Bowl of Ammonia
Posted: March 19, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities Leave a comment
Here at the Art Farm Homeschool Academy, I wear multiple hats, and some days require me to switch back and forth rapidly. On Wednesday, I worked as Headmaster, Serpent of Caesar, pest control carpenter, and then Science Assistant.
As the Serpent of Caesar, acting for and on behalf of a private school, I am knee deep in a lawsuit concerning its building with a leaking roof. Ongoing for more than a year, it has been an all consuming slog, even though mine is a part-time job.
Late in the game now, we are working on a settlement where the roofer will repair its work. Lawsuits are essentially about money – a battle to get the insurance companies to open their coffers – and so an in-kind repair, at no cost, is highly unusual. The attorney – whom I shall call Themis – has said in 40 years of construction litigation, she has never seen a defendant offer to repair its failure. That would seem generous, but the quid pro quo is that the roofer wants a release from all future claims concerning its work, and that legal document is no small task to wordsmith.
Themis and I have been working toward that, and on Wednesday, surprisingly, the roofer’s attorney agreed to our proposed language. What had progressed very slowly suddenly went live, and I needed the Board to approve or reject the Agreement.
Over morning coffee, while work emails sailed inbound, I had been organizing my son’s day. For language arts, his assignment was to read from Letters to his Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of becoming a MAN OF THE WORLD and a GENTLEMAN. The letters, written from 1739 until 1771, by the Right Honorable Earl to his illegitimate son served as a guide to etiquette and insights about diplomacy, politics and “the pursuit of excellence.” The Earl’s son, born of a commoner, would never be fully accepted into aristocratic society, but the father was committed to his hope. The Magister assigned for my son Letter III that describes the virtues of learning Greek, rather than Latin.
Pray mind your Greek particularly; for to know Greek very well is to be really learned: there is no great credit in knowing Latin, for everybody knows it; and it is only a shame not to know it. Besides that, you will understand Latin a great deal the better for understanding Greek very well; a great number of Latin words, especially the technical words, being derived from the Greek.
So, while my Son read Lord Chesterfield, I worked on the legal settlement, until, at 10am, when my son and the Magister had their class on the Greek accent rules, I changed hats, became pest control carpenter and went outside to check on our house.
My daughter had heard something scratching up in the attic above her bedroom. A serious problem. The attic vent had come loose, which left a gaping hole into which some rodent had entered. My only choice was to haul out the ladder, set it upon the porch roof, climb up to see who was there, and put the vent back in place. But raccoons had lived in the porch ceiling last summer, and eaten through both the asphalt shingles as well as the boarding below. Climbing up a ladder set upon the roof was fraught with risk but that rodent needed to go and the vent needed to be put back.
The attic was empty, so I reattached the vent cover, but noticed a raccoon had taken up residence elsewhere. They had left the attic – which was good – but moved above the porch ceiling – not good. Our Pit Bull-Rottweiler rescue puppy was going ballistic at the sound of my climbing above, plus the smell of the Raccoon overhead.
Pit Bulls are descended from the Greek Molossian “dogs of war” while Rottweilers are from the drover dogs of the Roman legion, used to herd cattle to feed the elite soldiers as they crossed the Alps into Germany. Pit Bulls are ferociously loyal to their owner, so our puppy was literally climbing the walls to protect me.
Raccoons are awfully cute, but we do not want them living in our house. Eviction was needed. A friend, from Vermont, told me that ammonia poured into a bowl is the trick because the rodent will move to get away from that smell. So as our puppy howled running to and fro, I climbed up and poured one gallon of ammonia into a metal bowl set above the porch ceiling. The Raccoon huddled in the far corner, hiding. The ammonia worked. The porch is vacant again. Truth is stranger than fiction. I still need to close off the porch ceiling, but things have calmed down.
Having finished the eviction, I went inside to work more on the lawsuit plus to help with science, which included recrystallizing kosher salt from our Red Cabbage Ph experiment. In my son’s last class the Mother Tree had taught, “Ph is a measure of hydrogen in solution. Solvent + Solute = Solution. Something that is water soluble is hydrophilic. Something that is not water soluble is hydrophobic. For the Ph Solvent is the water and Solute is the stuff added to create the solution. Water is what communicates to life.” Let’s communicate to life!
My son poured the red cabbage solvent from the jar, which left the solute – the purple salt – at the bottom. He scraped that out, spread it upon a plate to dry, then used a mortar and pestle to break the hardened salt. Admiring his creation, he commented, “We took table salt which is a solid. Put it in a red cabbage liquid. Turned some amount into a liquid. Took it out and turned it back into a solid, by using gas, an evaporation, which is covering all three states of matter: liquid, solid and gas.” I could not, in my wildest dreams, conjure that sentence so I am learning that he is factually correct. The homeschooling goes surprisingly well lately.
It is a curious fact that I am able to do this because I have a part time job, and am not allowed – by law – to earn much income. Social Security functions by a little known algorithm >62 + <18 = 2.027x, where FRA is 67. I am older than 62 and my son is 13. Both he and I receive benefits, with a cap on my income until I reach full retirement age (FRA). If you exceed that cap, the clawback is draconian, which means, in a culture driven to maximize income at all costs, my path is different. Time is on my side, plus just enough income, and time, for parenting as for life, is worth more than its weight in gold.
Lord Chesterfield taught that time was the most precious asset, its “true value” was to “snatch, seize and enjoy every moment.” We are in agreement.
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Spring has sprung! Happy first Friday! Carpe diem!!!
an Art Farm 