Friday. This is my one, normal work day for the week. Lots of work to do today having been gone for three days, then taking yesterday off as much as possible so that I could relax. Today is my day to catch up on tickets.
No real news for the day, but it was a fine day. No issues. We did lots of work to document what we did in Austin this week. I set up a HubSpot CRM for the company to use, too. That was a good hour of the day.
Paul put in a new door lock today. That was really, really needed. The lock on our front door has deteriorated to the point where I have been worried that we will either get locked out of the house for good, or get locked in in case of an emergency. For a month I have been struggling to unlock the door when people come to visit, sometimes taking over a minute to get it open!
So now we went from our forty year old brass disaster to a shiny, new brushed nickle more modern, and solidly working, lock.
Tonight, I started reading Tom Sawyer to the girls. They do not know the story at all, and believe it or not, Dominica has never read it (or seen the movie, or had it read… nothing.) I am excited to be working through a number of serious classics with the girls. I get to do a lot of their critical literature home schooling stuff.
We did three chapters tonight, which includes the famous chapter on white washing the fence that is so iconic. I am very impressed by how well Liesl and Luciana are following the story and even enjoying it. We have to stop often to explain the language, culture, and history. The book was written in 1876, so was exactly one hundred years old when I was born. So it is 42% older today than it was then, and the extra time really shows. It is so much more disconnected from current events than it was when I was little. So much less connected to the social consciousness.
When I was young, that book felt like it was so ridiculously old. Something from a totally foreign world. Now reading it, it doesn’t seem so old or foreign. At least not to me. But trying to explain it to the kids is pretty hard.
The girls have the benefit of having spent a lot of time in Missouri and are very aware of the Mississippi River first hand. Both things that I did not experience in my childhood. So they have a lot more physical and geographic context for the book than I did. But I had far more historic context.