Yesterday, I worked in our front yard. Normally this means cleaning up some resistant leaves and putting in some bedding plants.
Not this year.
Our yard is barren. There are two gigantic trees, a couple of shrubs that I don't recognize and two sickly azaleas. Near the mailbox, however, is a little oasis. There, tulips and peonies are just shooting up. No grass graces our yard. We thought about sod, but the affordable sod only grows in sunlight, and the guy at the landscaping materials place said that it was iffy. He recommended hardscape.
This yard is so beyond bedding plants.
So, yesterday, I bought hostas and caladiums. And vinca. And some other random groundcover that I can't identify. I planted the pinks I bought earlier in a pot, so I can move them to find sunlight, along with my herbs.
Mea's regional history day competition was Saturday. She has written a lovely piece on Sargent Shriver. This year, she has done an individual documentary, so she alone is responsible for the script, editing, sound, AND all the paperwork. Paperwork is what she hasn't really done before. Her friends she used to work with did most of the paperwork. This has been her biggest problem thus far. Her bibliography contains only a fraction of the works that she used. She still took third, and this is the hardest region in the state, but she has to improve it if she wants to go to nationals. One of her judges found my parents at the awards ceremony to try to talk to her, so we chased him down afterward. He said that she needs to focus more in her conclusion, and she needs to work on it-- starting soon. No more procrastination.
My dad's band, South Big Creek, played at Williams Family Jamboree on Saturday night. I only made it through the first set. Bluegrass music is an iffy thing for me anyway, and I was exhausted by 8pm-- that and I knew we had an hour's drive back home. So we headed back home before the second set. Mea, who was evidently still on an adrenaline high, stayed and rode home with my brother's family. Of course, she was not faced with driving.
Tonight our 4-H group meets, and tomorrow night is the fashion competition. Mea is threatening to skip tonight's meeting due to homework. And she probably will. AP English is piling it on-- a bunch of questions on Julius Caesar, which is one of my very favorite plays. The questions, though, are ridiculous-- we didn't do this in college lit classes (I did in one rhetoric class). Find an example of an anaphora in Act III; find Synedoche; find syllogism; etc. So she asks for help. Synecdoche, I remember. Part for the whole. Anaphora? Evidently I have aphasia where anaphora is concerned. Syllogism though, I know cold, right? Is is part of an enthememe. Alas, finding a bloody syllogism in a play is another matter. Fortunately, Caesar does have one of the best speeches of all time, so we mine “I come to bury Caesar not to praise him.” Lame as we are, we are comparing them to the classic: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. We settle on the bit where he says that Brutus is an honorable man; they are all honorable me. The thing is, I love literature, with a particular love for Shakespeare. This stuff drives me mad. I don't understand how anyone survives this garbage in high school and goes on to major in English. Last year, Mea talked about majoring in English-- not this year. This year, it is sociology, with an eye toward studying rural sociology in graduate school.
My Miss O keeps getting her card pulled at school. She can't keep her hands to herself, and can't attend to her school work. Week before last, she had three “yellows” and last week she had a “yellow” and an “orange.” (That is with the missed two days for the ear infection.)“Red,” I believe, sends her to the office. I should, I suppose, start on the behavior mods-- I know how to do them. Goodness knows, I practiced enough with W. Of course, with him, it was all practice. Because of the autism, he only cared so much about the rewards or even the consequences. We finally found something that he was obsessed enough to hold over him: a laptop. (He's 14 now.) And he can even sull up and go without that-- except that his sisters have access to it when he is grounded from it and he just cannot stand that.
Anyway, I am afraid that Miss O has a bit of an ADHD thing going on. I am almost afraid to get her diagnosed, because with that comes meds. W, of course, is unmanageable without his.
2 comments:
I had a yard like that, big trees at the expese of grass. Then one day most of the tree fell into the street and the yard and the garage and across the street into the neighbor's front porch. After it became a nub, there was grass galore.
I don't recommend that strategy, though.
Oh, the AP. Teaching 12th grade AP Lit was like teaching a grad course with four times the work load. I only miss it sometimes.
What's up with the color-coded cards? My daughter would have been in kid-prison with fifty red cards pinned to her blouse if they'd done that back then. Yikes.
I am trying to avoid the tree taking out the street strategy for grass growing, but I will keep that in mind if I get frustrated enough (although zoysia sod is probably less expensive than *that*)
I don't know where the colored card system started. We had our names written on the board. With check marks if we kept talking.
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