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Wednesday, July 12, 2006
I'm a bad bad blogger.
I go through these meme-induced sprees of daily blogging that last for half a week or so and then I get the writing blahs and don't post anything (about... watching grass grow? the nail-bitingly tense games of Clue my family has taken to playing at night? North Korea? the letters my daughter writes to herself? do you see the problem here?) until the empty screen shows up and people start sending me emails about it. (it's a test, see, to see if you all notice I'm here or not. It's good to know who my real friends are.)
(um, kidding.)
But I'm not a bad daughter. Instead of blogging yesterday, I was out at my dad's house, helping him. Which is a switch, because historically the help has moved overwhelmingly in the other direction in that relationship; that's just the kind of guy my dad is. But even Superdad can't take the broken pump out of his well and put a new one in by himself. So at 7:45 in the morning I found myself at his house, where I took part of the roof off the wellhouse. Yes, I. Took the roof off. Me. Well, at least I took off about three sheets of corrugated tin. Ahem. Then he, I, and my 78-year-old grandmother -- the spunky one, not the whiny one nor the dead one, bien sûr -- hauled a 75-lb pump attached to 120 feet of PVC pipe (which was of course full of water) out the well hand-over-hand. In case you haven't gathered, this is very hard work. Then after a drive to town where my dad spent an absolutely ginormous amount of money to buy a new pump and new PVC pipe and new wiring and rope and all kinds of clever technical stuff, we went back to his house where he, my brother, and I (Grandma having gone into town to have lunch with her girlfriends and organize a church directory photography session) did the even harder job of putting it all down the well, one 20-foot section of PVC at a time, through the hole I had so skillfully made in the roof. And then we took it all out and did it again, because we'd forgotten something at the bottom. Amazingly, the only injury I incurred during this entire process was a small rope burn on my thumb; I almost knocked myself off the ladder with the help of a wobbly section of pipe helicoptering around my head, but I stayed upright; in fact I managed to avoid major catastrophe completely. I had never sweated so much in my adult life, however, so as soon as the men were hunched over the technical stuff where there was no room for me to hunch even if I could have helped (wiring is not my bag, it's one of those things I'm scared to mess with), after I put the roof back together, I took my kids and my nephews down to the creek and we all jumped in. Granted, from a hygiene perspective, the sweat was probably preferable to the sandy, mossy, fishy creek water that had been running through cow pastures for about fifteen miles, but who cares. Plus there's that whole "floating on my back staring up at the sunlit alder leaves against the sky" thing, too. Very relaxing, just what my poor offended muscles needed.
Another thing I've been doing instead of blogging is trying to figure out what pictures I'm going to enter in the fair. I think I have it pretty well narrowed down so I'm not going to do that thing like I did last year when I ask everyone to go over to my photo blog and make suggestions. However, I am sick to death of all my flower pictures and I think I'll skip that category unless there's one that particularly stands out for other people. Not that I'm asking for input or validation, or fishing for compliments, or anything. I'm just saying.
We were really late signing the kids up for the summer reading program this year (and I never did get around to joining the one that Kat told me about); we only did it yesterday. They've had their noses glued in books since before we got home from the library. It's hard to tear them away long enough to do just about anything. You know how I hate that. Ahem. LT is reading Tuck Everlasting, which I think he's about to finish, and C is alternating between American Girl books and the Boxcar Children series, with some Saddle Club thrown in for good measure. I have got to gently nudge her away from boilerplate ghostwritten series books or else the next thing I know she'll be reading the Sweet Valley Twins and I may have to go throw myself off a bridge. I think I'll put her on a diet of Beverly Cleary and Mrs. Frisby and Narnia, and see if it'll pull her out before it's too late.
Comments
You know, you could still join - all you have to do is read at least three books between June 1 and August 31 (although you can set a higher goal for yourself - my goal is 30 but it's looking doubtful at the moment), and post what books you read and a little about them. Which you do anyway.
I read a few good articles for my children's lit class about why those boilerplate series books are actually good for kids at certain stages of development. Interesting. So I wouldn't worry. ;-) (I LOVED the Saddle Club. Even though I've never ridden a horse.)
Posted by: Kat with a K at July 13, 2006 06:34 AM
The Saddle Club has a book series? I bet it started out as books and THEN was made into a show, huh? And the fact that I discovered the show first is just an obvious (but sad) difference between our two families. Bekah loved the show, but I nixed it (to her dismay) because of the huge amount of pre-teen drama it involved - are the books any better?
Posted by: Anonymous at July 13, 2006 10:38 AM
Pre-teen drama? (panics.) I'll have to check. She hasn't dived into that stack yet. I'll whiz through one today. I just thought it was the next step up from Pony Pals, which a) we can't find above #8 for some reason, and she already has those 8 and b) are actually a little bit below her reading level. But so are the Boxcar Children, and she reads those. So maybe we'll be going back to Pony Pals.
Posted by: Rachel at July 13, 2006 11:05 AM
I haven't been reading your blog long, so I honestly didn't notice you were missing, but this sure was a great come back post. Except for the sandy, mossy, fishy, cow pasture part, the water sounded positively inviting! :o)
Blessings to you.
Posted by: Donna at July 13, 2006 05:23 PM
