Storm At Cedar Key

I spent yesterday afternoon cleaning out the wet lab in my new school digs. My primary lab/classroom is a sweet, modern room in the main building, but the "wet lab" is a portable building built specifically to be a science lab about 15 years ago. Back then, the county installed about 4 or 5 of these special portables, one at each middle and high school, and I actually taught in one for about half my career, so it is a familiar layout.

 I arrived at the school around 1:00 pm under hazy, dull skies ... nothing remarkable, just kind of blah and overcast.

Once inside the lab, I started opening cabinets and salvaging the good, while tossing the bad.

"Stuff" accumulates in labs and store rooms over the years and this one is no exception.

I got a lot done, but there is much more to do.

I toiled mostly inside, except for trips to the large garbage cans just outside from time to time with the residue left by the previous teacher who happens to be a friend of mine and, long ago, my mentor. Any classroom with lots of storage space like this lab, will collect everything from old files, student projects, mementos of past classes, and things that really qualify as junk.

The junk is often saved with the best of motives, "this may come in handy some day", and then other stuff gets stored on top, and then more things.

In an era of drastic education cuts, we teachers become packrats of a sort.

It winds up being something like an archaelogical dig.

The whole time I toiled, I could hear the chatter of the young ospreys who call the schoolyard lightpost home.

Not bad background music, not bad at all.

Somewhere around 6:00 PM, I ran out of large garbage bags and my rumbling stomach said it was time to go home.

When I stepped outside, the sky had changed dramatically.

The wind was whipping and a dark shelf of roiling clouds was moving in from the south.

The few boats that were still out were racing for the safety of the tiny harbor at Cedar Key.

If you are a regular reader, you have seen the "Honeymoon Hotel" with a golden sunset behind it as my banner picture, not so long ago.

On this day, some pretty ominous clouds took over the backdrop duty.

I'm thinking that on days like this one, that little sailboat feels even smaller than it actually is.

It stormed and rained all the way home and today has been grey with off and on light rain.

Good stuff.

The video below has a lot of wind noise, but, hey ... it was windy.