Spring break—sort of

A friend emailed me to see if we had any actual holiday time over my spring break, and I guess I got so preoccupied with everything else when we got back in town, that I forgot to mention our weekend trip to Georgetown. It was just beautiful there—perfect weather. We stayed with Matt and Shari at their house, which is very comfortable (although we clutter it up terribly—I expect they can’t wait for us to leave). Chris took Will kayaking and I took Laura out in the canoe, which was fun until she got mad at me for trying to show her how to paddle so she’d get less wet. I guess this must be how it was with me and Mama when she was trying to teach me to drive—her perfectly calm reasonable voice basically made me want to choke her—which is how Laura seemed to feel. I’ll have to think about that some more later.

We worked on a puzzle and ate shrimp and steak and took a walk along the creek and then another at the beach. We went shopping and I spent too much money on a beautiful piece of folk art I’ve been wanting for a year. Another fish. Isn’t it interesting how I hated fishing and never (unsurprisingly) got invited to fish and now I write poems about fish and collect fish folk art? Another thing to think more about later.

Today’s a day off as well. I’d planned to finish my presentation today (I’d hoped), but I forgot that Laura has the day off from school, so maybe it’s an enforced break, but so far it’s fun. We’ve spent most of the morning just hanging out in our pajamas. I actually didn’t take Will to daycare this morning either because I still haven’t caught up on laundry yet from last weekend so he has no clean clothes. And there doesn’t seem to be any point taking him in when Laura and I are off—neither one of us are in the mood for a big girls’ day out. So I’m washing Will’s stuff now—Chris is off at the beach for a meeting (and then kayaking afterwards). I thought about taking the kids to the zoo, but according to Laura, the most fun thing we’ve done the past month has been the thirty minutes I chased the kids around the house tickling them, and that seems a lot less stressful in terms of travel time, so that’s on the agenda for later today. :)

I guess I’ll try to go back into work maybe Sunday morning to finish up the talk—I’m pretty close to done. But I’ve got charts! Wow! For an English person! I made some up myself and took screen shots of others, and I feel very impressive . . . now if I can just figure out the last few minutes—I’m having lots of trouble with my conclusion. I feel like I should offer solutions, but that’s so far removed from my discipline’s approach to research, I hardly know what to think. We just point out our insightful observations, you know? Not all that practical.

In the next couple of days, I also have to decide whether to score SAT essays. I applied in the fall to do it when I was feeling really money-poor, and now that it’s time to actually decide, I’m having tons of trouble. I don’t want to read a million bad essays—but I can make close to $500 for about 25-30 hours of grading. That’s just for one grading period. Think of the big payment I could make then on my bills! Or how many fabulous folk art fish I could buy! The temptation of filthy lucre. Versus the promise of awful essays. Hmm.

Well, as Scarlett says, tomorrow is another day. Right now I’m going to take a really really hot shower while Laura and Will play outside. It’s sort of awful how very wonderful that sounds.