does everything demand an answer?

We have been having such pleasant weather in the mornings, cool enough that I am comfortable in jeans, not so cool yet that I need a sweater -- although I will enjoy that too, and revel in being chilly for many mornings until suddenly it is January and I am ready for warmth. The afternoons are warmer, and I think the next few days will be very hot, but I have been soaking up the pleasant coolness as much as I can. It has been very good to have a week with so much open space, to do things in my own time and restore some order to my life. Many start-of-school tasks that had been put off while I prepared for the weekend trip have now been taken care of -- annual pictures ordered, PTA membership sorted out, some outgrown uniforms sorted away and so forth. I am going to try volunteering in my son's computer lab next week and see how it goes; it is only an hour a week, and while likely less enjoyable than last year's hour of science class, it seems to be what is needed, and I do like working directly with the children.

Sadly, my smol son has had a bad cough all week, and then this morning he complained that his ear hurts, so this afternoon I will pick him up early from school and take him to the doctor to see if he has an ear infection -- he has never had one, but he inherited by high pain resistance, so if he is complaining about something hurting it is likely fairly intense.

Yesterday I began going through my bookcases in a leisurely fashion and making a stack of books I might donate, and adding all the books I have not yet read (or read so long ago I do not remember them at all) to Goodreads, so that I can remember to see which ones might have ebooks and so forth. It is a little bit of a nonsense project, in that it does not really need to be done, but I am enjoying it immensely -- rediscovering books I read long ago, finding things I have been meaning to read for ten or twenty years now but have never gotten around to, and releasing some books back back to the wild where I hope they will find lovely new homes. It is a good start to autumn, and will doubtless inform my reading choices in future months. I have been becoming more aware as of late that my time is limited -- not in the near term, so far as I know, but it continues to pass and at some point I will stop being in it, and while anticipation is a pleasure, I would rather not wait too long to read all these books I have been saving the pleasure of for so many years. Some of these books I remember buying at a Borders in Los Angeles in 1996 -- 1996! -- it is past time I give them a try and either read them or let them loose.