Travis reveals a smile admist the joy of teaching.
Oh hay there… No more hay bales for team today as we geared up at 7:30 this morning to commute to our 9 o’clock workshop day at the Newton Public Library in Newton, Kansas!!! Maceo and I needed our mandatory lesson citruses so we drove to a grocery store to get supplies. I’m trying a new experiment: Lemon Volcanoes! You take a lemon, cut it open, juice it with a popsicle stick, add a little food coloring just for kicks, then add baking soda to react that frothy goodness. We decided for the first two hours, Travis and Sean would teach first then switch halfway through.
The group would be divided into two so that they could experience two workshops in those two hours. That gave me enough time to update my lesson plan to fit the new experiment and set up the lemons for the kiddos. I’d say teaching was pretty fruitful today. Hah. The oobleck was pretty messy (as usual) but the students were super excited about taking home which made me even more excited about oobleck! Cole and I taught during the same block and Anna and Maceo were left to finish up the day. The library was super kind and brought us black bean lasagna, beef lasagna, and some fruit salad for lunch. Yummy. After I finished the teaching bit, my internal clock rung the caffeine bell and off I was to find the nearest coffee shop to feed this increasingly insuppressible addiction. But after wandering around town, searching for my one true love without much avail for most of the shops closed after 2pm in Newton, I found myself at this hippie dippie organic food market called ~Prairie Harvest~. Cole, another big brown energy juice fan, had joined me on this quest, was dilly dallying outside on phone call, as I spilled coffee on myself trying to smell the vast coffee bean flavors this stored carried. Cole and I spent some time bombarding our olfactory receptors with essential oils and coffee bean scents before deciding to purchase some ground Maple Bourbon coffee beans. Mmmmmm. We headed back just as Anna was cleaning up from her lesson. Like the White Stripes song, “Seven Nation Army,” we went to Wichitaaawww (far from this opera forevermore), for dinner at a Japan Express. We then went to visit The Keeper of the Plains, a steel sculpture by Kiowa-Comanche artist Blackbear Bosin, which according to my good friend Wikipedia, stands at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers.
The Keeper of the Plains!!!!!
We then headed back to the house to some homemade oatmeal raisin cookies thanks to our kind host Scott. Aziz Ansari came out with a new comedy special so I helped myself to a small dose of laughter before passing out for 10 hours in preparation for our day to Emporia.
Asia
Asia hangs out with her favorite host so far, Henry.