End of summer 2024

 
Grandma Joan came up to celebrate her 80th birthday with us

We toured Boston Harbor and enjoyed lunch at Legal Seafood

The girls made a chocolate layer cake

For 3 years Caroline has been riding Heather's 20 year-old bike to and from school. She finally consented to getting a new, still non-electric, one.

Meanwhile she worked on college essays while not lifeguarding at the town rec center

We headed to the White Mountains for a summer day hike. This time it was the Tom-Field-Willey loop. 

And we saw a little sun, before it rained

Tessie went to Merck for kids day and played with liquid nitrogen

Heather and Tessie attended a live "trained" cats performance called the Rock Cats (video at the end)

In our backyard I brought in a professional landscaper to replace our hosta with more varied plants

This year was an all-time low for our monarch rearing. We didn't see any wild ones and only found eggs during one week of the summer. These 2 were raised from those eggs and were drying out before we tagged them. There is a male and a female and you can ID the male on the right by the black dots on the vein markings near the bottom of the wings.

Tessie starts 6th grade at the middle school and for her orientation day, we visited to allow her to practice opening her locker

Erin's preseason cross-country training began. The Boston Globe preseason rankings pegged the girls as the #5 team in the state.

Did you expect herding cats to be any different?

Finger Lakes and Catskills

 

The NCF Envirothon was held at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, on the shores of Seneca Lake in Geneva, New York  

Team Massachusetts arrived with the T-shirts that they designed

The first night features a trading session with other teams. Caroline's team swapped those bandannas on the right for all sorts of other states' merch

The competition format has field tests in Forestry, Aquatics, Wildlife, Soils, and a Current Issue, which this time was "Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Future"

Is that a fluventic dystrudept or an aeric endoaqualf? (more on that later...)

The Envirothon outing was to Niagara Falls

and they rode the Maid of the Mist around Horseshoe Falls

When the scores were tallied, the two-time defending champs were dethroned by Tennessee and finished 6th. They won the Soils and Wildlife sections and each took home $900 - not too shabby. Next year's competition moves back across the border to Calgary, Alberta and the Current Issue will be "Roots and Resiliency: Fostering Forest Stewardship in a Canopy of Change". Caroline is very excited!

Where is this unsalted sea, with a beautiful empty beach and inviting placid water?

It is the southern shore of Lake Ontario, where Erin and I stopped on our way to pick up Caroline

After wading out like a quarter mile to reach a sufficient depth, we immersed ourselves to complete our swim tour of all 5 Great Lakes 

Katy and Lyla met us in Ithaca, where Katy gave us a tour of the town and Cornell campus

Cornell has 8 undergraduate colleges: Agriculture & Life Sciences, Architecture, Arts & Sciences, Public Policy, Engineering, Human Ecology, Industrial & Labor Relations, and Business. Each college's flag was on display in the student union. Some were easy to decode....

...and others not so much

In the greenhouses of the Ag-Life School, they've cloned 4-leaf clovers!

And in the basement various soil columns were on display, and we learned how to tell our Fluvaquentic Eutrudepts from our Fluventic Dystrudepts

from our Aeric Endoaqualfs

and our Glossaquic Hapludalfs

Another of Katy's old haunts was the ice rink. She was recruited as a walk-on to play goalie for Cornell's Division I women's ice hockey team

From Ithaca we drove over to the Catskill region and our favorite hiking area at the Mohonk Mountain House

Charlie and Brad arrived separately, as did Heather and Tessie