The First Day of Aquabilities Swimming Class

Archaeology Field School is Over

Yesterday was the final day of the archaeology field school at Kingsley Plantation for this year. DH came home last night and asked me to download all the pictures on his camera. Now he's back at Kingsley all day today doing clean-up and I'm home with all these new videos and pictures to look at and share. Hmmmmm, let's see...

A nice shot of the gardens, benches, and the back of the house:



People digging holes:



People standing in holes:





A person demonstrating just how close to human-size the units are:



A demonstration of how easy it would be to turn the units into kiddy pools:



Storm damage:



Sad, wet DH on public archaeology day:



More sad, wet people:



An energetic approach to sifting dirt:



A more relaxed approach to sifting dirt:



There is always at least one silly, entertaining video of the students and this is it. It's the Kingsley Slide y'all!

Bulletin Board Make-Over

This is the ugly, battered bulletin board I removed from the wall yesterday.



It turns out it was amazingly easy to put apart with my bare hands.

I already had an unfinished wood picture frame that I had purchased for a project long ago that had never been done. I used the same red mahogany wood stain that I've been using for all of Blaze's bedroom furniture. but the frame required more than one coat. It still looked dull until the polyurethane clear coat was added this morning.

The cork board had to be trimmed a little to fit the frame. Then I covered the cork with fabric, pulling it tight and stapling it in place.



Super glue was used to hold the fabric covered cork board to the frame.



The original board had large, colorful plastic tacks holding papers on. These also got a make-over.



I didn't want to paint the pin, only the plastic, so I came up with yet another use for old cereal boxes.



The tacks were sprayed with black Krylon fusion for plastic, which dries in about 15 minutes. Then, I did a very cliche steampunk thing and glued some gears on them.

The finished bulletin board for Blaze's room, complete with the tacks:

Happy first day of summer!

Packing continues:



We still have one more month until we move, but I'm discovering how much stuff we have accumulated over the past eight years of living in Gainesville.

The World's Largest Swimming Lesson

This was the event we attended this morning:



The idea behind the event was to make people aware of how important swimming lesson are for children. It was free and the kids had a good time, I just wish more people had shown up.

The children were divided up by age for their lessons. Blaze was with this group of 10 and 11 year olds.





The local new was shooting footage of the children swimming, so we'll have to make a point of watching the channel 20 news tonight.



Here is the entire group together:



The Noah's Endeavor/Aquabilities swimmers and volunteers:







As the children were leaving the pool, they were each given a certificate of participation:



This was a great warm up for Aquabilities swimming lesson, which will be beginning soon.



Blaze is signed up for the first two week session, which begins June 25th, but there are two additional two week sessions after that.

Public Archaeology Day at Kingsley Plantation 2012

It was a very wet Public Archaeology Day at Kingsley Plantation. This was how the day began:



It then rained off and on all day.

There were moments when it seemed like the rain had moved on and the students would be able to set up demonstrations of the work they had been doing,





but then the rain would begin again.



Excerpts from the 1:00 p.m. talk in the barn.



During breaks in the rain, I was able to walk around reading new interpretive signs and trying out the new path from the barn area to the cabins.





Inside Anna's house:


I also encountered some of the wildlife.