Matching Tracksuits

fun in fours

around the house

A Mess

Thursday 13 June 2019

I've been working to clean out our basement this week. Because of some shoddy renovation work -- well, shoddy cleanup -- we had a fair amount of concrete dust coating many things as well as the usual chaos that comes with leaving your basement to grow its on labyrinth of apathetic misplacement of tools and storage bins for four years.

Monday and Tuesday I worked on the metal and wood storage shelves that hold our plastic storage bins filled with camping items, old photographs, clothes the Boy has not yet grown into, and mysterious "why do we still have that?" items. Wednesday was the work bench as well as a few more shelves. (Everything takes so long because each item -- every single one -- needs to be wiped down, and the shelves took a long time because I moved them to one location temporarily to clean them and then had to move them back.)

Today, I began working on the other half of the room and final touches to the work bench. The after picture, as a result of not having time to put everything back in its place, looks worse than the before picture above.

In order to clean a mess, we often have to make one first. It's truism for most things in life, I think, but I often forget it. I want things to move ahead without ever moving back; I want lesson plans to come out perfect the first time; I want first drafts to be good enough to be final drafts; I want our kids to perfect things instantly. It's in the mess that we figure things out, though, and making a masterpiece always involves a mess beforehand.

I forget that when I come into the kitchen as K is cooking, though. I tend to clean things as I go along; K, not so much. The kitchen is a complete wreck when she's done cooking. Yet out of that mess comes little slices and ladles-full of perfection.

Garden

Monday 03 June 2019

This is the first year we don't have any kind of garden.

At all. It's liberating.

Blossom

Sunday 02 June 2019

Crossing Over Again

Sunday 19 May 2019

Evening Shooting

Wednesday 15 May 2019

The renovation project is nearing its end. The final exterior painting was completed today, but K decided she wanted to change one color -- the trim around the new windows will soon match the color of our newly-painted shutters.

The brown shutters seem to tone everything else down. Those old, peeling, white shutters just made the house look unplanned and neglected. With freshly-washed brick and newly-painted shutters, the house doesn't really look like it's from the late sixties -- except for the architecture, that is.

In the evening, some shooting.

Almost

Monday 13 May 2019

Almost is a word that has so much wiggle room that it is almost meaningless. It can mean anything from "nowhere near" to "just moments from."

"How are you doing with that project?" I ask a student.

"I'm almost done," he replies, and depending on the student and what he's taught me to expect, I understand that to mean "not even started" to "doing final proofreading."

"How are you doing with that project?" K asks me.

"I'm almost done," I reply, and that means nearly done or no where near done, but most often it means, "This is taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated or planned for."

Seven years ago, the Boy was almost here. It was just after we'd gone to bed on a Sunday night that K woke me with, "My water broke." By about half past eleven that Sunday (Mother's Day), we were at the hospital. By one in the morning, we were holding E.

For the last few weeks, we've felt like we're almost done with this renovation, almost ready to move Nana and Papa into their little apartment as they've taken to calling it. The floors are done everywhere; the power is on; the lights are hooked up; the washer and drier are installed; the sink is almost ready. Yet so much remaining. The bed for Papa sits in parts in our living room, with the headboard and footboard set to arrive later this week. The toilet sits in its box, ready for installation. The shower needs to be completed, and the exterior needs painting. There's still so much to do, and so little to do.

Tonight, with a little help from the Boy, I got a little more done: the drainage system is 99% complete. We need a new downspout for the back corner, and as such, I've yet to make the final cuts on the PVC for the drainage outlet there.

I stuck some PVC in to keep dirt from getting into the system while I filled in the gravel and dirt, but ti' about 24 inches too tall at least.

It's relatively smooth, relatively done. Almost -- just like every other almost.

Digging, Mowing, Sealing

Sunday 05 May 2019

We put the new bed in a year ago -- exactly a year ago today.

End of Spring 2018 Soccer

The day's first victim

It's tempting to fall into the obvious reflection: the "so much has changed in a year" cliché. A lot has changed in a year, but the majority of it has changed in the last five months, all starting December 4 with a phone call at around 9:30 in the evening while I was out walking the dog. "Nana is going to the hospital." And from that moment, it all changed. No one knew just how much it would change, of course. No one has any real clairvoyance in medical emergencies. But here I am, a day past five months after it all started, exactly a year after we put them in, taking out the last vestiges of a garden.

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then, Saturday work spills into Sunday. We try to keep Sunday as a day for the family, but with the last five months begin what they have, that in itself is a challenge.

Today's job was simple but critical: deal with the recently created drainage issue at the front corner downspout.

Yesterday's mess before it got really bad

Visions of it seeping through the brick into the now newly created concrete-slab crawl that would offer no outlet at all haunted me, and when the rain woke me at three in the morning, I went to check and found the hack I'd created didn't work either and set about digging, in a downpour in my underwear and Crocs at three in the morning, a quick trench to direct the water away from the house.

Crepe Myrtle free

Today, then, was the day to solve the problem once and for all. The first task: dig up the Crepe Myrtle at the corner of the house. That took a couple of hours. Then, the trenching, including a trench under the newly built ramp. Why not do it before they built the ramp? Simply -- I didn't know it would be necessary.

