Catching Up

September is a busy month at our house. The garden needs to be harvested and put away, the woodpile needs to be replenished, and the hatches need to be battened down for winter. Then there's always a new schedule to get used to. All this means I haven't kept up with family and friends (real life and blog life, too!) the way I should have. So here's to catching up.

Oldest son and youngest daughter were both supposed to be going to school this fall, but their jobs got in the way. Oldest son gave his two week notice back in August, but the company needed him and offered him a raise to stay for a while. He couldn't resist the extra money.

The company he works for has a two big jobs coming up. One of them was supposed to be done already, but it's not. It's a big construction job--the multiplex being built for the 2007 Canada Games--and his company is installing all the automatic doors. They were supposed to install them back in August, but when they showed up to put the doors in they discovered that although the wiring in the building was complete, there was no wiring for the automatic doors. The floors are complete, too, but no one had considered how the bars beside the automatic doors that keep the doors from going too far and hitting someone would be installed. Now they're waiting for things to be ripped up and fixed so they can finally get those doors in.

(It's an architect problem. The local architect who is responsible for figuring out this sort of thing visited earlier to discuss what they would need and what would work best, and then ignored (or forgot) everything they told him.)

Youngest daughter's employer needed her, too, and she stayed until January without a raise. She'd planned to do a business program that runs 8:00-5:00 each day, and you can't do that and work full time. She is the business person of the family. She likes dealing with money, closing for the day, drawing up the schedules, bossing people around, listening to customer complaints, and then entertaining us with the strange things people say to her and the odd requests they have.

Youngest son is back in school, and he's on the senior volleyball team this year so he practices for two hours four nights a week. Not after school, which would be a whole lot more convenient, but after supper. He feels bad about needing rides every night, but he's a kid who has a large amount of excess physical energy that he needs to use somewhere. Lately he's become very concious of how much I do for him, and he's making a real effort to cut down on how much he asks of me. He's growing up, I guess.

This semester he has the teacher who's taken it upon himself to watch out for him at school. It was a promise this teacher made to my husband, and he's postponed his retirement until youngest son graduates. He checks over every report card to make sure youngest son is not slacking off, and keeps track of his friends, too. It's amazing, really, that someone would go out of their way like that to keep a promise. Youngest son is aware of all this, and he walks a little taller whenever this is mentioned.

There you go. That's what's up with the fam. It's late, and I'm not going to proof this or edit it. It shall forever be what it is.