A boy and (not) his dog

It's really too bad that I'm not a dog person.

Or a cat person, as it turns out. I don't know if it's because I'm "the mom" (they tell me that's what I am) or what, but our cat will come and meow and meow and meow at me like she's one of my own whiney children and it drives me nuts. She doesn't cuddle. She makes huge messes with her food. 

I have turned into my mom: "Animals belong outside!"

Like, I have enough trouble keeping up with my humans, thank you very much. 

And as needy as our kitty is, I imagine dogs to be much, much needier. They need walking and playing and they're all the time panting with their stinky doggy breath and shedding their doggy fur. 

But I can understand why people love them and it's really too bad I'm not a dog person because Benjamin is a dog person. Or, at least, he is a dog's person. 

I attend the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!) and our mascot—evidently the greatest in college football history—is a...dog (again, Go Dawgs!)...specifically an English bulldog (Go Dawgs!). But because of the whole dog thing, Athens tends to be a very dog-friendly city. That's perhaps an overgeneralization, but I've seen dogs lots of places on campus and around town that I haven't seen on other university campus/towns. People are very proud of their dogs. 

Golden Shovels with Green Gables

We've been reading Anne of Green Gables and started a "golden shovel" poem together (ages ago). I had the kids finish up their poems drafts on Tuesday while I was on campus and it was lovely to see these come through in my email.

Basically, we took a line from AoGG, "The birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine," put those words down the righthand side of our page and then wrote into those words. It can be harder than it sounds to pull off!

Here's Benjamin's:

 I was meandering through the
countless birches
that made up the greenwood in
Tongass NationalForest. The
fir and maple hollow
that I found myself turned in turned
into a burning  torch as
the golden
flames reached the temperature as
burning sunshine.

Looking forward to some calmness

So much happened last week...month? 

With the school shooting in Winder at the beginning of the month, and then the hurricane at the end of the month, we have felt like our phones have been just about blowing up with public safety alerts. We were very lucky to have so little damage in the storm. Our friends in Tallahassee didn't suffer too badly either. We can't say the same for our friends in Augusta and especially not for our friends in Asheville (though I did finally hear back from my friend Emily (who taught English in Voronezh with me) and she is, at least, safe. Asheville has been entirely cut off from the world—no roads, no internet. Western North Carolina was hit very hard. 

So we've been feeling like we're in a perpetual state of panic and/or mourning this month. 

*****

Naturally, the kids all skipped out to play outside once the hurricane blew over. The neighbourhood kids were all so happy to have had such a long weekend. The grown ups were all stressed out about trying to catch up on the work they'd put off (while attending to hours of household maintenance and childcare duties they weren't necessarily planning on (I mean, we always plan on having our kids at home while we work because that's our norm, but our neighbours typically send their kids to school when they work at home (perfectly valid); and none of us had really set time aside in our work calendars to prep for a hurricane, you know? That's outside of our normally scheduled week). What I'm trying to say is...that we sent Phoebe outside to play under the supervision of her older siblings. 

Naturally, they eventually abandoned her because—let's face it—babies can get kind of boring. So the kids were all playing together and then Phoebe was just...exploring the yard on her own. 

A Wet Thursday but quiet Thursday

A minor tropical storm blew in shortly after we came inside yesterday, which identified a new leak in our roof, so that was very helpful.

I was scrambling to get some homework finished last night when I started to hear a *drip*drip*drip* behind me.

I was not too happy about it. We put a container up in the attic to catch the drips and hope that will be sufficient until we can get it repaired. It seems to be an issue with the flashing around a pipe-thingy. Ugh.

It's been raining steadily for well over 24 hours now, so the ground is already quite saturated with water, but Hurricane Helene hasn't even made landfall yet. She won't be here for hours, but promises to arrive with a lot of wind and rain (and probably thunder and lightning and possibly a tornado or two). 

The power went out momentarily this morning. We all stared at each other nervously (or ran around the house screaming in some cases) because we've been scrambling to do all the things we need to do with power and we weren't ready for it to be gone yet!

Rachel wrote to all of her professors to let them know she's unsure of her ability to hop online for the next little while and she was fortunately able to join an earlier discussion group so she can get that out of the way before the storm comes. 

My campus cancelled classes, so my in-person courses have pushed the syllabus back by a week. I don't know what that will mean when we have one less week to finish our final projects, but for now I'm happy to have a bit of time to breathe during midterms. 

Andrew also cancelled his class, which I think is good because...there are a lot of things you have to do during storms...like check containers catching drips in the attic and checking downspouts and things.

