I learned a great many things on the morning field trip.

None of them things on the itinerary, mind you, but important things, just the same.

Including, sadly, confirmation that it was suicide. Hence the complete lack of coverage of her death in the newspaper.

And yet there she still is, weeks later, staring out from her Facebook page.

Damn.

The couple sat through my Hunter Safety presentation last month, and asked, "Would you mind teaching that section for our class?"

Their town is not quite an hour's drive away.

Sure.

So on the evening's drive to their town, I have plenty of time to run through the whole talk sequence in my head. And I know some of the old, warped slides will not drop down like they should.

They never all do.

I've already converted the whole hour-plus talk into PowerPoint... the problem is finding a laptop projector. And so those of us 127 miles from the nearest projector we can borrow continue to use 35mm slides and a Kodak projector older than my sons.

I arrive plenty early and find the classroom in this tiny town using...

A laptop and projector.

Dang.

I begin my talk by apologizing for the old technology. Three-quarters of the class is under 12 years of age, and I correctly suspect many of them have never seen a slide show.

"My Granny has one," says a kid in the back row.

"I've never seen one," says a mother in the front row.

Heh. Granny technology. Maybe I can use that to my advantage at the next budget request period.