August School

Back to school this morning, and back to the front porch sessions - sitting there with a delicious Bones coffee, reading Psalms (that's been my latest focus - I'm reading through the Perry Stone commentary and it's been great to dive further into stories behind each Psalm).  The treadmill work in the morning continues in Colorado now, with a trip to Black Canyon of the Gunnison coming up soon.  We have our morning habits - prayer, attending to the sea monkeys, allergy medicine, my regular medicine, arm exercises each morning, feeding the birds, taking a picture of Maddie at the fireplace, and then heading out the door to get dropped off at school.  Not necessarily in that order.  Maddie's morning is much more condensed, which is to say she gets up and gets ready pretty quickly, rushing down the stairs, ready to move.  Mom gets everyone's lunches together early, so Maddie can just head out the door with her Spider-man backpack and lunchbox, ready to tackle her day.

School in the summer is weird.  August is now a yucky month.  I mean, before it at least was summer and no school.  But now it's the start of school, and there are no holidays, and it's hot.  Is there anything good in August to look forward to?  It's too hot for fairs and festivals, and everyone's too busy with school to do anything.  August needs a makeover.  We need to add a holiday somewhere or something.

I pick her up early on Mondays and Fridays, and it's easier - much easier.  No car lines.  I wait about five minutes or ten, and that's it.  We head home and she has much more time to prepare for taekwondo.  We eat together - Mom has spaghetti or something else nice prepared.  Then we're off and running to taekwondo.  Mondays she has leadership class and black belt class as well.  There's sparring and form and all the usual things there - she has a great time.  She's been doing this for quite a long time now, hasn't she?  All of it.  Time marches on.

So we've been doing these songs this summer, using AI to create music for the lyrics of the Psalms.   I think we have auto sixty or so of them set to music by this point, and that's been a fun project.  Some are really catchy!

And speaking of creative hobbies, Mom and I are going to enter another scarecrow into the Botanical Gardens walk here at Gainesville.  Mom registered - it's free - and we're going to take the body of a scarecrow that Nana and Ye-Ye made, but we're going to make a new head for it so the end product will look like Groot.  Mom ordered the materials and we'll be following a step-by-step DIY channel to make a decent head for the guy.  Hopefully it'll turn out well.  We have to follow a theme for this year, which has to do with flight.  Mom ordered a bunch of bees, and we'll fix those to Groot.  Like I said, hopefully it'll turn out good.  I have to get the hatch fixed in the car though, otherwise that thing's not leaving our garage!

Maddie finished up her cover for the photography book she'll be using, and that looks really good.  She's been doing some fun little side projects artistically lately.  Of course, soon there'll be homework and things like that.  But so far this year seems to be a little more relaxed.  Aside from the fees, of course.  Yes, we have senior dues taken care of.  And the yearbook ordered.  Next step is the yearbook ad, and I think that might be close to the finish line for the big costs of the senior year.  

We're still in our second heat wave here, although the clouds look a bit more thick with humidity and there might be some chances at rain, albeit slight chances.  It makes for some nice sunsets though.  Driving home, Maddie and I catch these sunsets crossing the lake.  It's a nice drive, that part.  It takes a half-hour or so to get to Oakwood from here, which seems crazy given that we're in Forsyth on the other side of Gainesville and we drive all the way to Oakwood through rush hour traffic.  But we've been like a river, finding the shortest course, and that's worked for us, unless there's some big accident that closes down Browns Bridge.  Yes, that still happens quite a bit.  There is talk of them - again - widening the road.  I remember going to meetings back in 2004 about that happening.  That was before the recession of the early 2000's happened, and a lot of projects got sidelined.  Then they focused on getting the bridges over the lake updated, as bridges have expiration dates.  We were past due on those, and I never really thought about that before, that bridges have expiration dates.  Like a Twinkie.  Anyway, we're still here with this thin and windy - and hugely traveled - road up and down the peninsula connecting to another peninsula, where if anything happens, that's it for rush hour.  Or any other time of day.

Maddie's excited about her first football game this Friday.  She's going with another friend, and I believe they'll meet their friend Maddie there, who will be there because her school is visiting.  There won't be any worries about competing teams, as the girls don't really care about the game so much as socializing and having a night out.  So it'll be fun.  We plan on going to several football games, and I told Maddie we had to do at least one early basketball game, just so we can say we did.  Hopefully Maddie can really soak in this senior year and make it a good one.

Speaking of "good ones," tonight we read from our book with has stories that are not good.  "From a Certain Point of View" is taking a long time to get through.  It's just a lot of short stories, and some are pretty fun.  Others are pretty meh.  Some are bad.  We are completists though, and we are slogging through this one!  But for the first time ever, Maddie is getting to the halfway point of certain stories and saying, "Can we just skip to the next one?"  And I'm in complete agreement.  Fortunately, today I found some old Star Wars books at the Goodwill, some old hard cover stories from the 90's that I was surprised to see.  I was there to get some oversized plush toys for our stage set, but as I looked around the books, I was happy to see some old "Legends" books, which had some weird turns, but turned out to be probably better than whatever it is they're putting out now.  I might be diving back into that old stuff versus reading some of the new things, unless it's Timothy Zahn, of course.  Got to respect the Thrawn stuff!  Hey, maybe that's where we go next.  Anyway, the point is, this current book is okay.  I think at this point we're reading it to complete the trilogy.  

We read tonight, and then we were off to bed after prayers - and tucking everyone in.