Sophia and Elannah Go to the United Kindgom (Duckface Edition)

Sophia and Elannah have been visiting their aunts, uncles, and cousins in England and Wales for the last two weeks, or fortnight. No shooting involved (game reference) and, in fact, you can't even carry a knife around in that part of the world (political reference).

I lack Instagram wits, meaning that I forget Instagram exists, can't remember the password for the account I set up long ago in order to do research for my content writing, and don't care enough to look at it. I'm sure they've been posting plenty of supercute pics to their Instas (or is it cooler to call it IG?), but I'll post the ones they've sent me on WhatsApp. There are a lot of duck faces going on. I am praying they are duckfacing only in an ironic fashion; otherwise, I've failed as a mother.

Duckfacing in the Nottingham Caves

Duckfacing in the car whilst traveling on the left side of the road

 

Not duckfacing whilst shopping in the town centre, bless their cotton socks

A town cathedral. Bath? Devizes? Nottingham? Not sure. They don't feel it necessary to explain their pictures

Sophia on the porch of a manor somewhere near Nottingham

You can tell Elannah was taking these photos and laughing so hard she almost couldn't stand up

The girls didn't get to London (not sorry about that, honestly), but they have seen a lot of southwest England (where Husband's sister and her family live in Devizes), including Bath; Cardiff and Pencoed in Wales, where Husband grew up (they even got to see the house he grew up in!); and the Midlands, including Nottingham and Bradford (where one of Husband's brothers lives with his family). They desperately wanted to see a West End play, but we really didn't want them traveling into London to see one. It so happened that the West End production of Les Miserables was touring the country, so when they went up to Nottingham to see that uncle and his family, they headed further up north to Bradford one afternoon to see a matinee. They loved it, of course.

They've seen Stonehenge, the Avebury circle (a cheaper, less dramatic stone circle), castles, the ocean, chip shops, kebab shops, lots and lots of town centres for shopping, and they've climbed up to the Westbury White Horse. They've also been able to hang out with aunts and uncles and cousins, of course. One of their cousins recently got his mission call to South Africa, and because he and the girls are such good friends, it was great that they got to see him before he leaves in September.

From what I understand, the girls are paying the cost to bring home an extra suitcase which they are filling entirely with chocolate and other British treats. I think they've spent a lot of money on British chocolate, which is so expensive here and so cheap there. Plus, they're bringing home flying saucers (styrofoam-y discs filled with a powder that turns creamy in your mouth), Parma Violets (my favorite favourite), and sherbet fountains (Husband's favorite). Also Monster Munch crisps (pickled onion flavor), prawn-flavored Skips (another type of crisp) and Battenberg cakes (Elannah's favorite).

They're exhausted. I've spoken to Elannah several times on face-to-face calls, and she's homesick even though she's having a great time. They're happy they got to go, but they're happy to come home, too. I told her it's like traveling to another dimension, where things are familiar but different enough that you just can't quite get comfortable. Also, jet lag. She agreed. She has revised her desire to get some sort of job that requires her to travel all the time. Turns out she's really a homebody.

Aren't we all, really? Don't we all crave some place of grounding, a place where you feel truly relaxed and comfortable?

I'm missing them. We're all missing them. But they'll be home tomorrow night, late, and the dog will probably pee himself with happiness when they walk through the door.

Summer's Over

Summer's over. I had my first official work-related experience of the new school year today. I had to do a bus driver physical assessment, which drivers have to take every other year. It's not hard. You'd have to be pretty badly off physically to not pass. The fact that I set the day's record for speed does not mean much, although I'll certainly brag about that to Husband when he gets home.

Sadly, my bus attendant, Kris, will not be coming back this year. We've kept in touch over the summer, so I know that she decided to stay home with her mother, who has Alzheimer's and dementia and is in late-stage renal failure. The doctors now give her a year or less to live. Kris herself also has multiple sclerosis, and being a caregiver for her mother has taken a massive toll on her own health. Kris is going to really miss "her kids," as she refers to our preschool students. She loves them.

Her decision to quit meant that the attendant route for my bus was put up for bid last week. When a route goes up for bid, other route drivers or attendants (in this case) can put in a request for that route. A new driver or attendant is chosen based on experience (attendants most often deal with special needs children), seniority, and the needs of the transportation department. It starts off a route shuffle, as well, as drivers or attendants switch to a new bus, which means the old route then has to go up for bid, and so on. If no route drivers or attendants bid on a route, the next substitute in line is offered the route. Substitute drivers and attendants cannot bid for routes.

