The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Kudos All Around – Nailing the Hobbies
Let’s start with this incredible photo of my nephew. Way to go! Looking GREAT! What a lot of effort that must take.
Sorry that photo is a bit blurry, it had been passed around various family member’s cell phones a few times before I got a hold of it.
Next up, Laura is now an officially certified open water diver. The training for that is intense! She can now go on diving trips around the world, as well as nearby trips held every weekend in Monterey Bay.
Congratulations, Laura!
And lastly, I finished my Master’s Naturalist certification. I now know far more than I ever thought I would about the Sonoran Desert. The problem is, the environment is so huge and complicated that there’s still vastly more that I don’t know than I do know. John likes to quiz me and I’m like, I have no idea! I don’t know even a fraction of all the weeds and shrubs and prickly things in southern Arizona.
Here’s a secret if you’re in Tucson and hearing birds and someone asks you, “What bird is that?”, just guess “house sparrow”. Practically every single recording I take has house sparrows in the background. So you’re bound to be right!
Screenshot
I did a lot of writing for the certification program, including a very long blog entry (that they haven’t posted yet). I’m hoping I have a chance to post that here for you soon.
At graduation we each got a mineral. The one they gave me is a small piece of quartz and pyrite (fool’s gold), about 1.5″ long. I like it a lot!
My certification class was an enormous amount of work and it was part of the reason I got so far behind with this blog. It went for an entire semester, from January until May.
We have one more congratulations post coming up, and then back to regularly scheduled programming.
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