FINALLY! I finished the damn thing......

I can give Pillars of the Earth back to Jan. I am done. Such a frustrating book. The story was.....okay? The writing was pedestrian and whoever edited that thing must have gotten as irritated as I did because they did a crappy job. One of the female characters was described as "sexy" - Excuse me? This is in the 1140s! Women were not sexy back then, nor were they "hot" in the 1130s, as he describes two women early in the book. ARGH. I have no doubt that women were attractive, even beautiful, in the middle ages, but I am sorry. People who bathe only twice a year, wear the same clothes for months on end, live with their cattle and have lice are NOT sexy or hot. Find some new adjectives, Mr. Follett.

In better news, finishing that damned book allows me to do something around the house again. Since we've got this week off from homeschooling, I have read that book but have done NOTHING resembling housekeeping. The dog hair has formed tumbleweeds, laundry piles abound, and the girls have taken to creating forts out of blankets, pillows and random chairs in the playroom. I have managed to keep the kitchen sanitary (I do have my limits) but since the garbage disposal on/off seal isn't working, extra vigilance is required in there this week. Everything must go in compost or in the bag in the freezer to go out on trash day. Nothing goes in the disposal or in the garbage can due to the awful fruit fly problems of late. Plus, the dog realllllllly needs a bath and our carpet is beginning to remind me of that point every evening when the sun comes streaming in the playroom, warming said carpet. Funk-E.

So, tomorrow, I vow that I will make the kids put away their forts, clean up the playroom, and vacuum (and Febreze). I will wash three loads of laundry and (sigh) fold and put it away. I will clean off my desk. Well, I guess I could do that now..........hey! Look! It's the copy of "A Thousand Splendid Suns" I got at the library the other day. Hmmm, maybe I should read this instead......

Yeah, housekeeping can wait until the weekend.

We love the library!

It is truly one of my favorite places in Clarksville (some of the others are Trinity Episcopal Church, Hodgepodge, the Blackhorse Pub and Tandoor, by the way) and it tickles me no end that my kids feel the same way. Today we returned 12 DVDs/videos and 20 books; played with our friend Koen; found 10 more books to check out; picked up a book on reserve; played with Little People; read in a quiet corner; talked to my friend Christina; used the computer card catalog to look things up; played in the bathtub; made a new friend; and talked to our favorite circulation employee, Vanya. (No movies today because they keep leaving the library DVDs out of the cases, and until they keep our DVDs in the cases for a week, they can't be trusted with someone else's - make sense?) How many other places can you do that many different things and not have to pay a dime? So cool. One of these days (read: When Lillie graduates from homeschool) I hope to work there. But I hope Miss Jean, Miss Mary and Miss JJ are still working there so I can work with them.

I picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns (thanks for returning it, Christina!) to read for our book club, Under the Covers. I have until Sept 12 to finish it, which is totally do-able if I can get through Pillars of the Earth. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it now and if I'm lucky, can spend the rest of my homeschooling-week-off finishing it up. Then I have to come up with something to read at the beach - whoo hoo! Another trip to library! :)

Focused

Mom and Dad kept the girls for us last weekend so we could help Chris' sister and hubby move in. While M&L were with Nana and Grandaddy, they went to the Frist Center for the Arts, one of our favorite field trip locations. Nana's main reason for going was to see the Tiffany glass exhibit before it closed, but the girls were focused on ArtQuest, the hands-on children's art area. They LOVE this place. Both of them are more artistically inclined than Timo and happily spend several hours painting, constructing and learning. This past weekend, one of the docents commented to Mom (who used to work there), "This little one is so SERIOUS - and focused!"

And so she is. That picture is from last week when she decided to watch birds outside and then draw them. She sat out there for about an hour, watching and drawing. What not-yet-5 year old does that? Certainly not Meggers. And her drawings ended up being pretty darn good too. I think I may have to work on art lessons for her.

Pillars of the Earth

Jan read this last month and gave it to me when she was done. She had warned me ahead of time that the writing "isn't literature," in her words, and she was right. Ugh. The first 1/5th of the book is a struggle to read. The prose is sooooo pedestrian and 5th grade and while the characters are vaguely interesting, they are also so two-dimensional that it's hard to stir up enough energy to keep reading. I finally got over the hump and got engaged in the main character, Prior Philip, enough to want to see how he manages to get his cathedral built. I'm now halfway through and the writing hasn't improved much (I just read about how one character hopes another gets his "just deserts" - WTF? Edit much?) but I've gotten this far, so I want to see how everything ends up. So far, it's a 2 1/2 out of 5 stars, and I don't expect it to get any more.

Write it myself

Rather than wasting so much time running down the rabbit hole of reading other people's blogs and wishing I had their perfect lives, I'm going to document my own totally less than perfect life and brush up on my writing skills at the same time. Plus it will make me download my pictures from the camera more often, help me keep track of things to scrapbook, and hopefully be fun. I shall see.

Chris gave me a beautiful pen from Hodgepodge for my birthday (or Mother's Day - I can't remember which, since they're so close together!), but it had an italic nib. Well, I can't stand to write fat, so I finally got around to getting a new nib for it last week, and it came in today's mail. LOVE this pen now. Beautiful. And it has written reliably all day long, which is a good sign. Yaay! Thank you Tato.

Also working on planning for the St. George Island trip next month. I still want to find a way to bring bikes down there, but rental for the 5 of us for the week would be $200. We gave away our old bike rack (stupid) and a new one would carry at most 3 bikes, leaving us to rent only two (cheaper), but the new rack would cost about $100 (not cheaper). ARGH! Still trying to figure this one out without spending an arm and a leg. On a good note, however, Chris' sister and brother in law have offered to keep the dog at their new house while we go on vacation (an excellent way to say thank you for us helping them move this weekend). That saves a cool $180 bucks - yaay! Oooh, must remember to call the vet's office and cancel our reservation for the beast.

We are taking off work from homeschooling this week. I was feeling so burned out last week only to discover on Thursday that - duh - it was because we had been going for 7 weeks straight. So we are having fun this week, no formal classes required. So far today the kids have cut up cardboard boxes to play with, read some books and made a fort upstairs. They have also asked me about a thousand times, "What are we doing today?" Whatever you want, baby; whatever you want.

I slept weird on my neck and have an awful kink in it. I'll put poor Chris to work rubbing it out when he gets home, but in the meantime, I wish I could find my heating pad. :(