more vignettes and ramblings

[chelidon]

So after going an entire winter season managing to avoid all of the colds and flus going around, even with a six-year-old in the house, the end of last week saw me finally falling prey to a nasty bug that's sweeping through my son's school. Ironic that just as Spring gets here, I get my first Winter cold. Harumph. With so many things piling up on my plate, a few days of enforced rest is in one sense necessary, but also rather frustrating. Thank goodness for Lovely Housemates with good medicinal teas, though, or I'd probably still be in bed.

On Saturday I had the second part of the second year of a semi-monthly regional class to co-teach with Claudia, focused around teaching people to priest/ess and teach magickal classes (using the Reclaiming Rites of Passage structure as a framework), and we were working with trance as a tool, and I made it through the morning class I'd planned to co-teach, but had to duck out after lunch and slept all afternoon, while the people taking the class were doing their presentations and peer teaching/skill-sharing. I held it together until I left, but I knew I was in trouble when 2 minutes of drumming to call everyone together at the beginning caused me to break into a sweat. Ick.

While the class was going on, we got my mother to take our son out for a day-long train ride with entertainment and such (trains are big out here, which will come in handy come spiking oil/gas prices...), and among all the passengers, he won the raffle, a giant stuffed bunny. Cool, my son wins a giant fertility symbol to celebrate the Christian version of Eostara/Mean Earraigh/Alban Ellir.

This is my son's Spring break week, and today he's home with me while I work and take breaks to play and do projects with him. This morning we built a couple of electronic projects together from a Radio Shack kit I bought him a week ago. He already can tell me the definition of objective, current, resistance (I explained it in physical terms by having him push against my arm), ohms, inertia, wiring things in series versus in parallel, alternating current versus direct current, open versus closed circuit, and all kinds of other cool groovy geeky stuff. I find that it makes me feel really good to be able to provide him with the kind of mentorship that I didn't have. Heck, it won't be long, I think, before he can help me with a lot of the building projects around here... And he keeps surprising me with how sharp he is. This morning at breakfast, he found a six-sided and a twelve-sided die, and we were talking about that, and he commented, "wouldn't a one-sided die be interesting?" And thinking I would inspire some thought, I slyly asked, "yeah, but what would a one-sided die look like, how could you have a die that didn't have another side?" Without a moment's hesitation, he said, "that would be a sphere, daddy, of course, and you could just paint a one on it." Um, yes, it would. Exactly. Damn.

Tax day was painful...thousands of dollars owed. But I expected that and planned for it -- in part, the wages of being self-employed. I actually try to work it out that way, to owe at the end of the year, just so long as it's not so much as there's a penalty. Why send the money off any earlier than you have to, it's not like it does you any good to give it to them sooner. Still, it makes April kind of a rough month.

Next week we get the new roof put on. It's going to be a standing seam metal roof, a little more expensive, but it should last basically forever, or at least 50+ years, and the dark green surface coating should absorb heat (the opposite of what you'd want to do in more southerly climes). I'm trying to plan for the long-haul when I can. It's pretty cool how they put the metal roofing on, if comes on the truck in a big roll with a cutting device, and is cut to size onsite, and laid right over the top of the existing roof -- which preserves the insulation value. When the roof goes on, the last skylight we got as a part of the house addition will go in, to let more natural light into the stair/library area, whose original outside window now looks into/over the new office, so I put a stained glass panel in there for privacy. The stained glass is pretty, but since I'm turning that upstairs space (where my current office now is) into a reading/guest area, I wanted to restore the amount of natural light to the space it originally had. The more natural light I can arrange, the better it is.

Speaking of renovations, this being sick has put me a couple of more days behind where I wanted to be on finishing my office. Sunday and yesterday were restful (I had no choice about that), which I would have enjoyed more had I not felt so awful and been aware of all the things I should be doing ;> C and I painted the primer coat on most of the blueboard last week, and I've been itching (but not feeling well enough) to put on the finish coat. And there's a bit more staining to do, and putting up the other half of the wood paneling (vertical 1x10 pine shiplap, stained "Provincal," which is nice medium brown, sets off the mahogany-stained beams), and then the oak flooring. Maybe another week, or two, before I can move in...

Comments

[k-navit.livejournal.com]

"my son wins a giant fertility symbol"

((grin))