flowering bush with red and green leaves and large clusters of tiny white flowers

Wordless Wednesday: Flowering bushes

If flowers are in bloom, you know I’m going to post pictures of them.

image shows a cactus garden. it was taken in the springtime so one of the cactus clusters is topped with lots of large white daisy like flowers. it's beautiful and surprising.

“But what are you doing for exercise, Shala?”

When I worked at the middle school library, movement was baked into my day. Now that I’m a full-time grad student, I have to be more intentional about getting enough exercise.

image shows a black and white bird with yellow eyes clinging to a grey tree. The tree is barkless, and its surface is dotted with acorns embedded into it in holes that are placed in a series of slightly slanted, but mostly vertical lines.

Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?

Sometimes when you go out and into nature, nature does something so interesting that you want to stop and watch it for a while. Case in point: while on a hike last week, my husband and I came across a colony of acorn woodpeckers stashing nuts for the winter. After watching for awhile, we found ourselves wondering: “Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?”

Intermittent masking is harder than I expected

One of the things that surprised me about going on leave from the school library is how much harder masking is now that I’m no longer doing it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I thought I’d be relieved to only have to mask every once in a while, but it turns out intermittent masking as Random Community Member is much more emotionally and cognitively tasking than wearing a mask to work every day.

Lahaina

Like so many, we here at Caterpickles Central are heartbroken at the news coming out of Maui.

Photo of the interior of a middle school library, showing the fiction stacks.

Guess who was not prepared for how hard it would be to juggle a job and home life?

My job is amazing, and I love working with both middle schoolers and books, but I do have a tendency to use up all my words at work. But we have a day off today, so I thought I’d spent at least part of it telling you how things have been going at the library.

Some personal news… Update

Guess who gets to spend the 2021-2022 school year working as a library assistant at her favorite middle school?

Some personal news…

School starts on Wednesday, and guess who gets to start working in the library in-person again (at least for now)?

One shot down, one to go

One side benefit of The 14-Year-Old being older than I think she can possibly be, is the fact that she is eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine. We took her last week to one of our county’s mass vaccination sites. One shot down, one to go.