This and That

Monday. Nice to have a day off. For Bob, that is, somehow moms never get a day off.

I need to get to civilization sometime soon. My boom box is dying. Thomas and Bob bought me a very nice CD player for the kitchen a few years ago. It's a Sony, it's pretty--has a lovely blue neon light--and has great sound. The sad thing is that the CD player is no longer working. It started going on the blitz this past spring, and now I cannot get any CDs to play.

That presents a problem when we want decent quality for our Story of the World CDs. (We're doing SOTW4 this year.) Plus, I like music, and I can't play my CDs.

My past CD player lasted about four years, and the CD player went on it, too. Everything else on both continued to work just fine.

Bob suggested getting a Bose. I laughed and said I don't want to spend that much money. $500? $150 tops for me, thank you very much.

I still haven't got that Abba CD, and Thomas continues to listen to Abba on You Tube.

Cha-ching.

And another thing. The new chairs we bought for our kitchen table don't work well for me. I waited so long for the beautiful new chocolate brown chairs. They look so much better than the chairs we had that we bought right after (or was it before?) we were married. (1989!) The thing is: it hurts my back to sit in these chairs. I've tried adjusting the chairs in all different manners, but it just isn't working. Bob suggested that I buy a nice-quality office chair. He told me not to worry about what it looks like at my kitchen table, because my back is more important. He's right. So I'll have to make a trip to the big city.

Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

The chair is a necessity. The boom box and Abba CD: not so much. We will use Thomas's CD player, but the sound quality stinks.

I've been debating our first day of school. I had originally planned on jumping right in, going full force. I think Thomas and I need a more gentle approach. So, I held back on cleaning the school room like I normally would. I did manage to get all the books off the floor, though. We will jump right in with math and a few other core subjects, but we'll also organize and clean our school room.

We didn't use the school room much last yea. The year before we did. We both prefer the kitchen table. I have come up with a compromise, though. Our kitchen faces east, so we have nasty sun in the mornings. We have large kitchen windows, so we usually keep the windows closed up until 11ish. We've decided we'll do school in the west-facing school room in the mornings and then move to the kitchen table in the afternoons. That way we get open windows, we'll be able to resume our bird watching out the school room, and we'll be able to keep the table less messy. Bob just hates it when he comes home for lunch and all our stuff is spread out on the table.

Of course we'll have our annual first day of school drive-through breakfast tomorrow. Biscuits and Gravy for Thomas from Arby's (we miss Hardee's so!) and an Egg McMuffin from McDonald's for me.

This past week I was nervous about starting school. Today I'm very relaxed about it. I think taking the pressure off to get the room perfect, everything perfectly organized helped me. Plus, if I make Thomas participate in that, he'll take more ownership in it. And the kid has some very good ideas on organization, too. He's much more creative than I am.

The rest of the day today I will be finishing laundry and paying bills, sipping coffee and putzing. Oh, and preparing my annual letter to the school district, can't forget that! And watching news coverage of the hurricane.