Up To Date

I have never been stung by a wasp, hornet, yellow jacket, bee, etc.  Bees I like though!  They are just doing their bee thing, the rest of the these stinging creatures just seem like assholes who are out to create arm flapping chaos wherever they go.  Making an otherwise normal person look like one of those wacky inflatable arm waving tube men you see in front of some store having a HUGE EVERYTHING MUST GO SALE!

Anyway, as I stood on this lonely gravel road on a hot summer day with no cell service and only the buzz and hum of at least a million winged things around me.....I thought to myself....I could get stung, have an allergic reaction and DIE RIGHT HERE. Not how I pictured the end. However since you, dear reader, are reading this I have lived to explore another day.

This particular day, I was stopped at an abandoned school.  What? Shocking!  Some of these one room school houses are named after the area they are in, a local person, or sometimes after a place that settlers in the area originated from.  This one is called Up-To Date School.  I couldn't find anything on how this interesting name came to be.  Info on some of these old schools is limited but I did find that John and Melvin Tucker hauled the lumber from Stettler (about 50km away) and built the school.  It opened in 1909 or 1910. This school did not have a teacherage on site, the teacher boarded with members of the community. I can't find a date for when the school closed but once it's life as a school came to end it became a granary.  It still stands tall and proud, and just a bit weathered, on it's original site.  In the end though, everything must go.