It is certainly bracing to live in a house without heat. A truck came with snaplock roofing and tomorrow, I am told, we will get our stovepipe back.

In the mean time, the girls got their costumes ready for the Eelgrass Festival.

And, for those of you following the Intelligent design "debate," please see this.

We held school on Shaw Island today. It was foggy on the water and, given that we'd all woken up unseasonably early, we were in high spirits. We went to Brian Odlum's house to lend him our ears.

Brian told us that he composes music electronically but has partial hearing loss at some frequencies. When he composes, he wants to know what the average youthful ear can hear. He can set the 30 equilizers on his sound board to compensate for his hearing loss so that, after adjusting, what he heard as he composed is what we hear on his CD. So, he did auditory profiles on five of the students while the rest of us discussed cults.

A multifaceted day. Two of my students spent the night, in addition to The Spink and Plumosita. The next visitor said the application for next year's art show is due tomorrow and would I please come up with five photos on the theme of "Patterns in Nature," a resume, and an artist's statement? Then we put an alcohol-filled sock on our sick sheep's infected hoof and I sheared her flyblown wool. The next visitor wanted to practice the song about eelgrass that I wrote for Friday's festival, which we all did, including the student who showed up for lunch (guacamole and chips). I put some bread dough in the solar cooker and painted the door jambs and sills with varathane. The kids went off to the dock and I stapled an eight-foot roll of Typar around three of the four walls of the addition. You're supposed to do it with a team of people, but I figured it might be more possible with only me, given that I wasn't really sure how to do it. I can't say it's a perfect job but the lower half of the addition is indeed weatherized.

School was interrupted by a trip to the Astronomer's meadow, where he had a solar telescope set up. There was one sunspot. We looked at the moon through a regular telescope and saw shadowy craters. They were clearer than Stuart Island across the channel. This is because the moon is seen through about 3 miles of atmosphere and Stuart through seven.

Homework day. Lesson plans.

Number puzzles

Two very interesting things happened today. One was that we went on a beach seining expedition to look for salmon fry (expect pictures tomorrow). Earlier this year, the fish biologist we went with was able to establish for the first time that salmon fry live in the San Juans. She's been sampling for them since February. Today, the September sample, turned up no fry, either because it was windy and they are swimming low to avoid the surf, or because they're done with the shallows and are ready for deeper waters now that it's fall.

The second interesting thing was that, after we got home and I refenced the sheep and dipped one of their hooves in bleach against bots and gave her her penicillin, I swept up after the carpenters on the second floor of the addition. While there, I casually glanced over and saw that ...

THERE IS A BIG FAT HOLE IN MY ROOF.

The two girls and another student spent the day on homework. We had some unsuitable music (I am old enough to wince every time I hear "motherfucker") and cream of chicken soup and high spirits. In the afternoon we all jumped off the dock float and then dug up the elderberry plant by the construction site.

Spent the day painting at a friends' place.

Tyko spent the day packing. The Niece (hereinafter referred to as Plumosita) is going to move into his room, and the choreography of "do you want this?" "why would he keep this?" "hey, can I have this?" was awesome. As a unreconstructed packrat, I have some difficulty watching somebody discard so much of their stuff in one swell foop. We tried to err on the side of "keep", but he only ended up with one box of journals and one of cool stuff and, of course, the bookshelf and the other bookshelf and the books up in the loft.

After he left, The Spink wandered around saying, "I'm not sad. What's there to do? Can I watch a movie? No, I don't want to watch a movie. Is there anything to eat? I guess I'm not hungry. What's there to do?" Under the influence of her Evil Mother (that would be me), she did some Algebra.

Plumosita rolled up her sleeves and found green paint (in the cabin), rollers (in the loft), a roller arm (in the garden overgrown with weeds), and some newspapers (under the paper recycle bag) and got to work.

I floated around moodily and ended up finishing a canvas of water under the dock.

I've been feeling scattered and confused, partly due to trying to get the High School up and running. This year there's a lot more support from the District but that also means that I have to do things by the book rather than by winging it. And since I didn't even know it was going to happen, or with whom, until a couple weeks before school started, I didn't know what to prep for.

