Today was marked by a stunning explosion in the household. Not of a chemical kind but purely emotional. Our eldest has demonstrated immense recalcitrance when asked to write to a writing prompt in school. Since she'll be taking the ISTEP this year and required to do so for the test the wife and I have been worried that she'll just refuse to complete the test and shout, "But I can't do it!" in front of the whole class. Her standard response is to claim utter ignorance. If she has any doubt whatsoever about what she's doing she just throws up her hands and sobs. I'm not sure what genetic trait we passed down or how we've erred in her upbringing but this is EXTREMELY irritating in the most irrational manner imaginable. The child fills notebooks with stories about imaginary beasts complete with illustrations but can't provide us with a complete sentence about what a farmer does at work all day? How in God's green earth do we fix THAT?
On a lighter note I managed to do some work today (at my real job) that I enjoyed. I spent most of the day writing Crystal reports and actually having real development to do (rather than hours and hours of virtual paper shuffling) and it was amazingly gratifying. It's refreshing to remember much better I feel after having done something meaningful for a few hours a day rather than the non-technical administrative garbage that comprises the majority of my job.
The tile in the hall bath is down and sealed and tomorrow... we grout. Er, rather, I grout. On a similar home improvement note, the 4-foot hole in the yard designed to accept the largish tree to be removed from the in-laws' yard when their in-ground pool goes in is ready. Apparently if you dig down far enough (in Indiana at least) you hit a horizon of decaying corn stalks. The smell of anaerobic decomposition in the hole had me concerned for a bit that I was approaching a sewer. Apparently it was just mountains of corn from years gone by... well, and maybe some farmers septic tile long disused. Tomorrow after the grout we buy another $11 tree, get about 200 landscaping bricks to properly ring off the trees we've planted in an arduous 600-step process and lastly, if I remember and if you're VERY unlucky, I'll take the garden archival snaps for July before it's no longer July.
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