Happy Friday!

I'm still here! (Is anyone else still out there?)



It has just been one of those weeks. With a week devoted to the flu, and then the week after flu week spent recovering (we were all really tired), this week, when everyone was healthy, I was dismayed to find that we had lost Our Groove. We didn't have it for long or anything, but we Did have a groove going for a little while, and this week was a struggle to recapture it. After two weeks of sleeping late (or not getting out of bed at all), we all got out of the habit of leaping out of bed bright and early, eager to get on with a new day of learning (alright, well, it was never quite like that, but you know how things look in retrospect!). So, now we know that, not only is it a bad idea to have a long summer break, it is also a bad idea to have a long bout of ill health. Who knew?



Katie's Real Birthday was Tuesday. She got "books, glorious Books!" from her Granny and Paba, and an ice cream maker from us. Yes, only six years old, and already she is collecting household appliances. But it was the Only thing she asked for. She was funny about it, too. She kept saying, "I Think that box is an ice cream maker, but I'm Scared to get my hopes up! I'm afraid I would be So Disappointed if I was wrong!" She wasn't wrong.

Katie's new machine makes Very Fine ice cream. I was tempted into two or three very delicious "tastes" of the chocolate she made.

(This is Not one of my tastes. My tastes were Very Small. So small they hardly should count at all. If I were Catholic, I could go and confess about them. Why, oh why, did I taste that Delicious Ice Cream? )

In other news, we've had a Lot of wind this week. So much that we sat down in the basement for a while (reading The Wind in the Willows) on Wednesday night because there was a tornado watch (or warning?) in the area, and the wind was so scary-loud that we thought the house might blow away. The house Didn't blow away, but I was very pleased, in a "If I had been Dorothy Gale, I would have gone straight down into that cellar and Not gone chasing after my dog" type way. No trip to Oz for us.

This poor little daffodil was the first (actually, only so far) to bloom in our yard. And it is getting battered and blown like anything for its pains. But it is very cheering, especially as it is very pretty and not Really blurry.

Finally, I would like to state categorically that Ed is Not Fat. An old friend of his looked at my last post and e-mailed this morning to inform Ed that it appeared that he was getting rather tubby. My poor sweet honeybunch has been moping ever since, and, most distressingly, decided that he needs to diet. This will Not Do! By dinner time tonight, my normally sweet Ed was grumpy. A hungry Ed is a Cranky Ed. So you (and you know who you are) will just have to take my word for it that Ed has a very nice figure.* Any roundness that you might have imagined was due to my poor photography skills/a trick of the light/and unfortunate choice of background.

*Since we are reading The Wind in the Willows now, that immediately made me think of the scene where Toad is talking to the jailer's daughter about the possibility of his dressing in her aunt's washer woman clothes in order to make his escape from prison. Toad says, "I have a very elegant figure -- for what I am."