Someday I'll Look Back at This and Laugh. Or Not.
Whilst I am at work everyday, Sam and the child have been over at the Bears' House, messing around in the attic. Sam's been putting in insulation and laying down floor boards, and the child's been hauling things up and down the stairs and, as far as I can tell, rolling in the dust. He comes back from the Bears' House filthy every day. We're all very proud of this. Look! The child's normal! Forget that part about how he likes to climb trees in order to have quiet places to read Chaucer! He's filthy! That's normal, right?
Sam found a little treasure in the attic yesterday, a dilapidated 1926 version of a Balzac novel in translation, The Quest of the Absolute. I told him he should take it back up to the attic and wall it in under the new floor boards. I'm still disturbed by the news that the last owner gave us, that when she was restoring the house she found an ancient pair of baby shoes walled up in the 1840 part of the house, apparently some obscure offering to the household gods I'm unfamiliar with, and so she sent them to a local museum, only they were falling into dust, so the museum sent her a nice thank-you note and threw them out.
Hello.
Excuse me.
You were supposed to put them back in the wall.
This bothered me so much I tried to get Sam to put a pair of the child's shoes in the wall someplace, but I see that the Balzac will work very nicely.*
I know that when this summer is over (I changed subjects real quick there; you had to be on your toes), I'll be a better woman, or at least I'll have gotten a lot done, which lot I'd like to enumerate for you here.
I have so far this summer:
1) Spent three weeks in England going all around London and East Anglia and the Midlands visiting archives and eating not much more than sandwiches, on account of my money paranoia after
2) Having bought a house -- no, not just a house, I tell a lie, An Historical Landmark, but also
3) Driving 2,300 miles in desert heatwave in a van filled with young relatives, so that we could cause them to observe 4 Corners, Mesa Verde, Shiprock, the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, and the Petrified Forest, and
4) Bringing nearly to completion a draft of the manuscript of the transcriptions I've been working on for 13 years.
There might be more, but it escapes me at the moment.
Anyway, we're about to go off to South Carolina, for what would be my vacation if I didn't have to finish #4. And then we'll come back, and there will be two more weeks until the fall semester starts.
At the end of the summer, besides the things listed above, if all goes as it should, I will have also
5) Actually put the draft of the manuscript of the transcriptions I've been working on for 13 years into the mail, and
6) Written the syllabi for the three classes I'm teaching this fall, and
7) Moved enough stuff into Bear's Retreat to use it as our base, and be living there while we get the rest of our stuff out of this house (and into the garbage, or the Goodwill, or the garage sale, or eBay).
Have I been doing any needlework this summer?
No.
Indeed, along with my laptop, the Russian mob got the embroidery project I'd been carrying with me -- which I had not worked on At All during the trip -- and a good indication of how the summer is going is that I'm glad it's gone, cause now it's one less thing to do.
So, when all my very dear and darling friends and acquaintances ask me how the moving is going, well, the answer is that it's not. But really. I had an excuse.
**********************************
*Naturally, this reminds me of a piece of doggerel, which I had earlier this week been reminded of also, when Sam gave some of his Victorian literature, as a legacy, to the Really Beloved Friend who replaced him in the department, literature which contained Thackeray, Eliot, and Carlyle:
As I was laying on the green
A little book I chanced to seen.
Carlyle's "Essay on Burns" was the edition
So I left it laying in the same position.
Sam found a little treasure in the attic yesterday, a dilapidated 1926 version of a Balzac novel in translation, The Quest of the Absolute. I told him he should take it back up to the attic and wall it in under the new floor boards. I'm still disturbed by the news that the last owner gave us, that when she was restoring the house she found an ancient pair of baby shoes walled up in the 1840 part of the house, apparently some obscure offering to the household gods I'm unfamiliar with, and so she sent them to a local museum, only they were falling into dust, so the museum sent her a nice thank-you note and threw them out.
Hello.
Excuse me.
You were supposed to put them back in the wall.
This bothered me so much I tried to get Sam to put a pair of the child's shoes in the wall someplace, but I see that the Balzac will work very nicely.*
I know that when this summer is over (I changed subjects real quick there; you had to be on your toes), I'll be a better woman, or at least I'll have gotten a lot done, which lot I'd like to enumerate for you here.
I have so far this summer:
1) Spent three weeks in England going all around London and East Anglia and the Midlands visiting archives and eating not much more than sandwiches, on account of my money paranoia after
2) Having bought a house -- no, not just a house, I tell a lie, An Historical Landmark, but also
3) Driving 2,300 miles in desert heatwave in a van filled with young relatives, so that we could cause them to observe 4 Corners, Mesa Verde, Shiprock, the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, and the Petrified Forest, and
4) Bringing nearly to completion a draft of the manuscript of the transcriptions I've been working on for 13 years.
There might be more, but it escapes me at the moment.
Anyway, we're about to go off to South Carolina, for what would be my vacation if I didn't have to finish #4. And then we'll come back, and there will be two more weeks until the fall semester starts.
At the end of the summer, besides the things listed above, if all goes as it should, I will have also
5) Actually put the draft of the manuscript of the transcriptions I've been working on for 13 years into the mail, and
6) Written the syllabi for the three classes I'm teaching this fall, and
7) Moved enough stuff into Bear's Retreat to use it as our base, and be living there while we get the rest of our stuff out of this house (and into the garbage, or the Goodwill, or the garage sale, or eBay).
Have I been doing any needlework this summer?
No.
Indeed, along with my laptop, the Russian mob got the embroidery project I'd been carrying with me -- which I had not worked on At All during the trip -- and a good indication of how the summer is going is that I'm glad it's gone, cause now it's one less thing to do.
So, when all my very dear and darling friends and acquaintances ask me how the moving is going, well, the answer is that it's not. But really. I had an excuse.
**********************************
*Naturally, this reminds me of a piece of doggerel, which I had earlier this week been reminded of also, when Sam gave some of his Victorian literature, as a legacy, to the Really Beloved Friend who replaced him in the department, literature which contained Thackeray, Eliot, and Carlyle:
As I was laying on the green
A little book I chanced to seen.
Carlyle's "Essay on Burns" was the edition
So I left it laying in the same position.
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