Wednesday I took off from work at noon. Marsha and I went over to the school where she teaches reading. We took a bunch of my fossils and we gave a presentation about palaeontology. Now you’d think that kindergarten and first graders' attention span would be somewhat limited, along with their understanding. Actually we were pleasantly surprised. I discussed the age of fossils and what kinds of creatures they were. Mostly I emphasized what the fossils tell us about the past. If seashells are found on top of mountains in Nevada, then the ocean must have been there at one time. If we find coal in Antarctica then at one time there must have been jungles and swamps rather than all the ice. Best of all they seemed to understand. They seemed to get it. The questions were fairly astute for the most part. There were a couple of tricky ones. One little girl asked if they’d found fossilized unicorn bones. I didn’t want to burst her bubble so I told her that we weren’t sure if dinosaurs existed until we found the bones. So far we haven’t found actual unicorn fossils but we have found all sorts of weird fossil horses including ones that had toes on their feet. So you never know. Then there was the time I started talking about one of the most common fossils, coal. All the kids suddenly got quiet and started looking at one kid in the middle. After a couple of seconds the teacher piped up with “Don’t worry Cole, it’s spelled different.” At the end I let the kids come up and take a close look at the fossils and even touch them. They were enthralled. Yes it was a bit of a risk but I figured that it was worth it for the teaching opportunity. We’d expected the class to go for 20 to 30 minutes. They are kindergarten and first graders after all. They were so into it that the teacher let us go on for around 45 minutes and even then the kids weren’t getting distracted or antsy. All and all it went very well.

Marsha has started referring to us as Dinoman and Fossilgirl. There was some debate between us regarding the name. Marsha liked Dinoman and Fossilgirl. I thought Dinoman and Fossil sounded better but Marsha thought it made her sound old. I told her that at least I didn’t try Dinoman and The Fossil but that didn’t help. Finally I asked the techy/nerdy/geeky kid that works with me which was better. He just thought that we were weird.

In other news, Best Buy, which is as most of you know a Minnesota company, is closing a number of their stores in Canada. One of them is the Nanaimo store. I don’t think we’ll get a chance to pick up any great clearance deals though. They didn’t say anything in advance. Just one morning the stores didn’t open, staff was turned away at the door, and the windows were covered with brown paper. Our suspicion is that everything will either be trucked away or moved to the FutureShop store in town as Best Buy owns that too. Competing against yourself is not a good strategy.

The only other thing this week was the progress we’ve made on the new room. We finished the primer last weekend. We’ve got the color nearly done and today I put in the Dricore sub-flooring in. The room is looking very nice. The funny thing is the colour. We selected a rich, deep burgundy red and a deep rich yellow. It will look great against the dark wood looking flooring and wood bookcases and the white trim will set it all off the colour very nicely. All this is true but it wasn’t until this week when we had the colour up that Marsha and I realized at about the same time that by accident that we’d painted the room maroon and gold. We didn’t mean to use the U of MN colours but that’s what it is. I told Marsha that if we’d realized it earlier I’d have gone with a blonde parquet flooring with a picture of Goldie Gopher in the middle of the room.

Doug and Marsha

PIX. Doug talking about Dinosaurs but first Momiji wanted to come along so she got into the suitcase the night before my appearance.



Unveiling the fossils at the start. Underneath the green towel and the hat is my T-Rex skull. I saved uncovering that till the finale.