For now, everything is simply laid out and pushed together. I'm far from done and not even sure how I'll terminate it for effective discharge.

Next, after several hours of digging, I turned my attention back to the yard and the hedges three-quarters trimmed. I'd cut my power cord yesterday and decided to put it off until Sunday -- and the torrents of rain that were by then falling didn't do much to avoid said procrastination.

The Boy for his part was upset and thrilled about it all. Digging is one of his favorite things, and he was disappointed that he missed out on so much of it. Mowing, though, is equally enjoyable for him, and he reached a milestone today: he can now start the mower himself. He ran over the trimmings that remained around the yard, always looking for a reason to turn the mower's engine off so he could turn it back on.

(The hard rain really did a number on our plants -- they're beaten into submission.)

The final task was indoors: sealing up the entry to the new room. The floor guys are going to be here tomorrow, and the thought of sawdust throughout the kitchen and living room was none too appealing.

Crawling in from the back side before it was sealed: "This would make a great little fort..."

Finally, dinner without the girls: leftover soup and a salad. The Boy, being the wonderfully odd eater than he is, was disappointed with the soup (he's grown tired of all soups, I think) and thrilled about the salad.

End of April

Tuesday 30 April 2019

It's difficult to believe that April is over, and when I look at my school calendar for May, I realize that the year is, for all intents and purposes, over. We have no single week of school remaining that is a regular, five-day, testing-free week, except for the last week, which consists of three half days.

April in a way flew by, but it also crawled. We're still not done with the renovation: "Two more weeks" has been the eternal refrain. We're so close now it's ridiculous: the walls and ceilings primed, ready for painting tomorrow; tiles in the bathroom and shower installed, ready for grout; hardwood floor installed in the bedroom, read to be sanded and finished next Monday. It feels like forever and no time at the same time.

Spring Monday

Monday 29 April 2019

I was worried that this would be the first of several very difficult days. With no one here to help with the kids (read: E) in the morning, it's difficult for me to get out of the house very early. This week, however, is my duty week: I get to spend thirty minutes before my contracted arrival time supervising kids on the eighth-grade hallway. It's loads of fun, but the downside is that I have to leave much earlier than usual. Which created a dilemma: what to do with the Boy. Two options: ride with the neighbor or leave without breakfast and have it at school.

At around 6:15 this morning, the Boy toddled downstairs, still rubbing his eyes, and presented a third option: "I'm just going to eat breakfast now."

"Are you sure? You could still sleep another half hour."

"Nah, I'll stay up."

And so the Boy proved once again that life is like calculus: there's often more than one (or even two) solutions to a given problem.

Once at school, the usually peaceful morning duty transformed temporarily into one of those moments when, as a teacher, I see a student's future and think, "Wow, if this kid doesn't make some serious changes, do some serious maturing, she's in for a long, tough life." And much of that, in most cases, is due to environment: they're not choosing necessarily to be a disrespectful kid. It's something that works on the streets and/or at home, and they just bring it into the school as well.

That particular exchange foreshadowed the discussion I was to have with my honors English kids, who read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" last week as their article of the week. We began with a review via video:

Then the kids went through a few discussion questions:

  1. To what extent do you find Socrates's point about the human tendency to confuse "shadows" with "reality" relevant today?
  2. What could be the elements that prevent people from seeing the truth, or regarding "shadow" as the "truth"?
  3. In society today or in your own life, what sorts of things shackle the mind?

The common theme that came through in all of these discussions was the role social media plays in creating false realities, in preventing people from seeing truth, in shackling the mind. It's ironic: I see so many of these kids buried in their phones before and after school, yet they're strangely aware of the negative effects.

After school, I hopped out of the car thinking, "So far, other than the little issue in the morning during hall duty, this supposedly tough day is surprisingly enjoyable. After dinner, it was even more so: one of E's choices in his literacy log is to find a pleasant place to sit outside and read for a while.

And after that, a little project: a bird house. Where did this idea come from? I don't know. The Boy simply talked K into buy him a piece of pressure-treated 1 x 6, and although he originally planned on building a tree house from that single plank, he was flexible enough to realize that a bird house was probably more in the scope of that single plank. So he found instructions on YouTube, gathered tools, and together we built a little bird house.

"Once you're done, I want to help with the painting," the Girl declared, and so with twenty minutes to go before the start of E's evening ritual, they began working.

"Let's decorate it with birds," the Girl suggested. They began drawing various silhouettes of birds while I got the dog's dinner ready, only to discover we were out of dog food.

"Alright kids, you'll have to do the actual painting tomorrow. E, you'll have to go with me to the store to buy some food for Clover." I was expecting a small fit, some protesting at the very least, and I was reluctant to stop the work in progress: it's so rare that they find something that really engages them both.

Still, the Boy was surprisingly mature. "Okay," was all he said, and off we went to get some kibble for the pup.

And so at the close of this surprisingly pleasant day that was supposed to be the first of several tough ones, I find myself realizing anew that "tough days" and "bad days" and "rough days" depend more on our perception than anything else, just like Plato's shadows suggest.

Crash

Thursday 25 April 2019

Our swing broke. K was swinging; the kids were playing; I sat down in the swing to join her.

We were soon on the ground. Thus ends “The New Swing.”

The New Swing