Why Is It

The weather is changing, pushing the thermometer up a few degrees from the sub-freezing numbers that have been keeping us inside the house. This week, it appears that the earth (or at least our little corner of it) might start warming up. Forties? Fifties? Maybe even ... Sixties?

Perhaps not that good. But we can dream, can't we?

My body has been craving sleep lately. It's been very difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and there is absolutely no way to resist the call of the pillow when the cats wake me up at 5:15 with their plaintive cries for food and I stumble back upstairs after dumping their food on their plates and it crosses my mind that this would actually be a perfect opportunity to get a couple hours of quiet reading time or study time or websurfing time before everyone else in the house wakes up ... and normally that would be the result. But lately I've been too tired, both mentally and physically. And I crawl back into bed. And then suddenly it's nearly eight o'clock.

Today was no different. The only problem was that eight fifteen is departure time for Chinese lessons!

The Chinese lessons were actually quite fun today. I managed to wake up enough on the drive over that my brain was nearly functional. So I was able to pay attention and learn some very important things - like how to say "wash dishes", "clean house", and other handy chore-related phrases. (We were studying how to say "You are supposed to do X by Y o'clock, but instead you didn't do it until Z o'clock". This is a very useful sentence structure to have handy in a household with teenagers!)

Later on that afternoon, I discovered that my compressor was having difficulty because one of the pressure gauges has a misaligned cover, so it is binding the needle. Had to fiddle with that for while to get it to work right. Not sure why that was making the output pressure insufficient to pump up the tires on the Subaru, since the gauge isn't directly in line with the output, but the plain fact is that the tire wouldn't pump up til I twisted the top of the gauge a bit. Weird.

After dinner tonight, we went for a walk, everyone except James, who was out at the mall hanging out with friends. Adam and Deb proved that they walk much faster than the rest of us, what with those long legs of theirs. Mary hung back with Cheryl and me, content to take things a bit easier. But the temperature wasn't so warm that it was completely comfortable outside, which was supposed to give us extra incentive to walk faster (aerobically). We were definitely ready for the warmth of the house when we got back.

Then we played Scrabble for awhile, and Adam used a lot of Latin words. It didn't help him win, but it was fun to see him practice it. Deb and Mary got a lot of help from Mom, which is probably why one of them won. Poor Dad could barely keep his head above water on that one.

James finally got home some time after seven-thirty, and then it was Bible-reading time. Finished up Galatians, quizzing the kids on what they knew of the church that was meeting there at the time. I'm hoping a lot of this is sinking in to their heads so they'll remember it.

Now that it's nearly midnight, my brain is back to fried again...