What the what!?

Remember this?

 Modern scrap-iron-art #1?

And #2?

All those beastly pounds of metal hauled out with brute force? 

Now our yard looks like this:

And this:

Yup. Gone. And not by our doing. Jake came home from work on Tuesday (or was it Monday?) to find the yards so clean you could eat off them. Nary a scrap of scrap was left. 

Can you believe that? Brazen! In the middle of the day (our neighbors claimed it was still there around noon, and Jake got home by 4), what had to have been more than one burly-strong person with a burly-strong vehicle spent at least an hour loading up our metal. That was heavy stuff! More than one of those pieces would require at least 2 or 3 people (STRONG people) to lift/carry them.

Jake called around to scrap yards to see if they had received a suspicious load (apparently they don't ask many questions, and this kind of thing is common) and discovered that scrap iron is worth 8 cents a pound. We figure there were conservatively about 3000lbs there, so that is just under $300. I guess that's pretty good pay for an hour's work.

Jake was pretty bummed about this and it is a little violating, but I personally find this whole situation is so ludicrous it's funny. It just seems so bizarre. The more people we told about it the more stories came out of anything metal, even garden tools, going missing at the drop of the hat, supposedly for scrap. The learning never stops with this process, I tell you. Never knew that stuff was so valuable! Thankfully, we have well-paying jobs and the loss of that income won't damage us irreparably. 

Moving forward: the install of the heat has been bumped back a week, which meant we got to take part of today 'off' of the renovation and spent a delightful morning meandering down Red River Road to Lockport. I didn't even know that road existed, but it was fun. We read ALL the 'National Historic' signs and discovered a beautiful little tea-room perfect for a weekend lunch date. It was wonderful. 

Tomorrow we are back to the 'grind' - school is pretty calm these days, but my report cards are due on Tuesday evening (well, technically Wednesday morning, but as if I'm getting up early to do those!), so tomorrow is going to be a LONG day of staring at tests.

Speaking of which (last anecdote, this one is getting long), I had a really good moment last week with a kid and her final exam (that is not the way it usually goes). This student, T, in one of my gr 8 science classes, started out the year as one of the kids I dreaded. Every day was a battle with her - to get her in the room, to get her to sit in her chair, to get her to use a pencil appropriately. It was non-stop and I definitely breathed a sigh of relief when she wasn't around for some reason - things went much more smoothly. At some point during the year, though, things shifted. She began talking to me in the hallway, and I was sometimes able to coax her into the room. She started working and quickly displayed she had some serious smarts. More than once she told me 'Your class is the only one I work in', but that didn't seem like such a wild statement considering she was still only working maybe half the time. By term four, she would come in, sit right at the front and her eyes would be glued to the wall (where I project what we're doing) or to whatever the task was that day. She was bright and inquisitive and although her attendance wasn't great, she was a joy in the classroom. I always make 2 versions of final exams  - one adapted for kids who struggle to write or read, and one 'regular' for kids who don't need those extra supports. I gave her the regular exam, although I thought it might be a push for her. She fought through that exam with the same tenacity and stubbornness that kept her in the hallway for so many months. At the very end she was the last one writing and she was DETERMINED to make sure she got as many part-marks as she could. At one point she said 'I forget what the words for these things are, but I'm going to explain it so I get part marks'. That may not seem like much, it's a pretty typical strategy to try, but for a kid that shied away from any kind of academic challenge for so long, that kind of problem solving is miraculous. It was like music to my ears. I marked her test first and was delighted that she got 85%! So proud of her. And she was proud of herself, which was even better. 

Here's to 10 more get-ups!