Cemeteries and Smoke

I had a busy day today! Mom and Dad got me up early to go to Nine Mile Cemetery for a workshop. Yeah, sounds creepy, but I love cemeteries! And our town's cemetery is so cool. It's really old, and it's built on a really steep hill. I climbed to the top once to see the gravestones way at the top, and I have no idea how they ever dragged coffins and tombstones way up there. Dad couldn't even make it up all the way. He had to slide down on his butt!

Anyway, there was this guy at the cemetery today who restores monuments and gravestones. He's traveling all over the country to show people how to clean old stones, straighten them, fix ones that are falling apart... stuff like that. He talked forever! I just wanted to do some work.

Here I am waiting, by the veterans' section.

And here I am after the guy told a lame joke. I asked him why some of the gravestones have fences around them. You know what he told me? "To keep them in." Ha-ha, very funny.

I finally got to work with Mom and some other people on cleaning up an old stone. It was fun! I got to spray, scrub, and rinse. The stone looked so much cleaner when we were done!

See, this kind of stuff is my schooling. Mom and Dad homeschool me, but they call it unschooling. "The world is your classroom," Dad likes to say. He called today an example of "experiential learning." Big words. I just like hanging out in the cemetery.

Later in the day, Dad looked out the window and noticed a lot of smoke covering the hills around our house. We thought there was a fire somewhere in town, so we drove around to take a look. It was really thick smoke!

Turns out the winds shifted and sent smoke from the wildfires on the West Coast our way. It was nasty! It really stinks out there.

Mom took some pictures of the smoky hills while we went on a bike ride at the end of the day.

That's the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes, our local bike trail, and that's me riding away.

I'm glad to be back home for the night and out of all the smoke!