Inadvertent life lessons

      My 10th grade Biology teacher, Mr. Ofsiani (more commonly called Mr. O), was one of those neat teachers that stick out in your memory. His entire classroom was covered in interesting things, from comics clipped from newspapers and hung on the walls to a skeleton hanging from the ceiling to the live iguana in the back of the room. He loved his subject and got excited about doing hands-on experiments instead of just going through the textbook and running tests. He was short, bearded, and completely bald, but he was also vibrantly engaged with life.

     The first quarter of his class was devoted to plant identification. Looking back, I'm not sure how he got this past the school board, but we essentially spent the first two and a half months of school filing into the classroom, taking roll, and then filing out again and going for walks in the woods next to the school. We did, technically, learn plant identification and I believe there was even a test at the end that gave you leaf shapes or bark pictures and had you give the name of the plant, but I learned more than just plants.

Old sketches for past coworkers

       The IT department at work has informed me that we are moving everything to a cloud-based solution. For unexamined reasons, I'm still curmudgeonly about that idea, so I took this opportunity to clean out personal stuff I have put on my work computer. Most of it is receipts, photos with work people, etc., but in the process, I ran across a folder titled "Sketches" that I'd completely forgotten about. It has photos of several ideas I'd sketched out at work on post-it notes for blog posts, but because they're about coworkers, I didn't feel right putting on the internet. Said coworkers have now moved on, and enough time has passed that I feel it's acceptable to put these online. 

     One of said coworkers was... enthusiastic. Thankfully not a morning person, so I didn't have to deal with any HELLO GOOD MORNING ISN'T LIFE GRAND nonsense right away, but once the day got underway, there was lots of energy to go around. Apparently, that wasn't just a work phenomenon - they came in one day and told me that their church had an Easter ceremony that weekend. The pastor was solemnly preaching at the lectern, and got to the point where they roll back the stone and find the tomb empty:

Sylvia Bishop chapter 4

      Chapter 4 is live here. Doing 2 weeks of sketches and then 1 week of writing seems to be going well for my schedule; no apologies for lack of sketch on writing days. Enjoy.