Village 11: Day 24... last day

Today was a very hard day. Being our last day, it was both sad and happy at the same time. We were all feeling rather forlorn this morning, and so decided to sing each and every one of the songs that we learned this summer. It was our best singing to date--we've truly moved from cacophony to mellifluous in these five weeks-- and it took us an hour! There may have been a surreptitious tear or two, and no one complained. Then we set out to clean up the rest of the of the mini fair. After a nice snack we talked about what it might mean to appraise property. We practiced on an old village building called the Chalet. Then we broke into groups and set out to appraise each others properties. The appraisals were really fun because all of the houses and yards were in top condition. Some of us hadn't already taken the time to really look at each others finished product. When we finished, we met up in the peep loft where Jesslyn taught us about mean and median. A few of us were worried that this was a math lesson... it turns out it was and wasn't. The homesteaders agreed that rather than average out all of the appraisals for their properties, we ought to use the median home values to be more fair.

When this was complete we broke for lunch. After lunch we went back into the forest to retrieve our houses and to learn everyone's net worth. We went for a brief swim at this point and later regrouped for the auction.

Owen was an awesome auctioneer and made things feel proper, Jesslyn recorded how many snips and snaps everyone had throughout the experience so no one lost track. I had the easy job and modeled the items up for auction. The auction took a tremendous amount of time. When it was all over snacks were had, goodbyes were said, and we all moved on. Perhaps a bit changed from who were five weeks ago.