For sundry and assorted reasons, none of which, unfortunately, have to do with moving back into the house (an event that remains depressingly lodged in the future), I have not felt up to posting. I still don't, really, but I am tired of staring "Doggy Bags" in the face every time I open up this blog.
In the blogless interim, however, I HAVE felt up to doing other things, including but not limited to:
1. Sanding down assorted bedroom doors. Our house has very nice, solid wood doors. The previous owner had very anxious, insistent dogs that were often closed into the bedrooms. Need I say more? There's a delicious feeling of exorcising the last of the house demons as I rub those scratch marks into oblivion.
2. Celebrating our 14th anniversary at Rioja, one of those fancy downtown restaurants whose menus read like short stories involving collisions of luxury ingredients (Alaska-caught halibut in an Earl Gray-Tarragon reduction with lemon cream fraiche and a fig tartlet) (which was delicious). Pretentious, yet mmmmm.
3. Receiving rather handsome T-shirts from our builder (although the shirts have the alarming motto "It's not our fault!" written on the back). I'm hoping this isn't one of those "I took out a second mortgage and moved out of my home and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" situations.
4. Finishing the fall baseball season with Silas (thank GOD. No more long haul missions to distant fields.)
5. Finishing untold piles of homework with the same. Eegads, the HOMEWORK. It's more than I had in many college classes. The boy continues to soldier on, bravely and stoically, but sometimes it breaks my heart. M offers a refreshingly different perspective, however--he says that when he lived in Germany in fourth grade, his homework loads were similar. Weekdays were for doing homework, and only weekends were for playdates.
6. Being dazzled by the autumn colors. This happens every year. All year I remember, intellectually, that autumn is very pretty, and then every year I amazed again at the incandescent yellows, the burning reds, the glittering grasses, the way a tepid vista of green and brown is suddenly spiced into brilliance, and everyday acts, like driving to pick up the kids or going for a disappointingly short run, become miracles of hope and beauty. (Why hope, though? I don't know.)
2 comments:
It feels like everyone recently has been talking about the insane amounts of homework their kids have been getting in elementary school. It makes me a little nervous for our own kids. I will have to ask Torsten about that Germany thing to see if he had the same experience.
Glad you liked Rioja! We were super disappointed the one time we went there. Maybe they were just having an off-night. We went to Fruition a few weeks after our bad experience at Rioja and it was so much better, so now I think Fruition would be our go-to place for fancy dinners. If we can ever afford them again. Sigh.
We really did like Rioja, although it's possible that the fact that our palates have been beaten into submission by eating solely at kid-friendly chains may have influenced our response.
And the homework problem is new this year. The life skill they're clearly trying to teach is how to manage long-term and short-term projects at the same time... but wow. It's intense.
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