Un-Monday-ish

This, as it so happens, was a very pleasant Monday. I'm not sure what we did to deserve it, but i do think that I can mark this as the most pleasant Monday in recent memory.

It's not that Monday is always a bad day. And it is possible, after all, to have a Friday that is pretty darned sucky. But Mondays have that bad habit of coming right after Saturdays and then Sundays, which are usually the two best days of the week, so by default, Mondays are a bit of a letdown.

Today, though, we had an excellent day of school. Meelyn and I started things off by collaborating on Module 3 of her biology book -- she is floundering over unfamiliar terrain in that class and is significantly behind, seeing's as how she's supposed to be on Module 6. we sat down today and went over important vocabulary, words like chrysosphyta and organelle and a bunch of other sciency terms that left me with the pressing memory of dull I found biology back in high school. Guess what? An absence of twenty-two years hasn't made my heart grow any fonder. What a big, fat yawn that subject is. When I read that Kingdom Protista is divided into two main groups, those groups being protozoa and algae, all I could think was big whoop.

But anyway, Meelyn needs my help and everyone knows that there are certain subjects in high school where you need no one to prod you, and there are other subjects where you need to be reminded to DO YOUR WORK and others where someone has to be willing to sit down with you as you drag yourself through the textbook.

After helping Meelyn with biology, I left the girls at home absorbed in their schoolwork while I went out to do some errands. It was nice to do that because as I put on my coat, scarf and gloves, I realized that this is the first day in just over a week that I have actually felt like myself; I did happen to notice when I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning that my eyes didn't look like two holes burned in a blanket, so having normal human eyes instead of two overbright and sunken orbs that looked like they belonged to Lucy in the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula right before Dr. Van Helsing let her have it with that wooden stake to the heart, plus actually having some energy that allowed me to get dressed and do my hair and makeup without having to lie down and take a nap afterwards, well, you can see why I was having a banner day.

Snow and freezing rain has been forecast for tonight, and I wanted to get out and run my errands before that mess was visited upon us. I've been following the news of that massive ice storm out east and oh, my gosh, those poor people. As always when doing some storm-shopping. I kept my priorities straight and made sure I had the basic ingredients for several different types of cookie, plus a huge bag of popcorn, plenty of Diet Coke, some beer and an extra bottle of Ny-Quil for the girls, who are still coughing. I stuffed in milk, bread, eggs and peanut butter around the edges. And, I DID NOT FORGET THE TOILET PAPER.

After I got home, the girls and I sat together at the dining room table and diagrammed ten sentences together and I was very stoked that I only missed one, and that was only because I forgot to diagram an adverb.

Today was also the day that we embarked upon our SAT prep, which had me copying out the first phase of the diagnostic test, part of the language arts section. Aisling in particular fretted and frowned over the fact that she didn't know everything yet, and I pointed out that she is an eighth grader and high school juniors are the ones taking the SAT.

My whole purpose in starting SAT prep in the eighth grade, I reminded her, is so that by the time she does take the SAT, she'll be so familiar with the format and the kinds of questions that are asked and the way she should answer them that she'll take it with complete confidence and get a very high score, which will lead to a fantastic scholarship, which will lead to her having a roommate whose parents live in France who would simply love for petite Ahhhzzzzleen's maman and papa to come and visit for a week or a month.

So! It was an excellent day of school, followed by temperatures way too low to allow for any further errand-running. The girls and I piled on the sofa to bundle up with our blankies and watch Return to Me, which is one of our favorite movies ever. By the time it ended, I had just enough time to type this before wandering out to the kitchen to cook the Mexican chili for dinner, which I need to go do, like, now.