The easy way out

August hasn't been an easy month. Oh, it started well--my birthday was the 2nd, and that was fabulous, and then we had lots of fun with visiting cousins--but as the month as gone on, it's felt like a downhill slide. The department chair gig has been not-so-fun, and to anyone taking on a new job, I would NOT recommend that you start your new job with 2.5 weeks of no child care and several weeks of rotating houseguests while you are trying to unpack a new office and learn a new job. I've ended up feeling rather tired and grumpy. And my blogging time has been taken over by work.

But tonight, I say, enough! So despite the fact that I am looking over at two piles of work that need to be read in order that I may write letters of recommendation (maybe tonight? maybe early tomorrow?), I have decided that bullet points are just what I need. Herewith:

• Julie continues to rock, and now she's a hard-working writing teacher in addition to all the other things she does. Like share recipes. (You can click through on the photo for another photo + recipe, a genre which delights me.) I made this one last week, using soy sausage crumble instead of real Italian sausage, and green grapes. I skipped the roasting and did the whole thing on top of the stove. Very tasty.
• Curious Girl has switched schools, to a sort of fancy pants progressive school that runs up through 8th grade. She's in pre-K now, but I'm totally in touch with all the kindergarten angst in this corner of the blogosphere. She has a longer school day that starts an hour earlier, and she's left a school where she'd been with the same group of kids since they were infants. I miss it, and I haven't quite worked up the same degree of enthusiasm for fpps yet. But then, one week into the school we're missing, we were all stressed out about whether her teacher would accommodate her feeding tube. So I should give it time.
• We are turning into Frederick Taylor around here in our efforts to be on time for school. We have our lunches packed, in the lunch boxes, in the fridge, the night before. Wallets and phones tucked in our school bags (for me and Politica); stuffed animal and blanky tucked in CG's school bag. Clothes laid out the night before. Curious Girl does not like being late--and she doesn't like being rushed, either. So getting out the door is a subtle process, to say the least. But it does amuse me that CG bounds out of bed and says, "Mama! the sun is wearing pink!" every morning.
  
• I am discovering my petty side at breakfast. Yesterday I was not happy about the fact that CG stopped eating the breakfast I'd served for us when Politica came down and fixed herself something else. Things are always tastier off someone else's plate in my family, so I should understand. But it's a different vibe having the three of us around for breakfast, and I'm not always making a graceful transition from my two-person mornings.
• While I am still a devotee of Adagio Tea, where you can make lists of friends and then compare what your friends are ordering, I just got a great shipment from Upton Teas. Their not-nearly-so-nicely-designed website has a cool feature: it recommends new teas based on your past orders. So that was fun. Upton has good blends (Adagio only sells single varieties).

I'm off to visit my parents this weekend--woo hoo! Labor Day at the beach!--but next week, life should be better. One big deadline to meet next week and I think I'll start liking my new gig a lot better.

In the meantime, I wanted to put a post up here just to say that yes, I'm part of the blogging slowdown that Phantom and Scrivener have described in some recent posts; I've not been reading online so much, and I've not been writing so much. And I miss you. So happy labor day (for North American readers). See you next week!