I love this place!

My Architecture babies want to draw these buildings!
"I wanna draw, Mr. Hardage!"
OK. Put shingles on your roof.
"What're shingles?"

" . . . uh . . ." And I launch into how the cedar loggers on the Pacific Northwest coast cut the trees into cants that are cut into standard lengths, then quartered, then independent shingle/shake makers cut shakes with a mallet and froe and either leave them as shakes or resaw them into shingles. And they look at me like calves at a butcher.

So we go outside by the tennis courts, and I show them (asphalt)(for you aggies . . . that is not a birth defect) shingles on a roof across the alley, and I wax prosodic about light and shadow lines on the asphalt shingles, how they're supposed to look like wood shingles . . . and they look at me.

Then I tell them about the brick, how you can see by the intensity of the shadows that the mortar joints are raked with a square tool. I show them how the mortar in the school's walls are raked with a round tool, and you don't have the play of the light there . . .

Mooooo.

Damn!

So I ask an Assistant Principal "Can I take my babies alley crawling tomorrow - there're only a dozen of them - to look at what they're supposed to be drawing?"

"Ask the Principal."

"Oh, Captain, my Captain . . ."

"YES."

That was all. Just, "yes." No paperwork. Just, "yes."

So I went and told the SRO we'd be out in the world, and he's cool with keeping the good citizens calm about my mob of banditos prowling their streets point at their residences; he's even calling Dispatch ahead of time.

Gawd! I love this place.

Pax, y'all.