Went to the District today and talked to a number of people who helped me clarify what I'm doing and where I'm heading. One of the more fruitful interactions was with the Marine Science teacher, who showed me a bunch of material that is at a much more basic level than what I've been trying to come up with. That's pretty reassuring - if I teach what I already know, that is at the high school level. If I teach what I've been trying to learn these past weeks, we'll be going over and above.

When I came home, the kids had cleaned house. All of a sudden I realized that I no longer feel as discombobulated.

We went to Shaw Island and pottered around in the eelgrass beds at Picnic Cove today. The idea was to gather fruiting stalks to collect the seeds for restoration. We'll let our stalks sit in seawater for three weeks until all the seeds have ripened and fallen out. Then we'll check some of them for germination, and plant the rest in areas where eelgrass has been wiped out.

Terrorism?

Adjusting to the school schedule. I'm compiling a notebook with solved math problems for my advanced students ... but that means I have to solve them. I find that after a few decades of carefree living, the exacting discipline of completing the squares and remembering trigonometric identities evokes enticing memory, like the smell of a forgotten spice. Do you remember the smell of cardamom from Danish bakeries on Sunday morning adventures? We passed one when I was young enough to have to reach way, way up for Daddy's hand. I didn't immediately like the smell, but it seemed significant and representative of Grownup Stuff.

We were busy little bunnies all day. The Spink and The Niece cleaned out much of the stuff stored in the tower room, filled it with the scent of tea, Windex, and candles, and worked on their homework in it. Our first day of class was yesterday, and so I spent the morning tidying and fussing around in the classroom.

School and niece are settling in nicely.

We did an extra COASST walk because they've been finding extra dead birds, but we only saw a pile of feathers and entrails, which didn't officially qualify as a "bird" because it didn't have feet. But it was something, as we usually don't find anything.

In an overly ambitious marathon watched the noir Fargo by the Coen Brothers, and the Chinese eye-candy Kung Fu Hustle by Peter Chow. Both worth it in their own idiosyncratic way. Margie as a sensible-shoed midwestern cop was memorable.

And, here is my idea of good fashion.

Went on a walk with the kids. The Spink wanted to eat an apple to its core while still on the tree.

We were talking about how to us parents, couples without children sometimes seem so narcissistic, as though one of their facets hasn't had a chance to grow up. And then we thought of 'Nam vets who must think that about us, who have never been in combat.

It seems as though a lot of people instinctively understand that difficult situations are usually necessary to help you grow. They seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, as though some day, some time, something will click and they'll rise to the situation and grow up.

But until that happens, people just seem to get more and more and more like themselves in a crisis.

To me, Bush's response to Katrina seems eerily like his response to Iraq, or taxes, or pretty much anything. Stick to an easily digested principle and ignore the evidence. Because he's had a kind of dumbed-down mainstream set of attitudes, that's worked for him politically. Now, he's worked himself into a situation where the knee-jerk response is losing political points. (I'm assuming that it's losing him points. Maybe it's not).

What a great opportunity for him to finally grow up.

Went for on a COASST walk to monitor for beached birds. It was low tide, with bright sun and heavy clouds lumbering in front of the sun now and then. At the point, I sat in a busy cloud of wasps and wrote a little flute piece. Midway through the piece, I realized I'd been writing a lament for New Orleans.

9/11 was a punch to the jaw. Bad people tried to hurt us and succeeded. Hurricane Katrina has a different feel to it. Global warming, we were told, would come with more intense weather patterns, so in a sense Katrina is my fault, and yours too. Bush is being accused of having diverted funds from addressing the possible effects of a bad hurricane in that area to Iraq, but he certainly did that with public opinion's approval. But Katrina isn't malicious in the way that a terrorist attack is.

That should make everything that much simpler. Since we are all hyper-aware and trained after 9/11, a smoothly running emergency preparedness system has long since kicked into gear, right? You would expect that Homeland Security had planned for a scenario much like this one and ... never mind.

What's sad is the enormous ineptness of it all. Nobody should be in a refugee camp for more than a couple hours. I'm sure there are thousands of churches and individuals in the US who would be glad to host a family for the next few months.

And in a sense, what's even more sad is the loss of the nation's sense of can-do optimism that I grew up with. With clearheadedness and old-fashioned kindliness, we'd've lost some real estate but not dignity, lives, and honor.