A Wandering Fox

Thanks for your many ideas yesterday about how to gain some leverage with students to get them to return overdue library books. We do use a few methods of mild coercion, mainly not giving them yearbooks until their library accounts are clear. We don't charge late fees and we don't bill for lost books through our finance department, because both options are bookkeeping nightmares. And we don't withhold grades, perhaps because that's an academic punishment that seems too punitive. But a yearbook is a purely social thing, so we can use that -- and we do, but unfortunately that opportunity doesn't arise until the end of the year, so in the meantime there's a lot of procrastinating.

I kept myself busy yesterday, finishing "Freewater," another Newbery medal winner. Remember how I read all the Newbery winners several years ago? Well, there have been a few awards since then, so I decided to update my Newbery page on the school website by reviewing the newest medal-winning books. I've done all of them now except this year's, which hopefully I'll get to soon.

A few months ago blogger Mitchell wrote about his cousin's daughter (is that a second cousin?) who is an artist and printmaker. I was taken by one of her designs depicting a fox -- certainly appropriate for our English garden where we see foxes all the time. I ordered one of her woodblock prints and waited. And waited. And waited.

A few days ago I wrote her to ask if she'd received my order. Turns out she'd not only received it -- she'd already shipped it, and the postal service showed it had been delivered. Very strange! I'd had it sent to work, so yesterday I dropped in to search the parcel room and the mail area, and there -- happily -- I found the print, sitting atop the staff mailboxes on a shelf where it wasn't visible and where I would never have thought to look.

Ta-da! Isn't it great? Now I just have to get a frame for it. I think I'll hang it in our bedroom, above my bedside lamp.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, in the afternoon I met up with my friends Colin and Shannon to see "The Brightening Air" at the Old Vic, a play about an Irish family in the 1980s. I enjoyed it a lot -- it was very well-acted and dealt with lots of family drama in a humorous and yet poignant way. I took the photo at top not far from the theatre, when I got a coffee at Pret and sat in a nearby park waiting to meet my friends. A colorful, sunny day out in London!