Battleground Flower Bed

This not-very-pretty picture shows the current state of our back garden flower bed, the one nearest the back door. Obviously we haven't cleaned it out yet, so it's still full of "winterkill" and unpruned stuff from last year. That big dead-looking clump right in the middle, for example, is a lavender bush that ought to come out again in the spring.

This space has been the subject of a recent domestic battle. Olga, for some reason, decided that she no longer wanted to walk up the steps and out onto the grass to pee and instead would leap from the patio over the wall and directly into the flower bed. I wouldn't care much except that we have little plants coming up there, particularly bulbs, and I didn't want her walking on them. (Much less peeing on them.)

So the other day I got out that green garden fence and put it all the way around the bed, and I think I've broken the pattern. She's now going up the steps and onto the grass again.

Animals are so mysterious. Why did she start using the flower bed in the first place? Was the grass too muddy? I thought going up the steps might have been getting difficult for her, but surely leaping over the wall was even harder. We will never know.

Here's another view. It's a mess right now, but you can sort of see the fence running around it.

Another slow day in the library yesterday. I've decided that I'm going to put together some Google Slides (kind of like Powerpoint) to add a visual element to my Newbery talk to the 8th graders (which is tomorrow). So I'll work on those slides today.

I also pulled a cartload of books about Ancient Greece for the 5th graders, who are about to launch into that annual project. Some of our Ancient Greece books are looking pretty dog-eared and ancient themselves. This one, for example:

This book is 30 years old. Do modern 5th graders even know who Indiana Jones is? I also wonder about the wisdom of including a fictional character in a non-fiction book -- but maybe I'm overthinking it.