School's Out!! (Time to plant the garden)

Yesterday was the last day of school here. Jolene is in Ft. Collins, CO with her Science Olympiad team for Nationals this week, and she let me know that I missed taking the 'end of school' picture of the boys. I was unaware that was a thing, but no problem, I will adjust. So I took a picture of them today (only a day late), on the first day of their summer break. Beside it, for comparison, is their 'first day of school' pic from back in August. Grayson finished 5th grade (no longer in elementary), and Landon finished his freshman year of high school.


Landon missed the week prior at school, while he was at the BPA National Conference, and during that week his Intro to Engineering class was working on their end of year project, each one had to design and build a one-string electric guitar (pretty cool project). But he missed that week, so he had just one day after he returned to get it built - so he was up late that night. He chose foam rather than wood for the body and headstock, due mainly to the limited time he had, but worked hard to get his design looking right.


I told him the body looked a little like the Millennium Falcon to me.


Piecing together the bridge and magnetic pickup.




He designed and constructed metal dowel pins to attach the body and headstock to the neck, and added some cross-support to give the foam body some rigidity.




Final product - pretty cool.


And when you plug in the amp - it sounded awesome. Our kids have gone to schools all over the country, but beyond a doubt his high school here in Alaska is the best we've seen. As a freshman he took all the normally required courses, but also took Intro to Engineering and two software / apps classes, resulting in him getting three Microsoft certifications and one Adobe certification for various apps / programs.


Landon was pretty excited to have Honey, Buffy, Mysti, Laura, Chase and Kate visit him while he was in Dallas for the BPA National Conference.


The end of school is a good indicator that the garden needs to be planted. Our last day below freezing was just over a week ago, but I think we're in the clear from here on out. So the boys got to it, and planted Yukon Gold potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, lettuce and pumpkins.


This middle plot has beets, lettuce, carrots and onions.


The upper plot just has potatoes. It gets a lot of moose traffic, so we keep up some barriers to convince the moose to walk around the plot.


The boys did all the work this year - tilling after adding soil, hilling into rows and designing where to plant everything. We still have lots of potatoes stored from last year, so we planted less this year, and hopefully we did a better job of spacing out the rest of the plants than I did last year. Time will tell.


A friend told us that having a statue of a raven in your yard attracts sandhill cranes to check it out. So, for a few days, I've moved our raven statue from the front to back yard, in sight of the cranes that are nesting on the hay flats. So far, nothing, but maybe we'll get some closeup pics of cranes checking out the raven this week.