fun in threes, sometimes fours
the girl
One of the things I like most about this site is the Time Machine widget at the bottom that serves up links every day from the past. What were we doing three years ago? Five? Ten?
But it’s the unpredictable things that bring long-forgotten memories that are the most enjoyable — like finding your fourteen-year-old daughter’s glasses that she wore when she was five.
We had an online meeting tonight with a company that helps student-athletes navigate the challenge of getting an academic scholarship. It’s something that I have absolutely no firsthand knowledge and little to no general knowledge about. The question is, given the cost of the service (it’s not cheap by any stretch), just how much will this provide us in the long run. Its cost would certainly be justified if we ended up with major savings to L’s college costs through a scholarship to play volleyball. Yet if we just get nothing for it — no real offer, no real scholarship, no real hope — then it was obviously money poorly spent.
We had a teacher workday today, and the day concluded with a presentation from a therapist about trauma and its effects on learning. It basically boiled down to, “Don’t be a dick and compound these at-risk kids’ issues by taking everything personally and letting that trigger you into a power struggle that damages the relationship.” That’s laudable, and certainly a very basic best practice for classroom management, but it got me thinking about how much we never know about our students in a given moment: what taught a kid to react this way to this stimulus, what’s going on in the kid’s head at the moment, how we’re contributing to it, what other social forces, unseen and unknown, are contributing at that moment due to peer pressure and the idea of lost face — the whole miasmic mess we find ourselves in when an at-risk student is in full panic mode. Not an excuse for disregarding the processes we went over today. Far from it — a full admission to their basic necessity. Yet it still leaves me feeling a bit like Sisyphus.
One of our final renovations on our house will begin tomorrow: the guest bathroom will get a complete makeover.
Heaven knows it needs it. In a lot of ways, it was always the room most in need of renovation. Ugly subway tiles on the counter, some god-awful trim around the sink, old toilet — it was all awful.
Was?! It is awful. It has been awful for years. And tomorrow, we start renovating it all. Well, we’re not doing anything — we’re hiring our Polish friend who’s done so much already in our home.
This last unknown is finally known: when will we ever get that bathroom done…
It has been a very long time since we were last in Biltmore. We went with my folks in 2006 with my parents (before the Girl was born)
Biltmore
and again in 2007 when Babcia was here from Poland.
Biltmore II
Of course, the Girl was too young to remember anything and the Boy wasn't even a thought when we last went there, so today being a teacher workday that I took as a personal day, we took the kids for a day at the largest house in America.
The house has looked like this for over a hundred years now,
but there was one significant change this time around, though. It was nothing in the gardens: they looked just like they did 14 years ago.
(Click on images for larger view, as always.)
The exterior really wasn't any different -- the limestone facade is just stunning and overwhelming.
What was different was that photos are now allowed on the interior. I guess in the 14 years since we last went there, the administrators realized with the advent of the smartphone that keeping people from taking photos was going to be impossible. Plus, why not get the free publicity that comes with social media posts.
As we strolled through the house, I kept thinking how "house" is such a poor word for what this is. It's more like a palace. I believe it's officially called a chateau. It's hard to imagine anyone building a structure like that for himself. Vanderbilt was still single when he began building the 170,000 square-foot home, and he and his wife only had the one daughter Cornelia. They took up three of the thirty-five bedrooms. What's the point of something like that other than to do it?
It's all so foreign and almost obscene to modern sensibilities. It would take 65 of our homes to equal the area of that house. What does anyone need with that? Nothing -- that's the honest answer. But why would they want something like that?
Yet it's a piece of art in and of itself.
Since we got year passes, we're planning on heading back in December for the Christmas decorations (which are already going up).
More planting in the yard,
a new bookshelf for the Girl,
some re-decoration of the Boy’s room —
not our typical Sunday.
Last night was homecoming. Instead of a date, she took her best friend.
