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A compressed week, this week, as my children are out of school early every day to allow time for parent-teacher conferences in the afternoons. This is convenient on Wednesday as it leaves much time for Halloween celebrations, but somewhat irritating for the rest of the week, especially tomorrow when I have a volunteer committment exactly in the middle of their school time, ensuring there is little chance to do anything substantial. The pleasant part of it all is more time to spend with them before they are exhausted by dealing with teachers and peers and such; today I think we will go to an urban 'pumpkin patch' (an empty parking lot taken over by bounce houses and other inflatables, also pumpkins one can buy and take home), and tomorrow we might bake together. I was given icing tips for my birthday, and I would like to try them out, and icing things is something the children enjoy, although there is always the difficulty of figuring out what to do with the things afterwards, as they like using an amount of buttercream which renders the cake difficult to eat.
It was a good weekend, although I was very short-tempered yesterday and snapped at people far too much; I felt overwhelmed by the number of chores to get done, particularly an incredible backlog of laundry, but spouse was very patient with me and by the time we were going to bed it was all dealt with. Saturday was better, we went to an actual pumpkin patch with a corn maze, many pumpkins grown there on the farm, a hayride, and other attractions; the children led us through the maze with much hilarity, and then we ate from food trucks while listening to a local band, admired pumpkins, ran around in the corn some more, rode a small train around to look at scarecrows and more pumpkins, then headed back home. This has been our daughter's activity of choice every October for several years now, but this is the first year that her brother has actively enjoyed it rather than putting up with it for his sister's sake. The only way it could be have been better is if cooler; I do not love heat, and it was both fairly hot and very dusty, so I came home streaked with sweat and dirt and was very glad to get into the shower before dinner.
Weekends are terrible for reading, but in spite of this I finished another Margery Sharp (Rhododendron Pie, her first) and just this morning I finished Rachel Ferguson's The Stag at Bay, which is so worshipful of the landed classes that I keep thinking it must, must be a satire, that nobody could possibly really have believed that the upper classes intermarrying with suburban families was a eugenic tragedy -- and yet, there it is, she seems dead serious. It does not make me love The Brontes Went to Woolworths any less, but it makes me wonder if it is an outlier in her work; there is some class concern there but it is about culture, not about bloodlines. I will read more of hers, if I can find them via ILL, so we shall see.
It was a good weekend, although I was very short-tempered yesterday and snapped at people far too much; I felt overwhelmed by the number of chores to get done, particularly an incredible backlog of laundry, but spouse was very patient with me and by the time we were going to bed it was all dealt with. Saturday was better, we went to an actual pumpkin patch with a corn maze, many pumpkins grown there on the farm, a hayride, and other attractions; the children led us through the maze with much hilarity, and then we ate from food trucks while listening to a local band, admired pumpkins, ran around in the corn some more, rode a small train around to look at scarecrows and more pumpkins, then headed back home. This has been our daughter's activity of choice every October for several years now, but this is the first year that her brother has actively enjoyed it rather than putting up with it for his sister's sake. The only way it could be have been better is if cooler; I do not love heat, and it was both fairly hot and very dusty, so I came home streaked with sweat and dirt and was very glad to get into the shower before dinner.
Weekends are terrible for reading, but in spite of this I finished another Margery Sharp (Rhododendron Pie, her first) and just this morning I finished Rachel Ferguson's The Stag at Bay, which is so worshipful of the landed classes that I keep thinking it must, must be a satire, that nobody could possibly really have believed that the upper classes intermarrying with suburban families was a eugenic tragedy -- and yet, there it is, she seems dead serious. It does not make me love The Brontes Went to Woolworths any less, but it makes me wonder if it is an outlier in her work; there is some class concern there but it is about culture, not about bloodlines. I will read more of hers, if I can find them via ILL, so we shall see.
