Woodpecker in the yard!!!

This morning as I took out the garbage and got the paper, I noticed a bird on the suet that I hadn't seen before. I called my wife to come and we identified it as a downy woodpecker. I tried to get a picture of it, but it flew away and lighted on my neighbors tree, so the picture wasn't clear. I found one on the internet. This is exactly what the bird looked like. That started my day off well.

I wish I taught more books. I love books. I love reading. I wish we could have a book club here. Read selected books, then have discussions about them. Just talk about the books. Nothing formal. Just, hey, I loved this book. The part where this character did this or did anyone notice that. Lots of people like Nicholas Sparks, so we could all read one of his books and then just talk about it. Maybe watch a movie based on his books. In my mind, especially in this field, learning is much more exploratory and independent. In some ways, that's why I got into this in the first place. I remember as a college senior, we had a seminar course. Each class, and we met three times a week for 50 minutes, we had one work to read, and one student would take the lead in the discussion for that day. He or she would create a hand out and we would talk about it, discuss it, disagree over it. I did a big project on the book Night, by Elie Weisel who was a boy in a Jewish concentration camp. He witnessed the death of his family but lived to tell his story. I have a copy of the book. It's rather short. But think about that. Everyone reads the book and then we discuss it. How could people allow that to happen. How could society stand by and watch the oppression and execution of people for no other reason than the fact that they were of a particular race.
Well, somehow I went from downy woodpeckers to the Holocaust.