Oh, I want to do a whole thing about how the cottage was totally neglected for 8 years, and so if anybody had thought we were going to make it better instantly then that person was crazy, but I'll tell you that even though the neighbors are surely frustrated that we haven't gotten ourselves all up to snuff yet, we've focused on domestic issues and the improvement to the land itself is dramatic, albeit subtle. It was A METAPHOR, because everything is a metaphor. I might write it someday before November, but not today.
Last weekend we went to the cottage (!I know!) and Squire was being impossible, totally disinclined to work. At all. You'd open your mouth to some sentence about the chainsaw and he was too absorbed in re-reading a book to even notice you were talking. It was irritating. Then I realized it could be fun. I dubbed it "Proust Weekend" and I think everybody deserves one once in a while. We propped him up with pillows and sleeping bags that I declared were furs, and we fed him tea and gave him snacks and inquired after his general health and his digestive system every couple hours. Friar said we should get a four-part novel out of it, and perhaps someday we will, but the point was: you make it a game, and then it is one. Proust weekend is not remotely irritating; it is fun and it is funny!
Squire started school again Monday, so I think a Proust Weekend was a well-deserved sort of mental bachelor party. School persists in being stupid. They've changed their idea over the summer that he should take Some Other Language and decided that he should take English classes. So yeah, the native-English-speaking kid will be learning "eeeeet eeees ayyy dog!" yay. I went and met with the English teacher, and suggested that she let him read (English) books during classtime or that perhaps she use him to help the strugglers or something. She mainly seemed interested in if she could give him the same tests she gives the other students. I have lost the battle over how this is stupid, and am now girding up for the battle over whether "How come" is correct English (or whether "Do you have" is the same as "Have you got" or whatever idiomatic and correct English he'll be using and be corrected for using). Le sigh.
I could make a list for you over battles lost and battles won and you would be horrified. Not least because I tend to change allegiance: take the swimming battle for example. Sometimes it's hard to care enough to fight from where the sun now stands.
Also on Monday, for SPICY, my computer died. I don't even want to hear about it. My grandmother had serious trouble keeping pictures in frames and my parents have a recurring problem with the front door of their home and I cannot, CANNOT, manage to keep a system that backs up what I said. I have lost journals to rainstorms and apparently I can knock out a computer by sneezing.
And that's us: an unexplored metaphor, a proust weekend, school is stupid, my computer died. It's September, and I wish you the best, because we all deserve it.
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