishwasher. Instead, I've been laughing at funny pictures on George Takei's facebook page, chatting with a high school friend, and now blogging. I haven't typed anything in over a week, so now I choose the night that I've got my fingerprints scraped off to peck at the keyboard. Yeah, I'm a smartie.

So, as I wasted time pecking because I can't type properly for my hurting fingers, I found this article: http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/dinosaur-among-words-thought-controversial-by-new-york/  Go ahead, it's just three paragraphs long.

In a nutshell, people in charge of public education are complete chuckleheads. How on God's green earth did "dinosaur" make the list of 50+ controversial words banned from New York's standardized tests? Idiots.

Meanwhile, here in Montgomery, a lunchroom worker brought a gun to school, hidden in her Bible (what?! Her Bible?!) where she'd cut out a spot in the pages like in an old movie, so she could threaten another lunchlady. In a room full of knives.

I sit here tapping my thumb (because the other fingers are beginning to really sting) and ponder why she didn't just pull a knife. I got nothin'. Solomon, she's not. Yeah, Montgomery Public Schools iz where itz at, yo. Our elementary school lunchladies beez strapped wid a heater.

Where was I? Oh. Right. We'll use the garden in science lessons for home school, too. Like watching seeds sprout, cutting apart a bloom to see what the inside parts of a flower are, and seeing if the dadgum dog can outrun me when I try to hit her with a shovel for digging up my garden again. (Of course I'd never actually hit her. She's too dang fast.) So maybe next we'll study why four-legged creatures are faster than two-legged creatures. And perhaps a lesson on why we wear clothes, shoes, and bike helmets to protect us... and garden gloves.