Ferns

Growing wild in the woods at Grenada Lake. It looks so much nicer there than in a basket, don't you think?

I didn't really have time to post yesterday because Cody needed the computer for a science project. He did really well, I thought. He drew a full color picture of the solar system, then looked up all sorts of facts about each planet and put them on the poster next to the planet they pertain to. It looked very nice when he was done, but irony of ironies, his teacher was absent today and he didn't even have to turn it in.

My little bloodred baby Scarlett had really been worrying me this last week. She regurgitated her meal last time I fed her, and after that, has just not been active or anything. I was really worried that she might be sick. I got home from work yesterday, and she had presented me with an absolutely perfect shed! No wonder she'd been hiding so much. I'd completely missed the signs of impending shed. What a relief. Tonight when we got home from karate, she was out and about, cruising her tank like always. I usually measure my snakes each time they shed, and this time was no exception. She is 17.66 inches long. She'd grown an inch and a half since I got her! This is great! I'd been worried because she and Blaze both are so tiny.

Blaze is also getting ready to shed, but he is perfectly obvious about it.

Tonight in karate we did sanchin kata with the lights out. Those who didn't know sanchin did slow motion kicks. Sensei says that is a good way to practice sanchin, but since I usually take my glasses off for it, I can't see anyway. So it didn't make that much difference to me.

I wrote a bit last week about how aggravated I was with Sensei. Well, I finally got around to filling out my dojo feedback form. Sensei had put them out a couple of months ago. When I asked him about them, he said, "Be brutally honest." So I did. I told him exactly what I thought. I won't go into detail here, but my main points were:

a) be more consistent and stop showing favoritism,
b) establish a minimum time in rank and stick to it,
c) start keeping student records, and
d) make the kids behave in class.

I also added for him not to forget that his higher ranking students still need instruction, too. I doubt it will change anything, but at least now he knows that people notice what he is doing. I wrote in a couple of places describing what he does that is inconsistent, and I put "this is favoritism and it does get noticed." Well, we'll see if it helps...