Is Today Over Yet?
My late father would chide me for ‘wishing away my life,’ but today has been such a waste of time that I’m eager to finish it and start over. I woke up with a scratchy throat that quickly turned into a sore throat and highly ‘unteacherlike’ voice. Not anticipating this, there was no school work ready to toss to Dad and he hadn’t planned on schooling today anyway. Because I needed to keep a bloodshot eye on the dog, I couldn’t lead the troops up to my bedroom and make them watch a Standard Deviants math video or some other fall back choice. So I tried the next best thing............watching A Hard Day’s Night en francais. This was not good. We are not studying French and all I could do was rasp out the occassional word that the boys might recognize as being of Latin descent. Chuck lost patience and turned on the English subtitles. I think all they learned is grandpere is French for grandfather. The voices were dubbed by Frenchmen who sounded reasonably Liverpudlian and the songs were the original, so it was not a total waste of time.

After lunch, we watched the Hands on History Marathon on the History Channel. I don’t know how much the boys learned from that, but the salt mine episode left me with a craving for something salty that has only now been vanquished by sending spelunkers down to Fran’s room to find the dry roasted peanuts. The episode about modern printing techniques was fascinating; things have changed a lot since I was hanging around my dad’s printshop.

The boys went upstairs to play LEGOs so I could nap. Sleep would not come - and I tried to wrap myself around Steven Riddle’s question of “What is the most beautiful painting you have ever seen (famous or otherwise) and what makes it so?” I’ve been thinking about that since yesterday and still cannot arrive at an answer. My head throbbed anew - not that I’m blaming Steven. But I was in no condition to think - especially about a question as difficult as “which one of your children is your favorite?” or “if you could only eat one more piece of chocolate in your life, what would you choose?”

I took a medicinal preparation and did sleep while the rest of the family ate a casserole that Rick threw together out of whatever he could find. He said the gang loved it. I hope this can be recreated in the future. I was just recently awakened - thank God! - from a nightmare of such mundane yet terrifying intensity that I now feel like Dorothy returned from Oz.

Tomorrow is another day. I can’t wait.

PS - I should have known I was starting to go downhill last night. After reading Steven's post, I took Faure's Requiem to work with me. I missed In Praradisum the first time through because I was running the copier. I couldn't find the button to jump back or forward to another track and was reduced to depressing the speed-backward button.........while I was crouched under the table doing this, I thought it sounded pretty darned beautiful backwards, too! That should have been a sign of imminent decline. At least I didn't hear any secret messages imbedded in the CD...............