monday is alnmost always a kind of day off here, although that doesn't make it more peaceful. kids have no school, and, energized by sleeping in two days in a row already, they wake up eager to do stuff, and that almost always involves money and trip to town. we hold them off as long as possible, hoping they'll sleep half the day and limit the suffering by about half.

now, the weather is stunning, but that rarely has anything to do with it. sometimes they want to hang out downtown with friends, or play some basketball, or just go into town to eat. they're kind of relentless. my wife has taken to riding horses most of the morning and part of the afternoon, so often i get the brunt of it when they wake up. but they're like, where's mom, like she's going to magically make food appear, or permission to go, when in fact she'll stall too. i'm more curmudgeonly when i stall. i have more experience, having less money for longer.

i am actually working on several projects at once, even home, by my computer, as they wake up. one, i am reading others' books in return for their reading mine. i am making a small quaker pamphlet on my copy machine back in the shed, but if i don't find a more efficient way of making it (it spits out copies very slowly, one at a time) it won't work as a long-term solution. that is a job for the patient, involving careful observing of how it lays out and staples as a pamphlet, so i'm just doing a test run now, a single pamphlet which i will pore over.

but while i was in the shed i pulled out and brought forward grandma margo's scrapbook, a large thing with colorful pictures. i can barely hold back on starting this project even before i've finished my last one (my autobiography, finally almost totally proofread). with the proofreading of my autobiography almost done, i have about six things i could charge forward on, but this scrapbook calls out to me when i'm out in the shed. so i brought it in. it puts me, in a visual artistic way, in the toledo ohio of about 1906, that's where it starts. she is about fourteen when she starts it. i am not quite clear on the dates or even whether she puts everything in order. i decided to catalog it and see if i can decide what i want to focus on and what i should copy.

so proofreading the last of my autobiography is a chore, but i'm really not in the mood.

so my choices are, research on toledo ~ 1906, research on language (also a chore), research on some other stuff.

as i check my stats almost constantly, the amazon record service says, crank it out. publish it. produce it. whatever, get it on the table.