Early Morning

The dawn is just breaking outside and it's quiet in the house, except for the dog who is whimpering for some breakfast.  My husband and daughter both love to sleep in on week-ends, and won't be heard from from awhile.  I'm confident that my college sons are also sound asleep, albeit far from here.

This is the first time in a few weeks that I've felt like getting up and taking my usual long Saturday walk, but it's dark and gray and windy outdoors, so I'm not in any rush.  I had really looked forward to the arrival of this morning, after missing so many warm and sunny fall days due to illness.  The leaves are going to peak by the end of next week, if the rain and wind doesn't knock them all off the trees first.  Today feels more like November than October.  We've had an extended Indian summer, but I think that it may be over.

My dining room, where the computer desk sits, is a disaster area, and my plan for the day is to get that under control.  One of the many reasons that we purchased this home 20 years ago was its separate and potentially elegant dining room.  The house was built in 1917, so all the rooms have molding and mahogany woodwork.  The dining room has built in cupboards recessed under arched spaces.  Most of the furniture is pretty old -- my great-grandmother's Empire dresser, an 1800s gateleg table that we received as a Christmas gift from family many years ago, and chairs of the same era that we found in an antique store.  It's hard to believe that we ever had a life with time in it for furniture shopping.

The room, like the rest of the house, has never reached that potential for elegance that I saw when we moved in.  That has something to do with the three children who arrived in the next three years, but more to do, I suppose, with my own ineptitude. Now that the children are almost gone, I would like to rectify the situation, and the place to begin is this haven of chaos in which I sit. We would like to move the computer and associated paraphernaila into the sunroom in the back, but there's no point in doing that until the ceiling in there is replaced.  That job will involve plaster dust, not to mention money that we don't have, so it won't happen for awhile.  And now that winter is almost here, it can't happen for awhile anyway -- who wants uninsulated rafters exposed when it hits ten degrees outside?

So the workspace will stay in the dining room, but the computer desk can be closed up and the room itself could be a pleasant gathering space if it weren't for the piles of bills, school papers, books, homework, photographs, and God knows what else occupying every flat space. 

I also have to make up my next eighth grade major assignment today -- The Giant Map Project of the western hemisphere, with at least 100 items for the kids to locate and chart.  We have just reached Christopher Columbus's arrival on San Salvador in our studies, and the task is for them to know the geography of North, Central, and South America by the end of the month.  I'm hoping to avoid having to include the 13 colonies, so if anyone knows the names of any obscure rivers, mountains, or other features of the landscape, let me know.

My dog is obviously about to expire of starvation.