athelas

Today was a spider-haunted day.    We saw half a dozen as we worked on dragging things from under the deck to the dumpster on the street, and two of them were the “walk like a giant” type of spider that make S yell blood-curdlingly and race for the middle distance.

One was a sort of dusky red like a red hot iron, and could move like lightning, and evade like anything.    It was like Syndrome’s vehicle of destruction in the Incredibles, only radioactive red.

These unpredictable adrenalin surges wore us all out.  The new strategy is to jet-spray the items before lifting them.   Still, we made progress, and are planning to take the weekend off and resume the task on Monday.

I plan to start the homeschool year on Monday, too, though I have been called for jury duty and that might interfere with our plans.

So this weekend, in between dropping children off at train stations and colleges, I am going to try to plan for the school year.  The local school age children have already started back this week.

We took the whole family out to dinner yesterday — all seven children ranging from 26 down to 9.   They are usually fairly quiet but this evening, talked and talked to each other.   Now that three of the children are in their 20′s and have their own lives going on, they are not sure when they will be together again, I suppose, and texting and Facebook and phone calls are never quite the same as sitting together over dinner.