What, Oh What?

So girl, what on earth do you do all day?  These journal entries aren't so scintillating that they're taking up all that much time.

OK, here was yesterday (excluding the never-ending journal):

3:00 a.m. My son comes in and wakes me up so I know he's home.  He has a very sweet story.  All of my kids attended Montessori school through 8th grade and have retained their closest friends from their middle school years there.  There were six boys (and nine girls) in his graduating 8th grade class and he was out with all of the boys except his twin brother, who's in France.  The five of them -- college students across the country and world travelers all -- had been sitting around their old Montessori playground (yes, at 2:00 a.m.) swapping memories of elementary school.  They are really big and hairy and darling guys.

6:30 a.m. I get up, take the dog for a walk, wake my daughter up, go out for bagels, and take her to a friend's for the trip out to soccer practice.

I spend a long time washing the tub, which is pretty disgusting.

I stop by my school, hoping to check out new classrooms and work space.  There are some beautiful new classrooms, so I am discouraged to discover that I have acquired the least desirable of the old ones.  And the promised new teacher work spaces remain just that -- promises.  The custodian guys have clearly been working their tails off, but they aren't fast enough for the teachers -- we want our stuff OUT OF OUR HOUSES.

I take the daughter of one of my best friends out for a back-to-senior-year-of-college lunch.  She is a delightful and enormously talented young woman who has just taken a year off and I figured she could use some encouragment for the journey back.

My daughter gets a ride home, so I go out to the mall to do some birthday shopping for her.  I want to get her things she would never buy for herself, and I find a black sundress and a black velvet jacket at the Gap.  It's somewhat difficult -- I personally find it a bit of a challenge to distinguish between  sizes 0, 1 and 2 (!!).  I settle on 2s and hope that the 0s will still be there tomorrow if my guess is wrong.

I take a long long walk in the cemetery.  By late afternoon it's really hot and sticky.  I see a small black cat down at the bottom of the hill, whom I watch for awhile.  Totally wild -- when I give in to the urge and start calling "kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty," she looks up, apparently sees me all that distance away, flattens herself almost completely to the ground, and takes off at top speed.  I also pass a funeral which, from the logos on the hearse, I think is for  yet another young man in our community.  Not someone I know, but he had a lengthy obituary in the morning paper -- he died at the age of 47 of what I presume was melanoma.

I fool around for what's left of the afternoon.  I have to leave by 6:45 for church, and my son has gone off to an amusement park with his friends, so I suggest Chinese to my husband and daughter, which seems quite acceptable.

I'm at church to lead a Lectio Divina group if anyone shows up, and in fact three other people do.  Lectio is a form of prayer that involves using a short section of Scripture as a focus, and some of us have started to do it as a group a couple of times a month.  Summer attendance is erratic, so it's nice to have two completely new people, both of whom are enthusiastic after they've tried it and wondering if we can get together next week.  In the end, we conclude that the demands on our time over the next two weeks are such that we do need to wait for the church year to start up again.

Home for a tiny bit of Olympics, a tiny bit of reading, and falling sound asleep really early. 

So, how am I supposed to fit work back into my life?  You tell me.

Total non sequiter:  Trees in Oregon are Really Big:

Willamette College, Salem OR