To keep myself busy now that M has left for the opposite end of the country, I'm helping my father's tech guy image iBooks at the middle school where Dad is the principal.

First of all, I discovered that someone named Julius Lester has done YA novelizations of a certain Shakespearian tragedy that happens to be my favorite play ever.

Second, they are doing the most awesome thing -- the school has little botanical gardens. There's an all-organic, all-student-tended vegetable garden that donates hundreds of pounds of produce to Family Services, there's a custom pondscape and a propagation greenhouse in their little fruit orchard, they're moving palm trees around because the beds they were in are being converted to all-native flower beds. It is so incredibly cool. They're even talking about converting a disused classroom into a small natural history museum.

So that'll help me keep busy. I'm also trying to use up some of the stuff in my "tribal" and "wood/bone" bead boxes, since I keep buying it on clearance and never use it. It all tends to come out slightly Victorian spoils-of-empire, but y'know, I'm okay with that. It's all right if I keep a sense of irony. Right? Right.