Sold!

Ed and I wandered down to the crossroads at lunchtime today to watch the auctioning of our little community's "downtown." Our house is one house and a little Baptist church away from the crossroads, and the buildings being auctioned were the stone house/grocery store and the gas station next to it, and the old post office on the opposite corner. Actually, the post office closed long before we moved in, and all three buildings have housed various sorts of stores, all short lived, since we've been here. To completely accurate, it wasn't the whole of our little civic center being auctioned -- the fire department and elementary school weren't included, and neither were any of the churches. Still, it certainly had the feeling of a Town for Sale (a very small town), and the auction was well attended by curious residents of the area. And the buildings ended up selling for more than you might have expected! The only bid for all three buildings was $140,000, and that wound up being higher (by a fair bit) than the combined bids for the individual buildings so that first bidder took the lot! I hope he's not kicking himself, and that he has lovely plans for refurbishing our little downtown.

In other news, I'm starting to feel less panic and more excitement about our next school! I've got over half the materials purchased, and they all look Wonderful! I've gotten some of my maps laminated, and they are so pretty, and I love when we can go straight from watching our Ancient Civilizations video to the school room and admire Greece and the Mediterranean (today we watched the lectures on Sparta and Greece). Today, though, I blew every penny of the rest of this month's budget when I found Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition for sale, used, on Amazon.  It looks so good. The first twenty-four lectures cover authors we will be studying (or at least, most of them we'll be studying) this coming year, and that leaves sixty more lectures on authors we'll cover in Years 2, 3, and 4! I hadn't figured it in, but it was too marvelous to pass up, and I still have time to buy the other things before August!

Katie is off Trying New Books. Clare died at the end of Charlotte Sometimes. And she was only thirteen! Katie was outraged, and has said that from now on she's only reading books where she already knows they come out well. I'll give her a couple weeks to recover before I push it (since we have a fair number of books around here that she knows are "safe"!).

And then there's Emma. Lots of Emma.

She finds back sleeping very comfortable, but I think she suspected I was making fun of her (as if) and rolled over into the more elegant "reclining and looking coyly over the shoulder" pose.

Harry thinks she is the most beautiful thing on the face of the earth.