Day 10 and the Weekend, an offer to coach a chess team

Tricksters Old and New
Bit of catching up to do.

Friday, the senior class got into the poem Beowulf at last starting with the problems the creature "Grendal" causes for the Danes. I love the way that Maurice Sagoff, the creator of Shrinklits condenses this part of the epic Monster Grendel's tastes are plainish.\Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.

The juniors read Langston Hughes' story "Salvation" in which he tells about a time when he "faked" being saved in a church revival to please his aunt and everyone else in the congregation. It is another example of the kind of reflective essay the students are going to be writing soon. I had something similar happen to me which I wrote about in a blog entry entitled "Camp Meeting".

This weekend has been part school preparation and part home remodeling. We are going to install new cabinets in the kitchen, so the old ones had to be taken out, moved actually. The old are being relocated in the our pantry to make way for the new.

I have also been working on my lesson plans for next week. The people who believe that teachers only work from 8am to 3pm don't know what they are talking about.

I also found out that Casady Schools wants to talk to me about becoming the coach for their middle school chess club. I held a chess camp for them over the summer, which I really enjoyed. If this works out as I think it will, I will be sponsoring three different scholastic chess groups: Centennial, The Village Library, and Casady.

Next week, the seniors continue with Beowulf while the juniors will be reading and working with Native American creation and trickster tales.

My New Study

It took nearly all of my Spring Break and a good deal of this weekend, but I finally have been able to transform, along with a healthy assist from my wife, a "junk room" into a study. When Cat and I merged our households, most of the books I had in my apartment had to go into storage. Later, I moved them into one of the rooms in the house. So finally I was able to have the time to put up the shelves I needed to unpack the books and get the room cleared out.

It feels great to have my library once again!

House Painting

The Mess
For the last 3 days, our house has been in a complete uproar.

We've been painting the living room, dining room, and breakfast room.

I hate having my living space disrupted, even when it's necessary, and this was very necessary. We should have done this years ago.

But I hate it when I can't get to my comfortable reading chair, when I can't get to any chair really.

But we're nearly finished. We just have to put everything back in order.
Weapons of Mass Distraction

Did A Little Home Improvement This Weekend

Hebe, cupbearer to the gods
I got a home improvement project done this weekend. It was a project of long-standing as my home improvement projects are wont to be. We have a corner of our front yard that tends to stay shady making growing anything there nigh to impossible. So we thought it would look nice to build a little platform of paving stones and put a statue we have of the goddess Hebe there. Hebe was the cupbearer to the Greek gods, and she is considered the goddess of hospitality making her a great figure to great our guests as they come to one of the dinners my wife and I like to host.

Cat has had Hebe for several years, and the old girl has had an accident or two in that time. Cat has talked about replacing this Hebe with another one, but I kind of like her the way she is. She really looks like she could be one of those ancient statues they have in museums. She has dirty feet right now though because she has been standing in our garden for a long time before we put her on pavement.