Exhaustion, This Week and This Time Last Year

This has been an incredibly long week.  Let me record a few highlights before I forget:

--The Great Flooring Project is complete!  It's fascinating to see the difference in the woods in the house.  The 2 bedrooms and the kitchen have new wood; we kept the old wood in the living room and dining room of the house.  They were stained the same color, and at first glance, they look the same.  But on closer inspection, the wood in the living room has much more variety.  I've enjoyed looking at individual boards and meditating on the differences between them.

--A room with wood floors and not much furniture has amazing acoustics.  As I opened the living room curtains this morning, I sang some prayers I learned from singing with the monks at Mepkin Abbey and marveled at the beauty of a human voice singing plainsong alone in an empty room.

--The first week of classes means long days for me; each week I've arrived at campus between 8:30 and 9 in the morning, and I've stayed until 6:15 or 6:30 to make sure that evening classes are running smoothly--and on Tuesday, I stayed much longer than that to teach the evening class that I only found out I was teaching on Monday.  But several evenings this week, my spouse and I sat outside to have wine, cheese, and crackers while we caught up with each other.  While it hasn't been cool, the withering overnight heat seems to have lessened, and we've had a good breeze.

--Meeting people's animals is one of the delights (and sometimes a challenge) of being at a place with a Vet Tech program.  Yesterday, the registrar's kitten came to visit me in my office.  She sat in a chair across from me, looking for all the world like a student with an issue.

--Today my church will have a pet blessing service.  Even though I don't have pets, I'll attend--my spouse will be singing and playing his violin.  I'll sit and sketch.  Oddly, I'm looking forward to this.  Or am I really looking forward to the dinner that we are planning to have after the 4:00 service?  It feels like a long time since we've had a proper meal.

--Although both my spouse and I are exhausted most weeks, let me look back a year for some perspective.  A year ago, the roofer came and told us that the water running down the laundry room walls was not from the roof.  A year ago tomorrow, we took gutters apart and pulled all sorts of detritus out of them.  A year ago, we had just completed various visits from insurance adjusters.  We are still not done fixing all the damage that the adjusters documented, but we are much further along than we once were.