Miriam, Benjamin, and I went outside to check all the downspouts to make sure they were functional and found out they weren't. So we did some more gutter clearing and ditch digging and spout fiddling and we ended up soaked clear through our rain jackets, all the way to our skin! But everything seems to be running smoothly now.

The drain system we had installed in our basement seems to be doing its job well. Water is pouring out of the exit spout, but the basement itself is dry! 

So, that's where we're at...

Whether the weather...

We got up this morning and got right to work preparing for hurricane Helene who will be cruising up our way from the Gulf of Mexico in the next couple of days. Even though our gutters were recently professionally cleaned, we cleaned out the gutters. We cleared all of our yard drains and re-dug all of our emergency trenches. We got some water ready. We did several loads of laundry. And, yes, we have been diligent about charging our devices.

GYLT and spilled tea

Last week Andrew did a family night lesson on SAST (small and simple things, or sucking at something, whichever you prefer). This week he did a family night lesson on GYLT (getting your life together, which we decided was pronounced the same as "guilt"). 

GYLT is a principle Andrew saw from an academic who schedules time blocks in her day to GYLT (simply doing the things that need to be done—things like responding to that email you've been meaning to get to, cleaning off your desk, paying that medical bill...whatever). It's not a bad idea, though the way she blocks out every minute of her waking hours with something stresses me out. I'm sure she's very efficient, though. 

I find myself needing blocks of time where nothing is scheduled so I don't have to feel guilty when my day gets derailed. I don't think that means I don't get things accomplished...it just means that sometimes when your nine-year-old daughter is making breakfast for herself, she bumps up against the hot kettle while she's trying to make toast, which makes her jerk her arm away from the kettle, knocking over the hot cup of water she'd just poured into a mug to steep her tea, soaking herself with recently-boiled water, and burning her torso. 

Watermelon pizza

Alexander has been loving reading magazines recently. We get The Week Junior (a magazine on current events) and The Friend (a church magazine) at our house. He loves reading all the stories but has been particularly interested in the recipes. 

He's been hankering for some watermelon fruit pizza since reading about it in The Week Junior and he finally got to make it on Sunday to have with dinner (which was otherwise leftovers). He'd hounded Andrew about being sure to pick up the required ingredients at the grocery store on Saturday. Andrew came home with blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries in place of the cherries the recipe called for, but this was a case where substitutions were just fine.

It's autumn time! It's autumn time!

It was 93°F today (33°C) and the pool is still open, so we went to the pool this afternoon (just me and the four youngest). Phoebe was so upset about her finger (and the accompanying bandaid) that she could hardly sleep last night and was a bit of a cranky mess today. So naturally she tripped over Alexander in the parking lot and scraped up her knee. She was just about the saddest little girl in the whole world.

"Why does it hurt???" she wailed. "My finger already hurts!"

That's like double jeopardy or something, right? You can't get hurt twice in a 24-hour period.

Antidisestablishmentarianism (and all those other -tarians)

The longest word I ever had on a spelling test was antidisestablishmentarianism, which was once purportedly the longest word in the dictionary (which dictionary? I don't know) and which more or less decries the separation of church and state, typically used in the ongoing debate about The Church of England (and whether or not they need a state-supported church). 

This was in grade four—the same age that Zoë is now! 

*****

Today in church the sister missionaries spoke and one of them talked about a humanitarian trip she took to Kenya when she was 17. So there I was, listening intently, when all of a sudden Zoë shoved her notebook over to me. She pointed to the top of her page where she'd written:

"What is humanitarian?"

I told her that it meant to "help humans (others)."

She read this with great relief because to her "it sound[ed] like eating humans, like, a vegetarian..."

I mean...we all know what vegetarians do...so what about those humanitarians?! After all, "they both end with -tarian."

Andrew is 40!

Andrew turned 40 on Thursday, which happens to be his mega-day on campus. I also have an evening class on Thursdays, so he typically ends up arriving home a few minutes before my class lets out and begins instituting bedtime. So...we didn't do much to celebrate him on Thursday. 

He did put up a birthday banner for himself on his birthday-eve though, which I told him was pretty sad when I went down to put up some 40th birthday decorations I'd gotten for him. 

Anyway, we didn't really do anything for him on his birthday proper, and then on Friday he had to teach an all-day seminar. And Zoë had a primary activity in the evening. And the other kids had a sleep-over at Grandpa's house (while Darla was off in California for a new grandbaby's blessing celebration). 

We couldn't really celebrate the day beforehand because Wednesday is mutual night and Tuesday is my mega-day on campus...and...yeah...