Richard is nearing the end of his summer class in children’s literature. Plus he came home from his one week intensive with more homework and a final project. So this means he’s starting to get really stressed and spending a lot of time when he is home glued to one of his computers, trying to get all his homework out of the way. I am strongly encouraging this, if only for the fact that the sooner the homework gets done, the sooner we get rid of the rather impressive stack of 50-something children’s books that have been camped out on the coffee table or the breakfast nook table for the past several weeks. Not that I have minded having that many books, per se, since I got to read all of them (and occasionally keep finding more that I didn’t get a chance to read), but it’s hard to put your feet up on the coffee table when it is covered in books, and I am too lazy to move them somewhere else.

So Sunday he spent most of his time doing homework except for the brief trip off to the hardware stores to gaze upon the pitiful selections of build-it-yourself shelving and workbenches for the garage, and Monday he stayed home to do homework while I went to dinner with my parents and my older sister and her family (although I did bring him dinner home from the restaurant). Tuesday night we met for Indian food on the way home but then it was back to the homework, and last night he was still plugging away at it too. At least Tuesday night the bulk of the books were returned (yay!) so that I can actually see parts of the coffee table again, and I suspect that the rest of the books will disappear soon enough.

I have been frantically busy at work this week on a variety of projects, but the main one has been this database. I had to figure out how to deal with linked tables once it is distributed and I spent two marvelous days in a crash course teaching myself how to build my very own customized Help and then figuring out just how the heck to attach it. Plus there was an entire day earlier in the week devoted to organizing a paper to look like a research study, and there was also the office picnic on Monday where I volunteered to bring a fruit salad just to have an excuse to use my melon baller. Only some of my coworkers seemed to understand this reasoning. I would say it was the women versus the men but that seems somehow sexist and it really just happened to end up that way so instead I will simply say it was the ‘people who like to cook’ vs. the ‘people who could not find a colander in the kitchen if it was staring them in the face and doing a jig’

By the time I have come home most days this week my brain has been reduced to little more than a big pile of grey mush in my head and all these other things I should be doing – like updating the format for our house and yard journal, or writing my July entry for On Display, or pondering healthy choices for dinner – remain undone and instead I have been camped out on the futon in the living room next to Richard, laptop on my lap, watching movies from Netflix (Galaxy Quest, which we should just break down and buy because of our sheer and unnatural love of the film, and then Jumanji because I had apparently forgotten just how cheesy the special effects are) and playing far too many games of Spider Solitaire. I am addicted to Spider Solitaire. Granted I cannot play anything higher than two suits at a time, but that does not deflect from my unnatural love of this game.

Today I did a million and one little last minute fixes to the database and I had fun with style sheets for that nifty Help system I built with my own little hands and I commandeered various coworkers’ computers to see if I could make the whole thing work, and I went through several versions of sheer panic when it would all suddenly and without warning crash in a spectacularly vile fashion, and then I finally got it all to work and once that was done I decided I had better stop poking at it because if something else broke I really didn’t want to know about it.

I am not sure how productive I will be tomorrow at work as a result. The database is off to be previewed at another office and if it breaks there is not a darn thing I can do about it. I have some nice easy tasks to accomplish that require a minimal amount of thought, but yet should keep me busy until noon, at which point I skip merrily out of the office, hop in my car, and drive up to Reno, where my sisters and I are converging for a wild and crazy girls-only weekend of husband-free, child-free fun. Pink hot pants, thong bikinis, and impractical shoes have been discussed. Donuts and ice cream and copious amounts of chocolate will undoubtedly be consumed. It is possible that one of us may actually toss a nickel in a slot machine somewhere, but seeing as how none of us are big into the gambling the chances of one of us losing the family fortune is slim (although you never know what three adult women under the influence of a box of good Belgium dark truffles and a spa pedicure might do).