Where we were

Penny spent the day with Grandma. They went to a soup class at church and had soup for lunch. Then they played with toys and had a generally wonderful time together. That's not hard to do with Penny around!Kevin spent the night last night in Shamrock, Texas. Then I talked to him after school, and he was just outside Little Rock, Arkansas. Penny and I talked to him before bed, and he was on the Music Highway nearing Nashville, Tennessee.

If it's possible, though, I feel like I covered more ground today.

Today was the Discover New Mexico day for the entire 7th grade, for the entire day. We had presenters come from the community and surrounding areas to give classes on New Mexico and its wonderfulness. Each kid got to choose 5 classes. There was obviously a lot to choose from.

We had several artists: potters from Santa Clara Pueblo (and grandparents of one of our students), a weaver from Chimayo, a painter from San Ildefonso Pueblo, and then a tin-working class and retablos demonstration by the Spanish Colonial History Museum. One person demonstrated primitive arrow making, and another class was doing flint-napping.

We had presenters from the Los Alamos National Lab: DNA extraction (where the kids actually extracted DNA from strawberries), Nanotechnology, Bees (which are trained to sniff out explosives), and Robotics.

Then there were several presentations about the surrounding nature: owls, falcons and a snake came to one presentation, there was a game about native plants, presenters came from Bandelier and Puye Clilffs, and there were more activities about animals.

This was pretty much education at its finest.

My jobs for the day were to go pick up the catered lunch from El Parasol (a fine NM restaurant in town) and go to the various presentations and take pictures. This means I got to see a little bit of all of them.

By far, my favorite one was the Santa Clara Pottery presentation. They showed what the clay looked like when they dug it from the ground, and then Grandpa demonstrated how to make a pot, coiling the clay and shaping it with a gourd piece. Then as Grandma gave more information about how it was being made and then how it was finished, Grandpa worked and worked.

By the end of the presentation, the pot looked pretty much like this (except not polished or fired, obviously):

But he had completely shaped the pot and carved intricate designs into it. During the 5 classes, he made 5 little pots.

They also had some animal and people figurines on display, and they were absolutely gorgeous! The part I thought was so cool, and of which I was completely jealous, was that for each class, the kids put their name in a bucket, and one lucky kid got to take home a piece of pottery. Now, Grandma and Grandpa said that these were pieces with a flaw, maybe a chip, a crack, or a discolored part. It wasn't something they could sell in their art shows. But the piece I saw was a figurine of a woman, and to me it looked perfect. You'd have to be the master to know there was any sort of flaw.

At the end of the class, each kid got a good handful of clay to make their own creation. They had watched how to make pots, and they also got a quick demonstration of how to make a turtle (a very popular Santa Clara piece). Like this one:

It was really really cool. This was my favorite class, but all of them were fantastic. New Mexico is really an awesome state, and quite a cultural hodgepodge, too. I learned a lot about the surrounding area. Even after growing up here for 20 years, there were still things I didn't know.