Special skoolz-out edition: chiggers and the "a" word

Chiggers don't mess with Blockhead the Train Pirate. He'll cut 'em! And Blue Lens-Distortion Ghost has his back.

You know what I'd forgotten about? Chiggers. But thanks to the hours I spent birdwatching and knitting last weekend on my mother-in-law's lovely deck in her heavily wooded backyard, it's coming back to me. Scratching my pocked legs calls up memories of childhood summers spent playing outdoors in the sticky heat and picking scabs. Childhood-summer nostalgia is overrated.

The bugs and the heat are why we don't do a "summer break" from free-range learning. That and the fact that I can't get my kids to stop learning anyway so what the hell. Rocketboy's back from Grandma's house and ready to get back into history -- we're at the building of the Berlin Wall. After we get up to the present, we'll take a little break and start over again with the Big Bang.

Hurricanehead is pretending to read lately. He knows some numbers but he's not identifying letters yet. Not that it prevents him from scrawling 'notes' for me on index cards, of course.

And me? I stumbled across The No Asshole Rule at the local library and am zipping through it. I was delighted to opt out of paid employment when motherhood drew nigh because I wasn't very good at dealing with assholes. I don't plan on working for other people again, but the day may come when I am working with other people and I want to be better-prepared. Plus I'd like to be a better asshole wrangler in general.

Apropos of nothing, here's an item from today's Austin American-Statesman:

A handful of Dripping Springs High School seniors will be called back into the principal's office for cheering and bouncing beach balls above their heads during their graduation ceremony Friday at the Shoreline Center in Austin.

[Principal Greg] Jung held on to diplomas for the entire 200-student graduating class for two days while district staff reviewed video of the ceremony in an effort to identify the pranksters. Jung said he expected to release diplomas for students not involved today or Friday.

It's worth reading the whole short piece for reporter Molly Bloom's dry, elegant roasting of Jung's decision. For those of you who do take a summer break from whatever it is you do, happy summer break. And for everyone, don't go into the woods without long pants tucked into your socks.