The bidding closes today at 4pm, and when I asked the supervisor over attendants if anyone had bid on it, she said that seventeen people had bid for the route. I was astonished. Because sub attendants can't bid for routes, that's seventeen route attendants who have bid for a route that is only listed as getting 13.5 hours a week. Either they're desperate for a shorter route (why?) or they really want to work with preschool kids or they don't like their current routes. I'm not sure how many routes require an attendant, but it can't be more than thirty. My route will have more hours once school starts because we pick up a few Behavioral Unit elementary school kids at the end of the day and transport them home, but because that part of my route changes year to year, they can't include that in the official hours count. Also, preschool kids keep getting added to my route throughout the school year, so by the end of the year, my route gets at least twenty-five hours a week. Despite the lower hours, I do have an incredibly easy route for attendants. Preschoolers are energetic and bouncy, but they're strapped into their seats and are easily contained. I've never had huge problems with the elementary school-age behavioral kids, either, and we've only ever transported two or three of them at a time (that number can always change, of course). Some of the special needs kids on other buses can be very, very difficult to deal with on a daily basis. Most of them are great, but a few of them are large, strong, and hard to control, and that's wearing on the attendants and the drivers.

Drivers don't have any say in who gets the job as their bus attendant. I can only cross my fingers and hope it's someone I can get along with.

During my physical assessment, my boss (who still looks like he's barely into his mid-twenties) asked if I would be willing to do some driving the first week of school. Preschool doesn't start until a week after all the other kids start, and the bus garage has four routes currently without drivers. I said sure, of course. It's more money for me. Plus, I like my boss and the people in the office, and they're in a tight spot. But what the heck are they going to do for drivers, I wonder. Our small, mostly rural school district can't afford to match the pay that larger, more affluent school districts in The Big City can afford, and we bleed a lot of our drivers to those districts or to better-paying trucking jobs. With the rate of growth our little burg has seen in the last two years, we probably have at least three or four new routes in the valley--or will have by next year. You can tell thousands of people are moving in to our town based merely on the fact that we now have traffic jams on Main Street and commuters are always complaining about being backed up on the interstate waiting their turn to take the one exit into our valley--a trip often made even more frustrating by the frequent car accidents on roads not designed to handle this volume of commuters. Dozens of new subdivisions are popping up in former ranching pastures in town and all over the valley, new neighborhoods into which buses will soon be weaving. If you want to move here, do it now while housing prices are still somewhat reasonable and you can expect good appreciation on your property. I suspect that in a few years, the state will decide that it's financially expedient to blast a pass through the mountains into the valley where The Big City lies, cutting the commute time in half or a third, and then we'll become just another suburb of that city, enjoying even more traffic and an even higher cost of housing.  (However, it's more likely that they'll expand the commuter rail system out to our valley. That's got to be cheaper than blasting mountains apart to make roads, right?)

Ugh! I say it again: ugh!

But I digress.

Tomorrow is a day-long training. School starts next Monday. Summer's over.

Musical Clickbait

I was going down music rabbit holes today and found this.



The piece is amazing. It's absolutely lovely, though I couldn't hope to play it--at least, not once I hit the cadenza. But what I found hilarious was the comments.

Sleeping Under the (Stenciled) Stars

I'm exhausted but proud.

All the carpet is gone and we now have laminate flooring on the second story of our home. All the rooms are freshly washed and painted.

While I know it's gauche for those who drink their tea with their pinkies extended to speak of money and cost, I am not one of the gentler class. I'll happily admit that we couldn't have done this if we'd hired professionals or paid full price for everything; plus, we learned a lot of new skills in the process. The laminate flooring was bought at a massive discount, so we paid about twenty-seven cents per square foot for that. The paint we bought on sale, as well, and it hung around in our garage for a year before we used it. We just took the paint cans back to Home Depot and had them reshaken.

In the months between when we bought the laminate flooring and when we actually used it, Husband found whatever flooring tools he could at pawn shops and bought the rest when they were on sale on Amazon. He used every single tool he bought, and they all made the job so much easier.

Sophia's room was already painted (she did that on her own a couple years ago), and it was the first to  get new flooring the weekend before she moved back in. Then we moved on to the hallway and the two boys' rooms before finishing up in the master bedroom.

The walls got washed and Little Gary wanted to help me paint. I love this deep peacock blue that we put on two walls. The other two walls are painted with the light blue I used in the hallway.

It doesn't look like a glossy magazine photo, but all his stuff is back in and he loves it. The room is pet-odor-free (yay for Kilz odor-blocking paint!) and contains a dresser that I will someday get my hands on and make very pretty.

The hallway, done in "Winterscape" by Glidden paint. There is no natural light here, so I thought it was best to keep the color light and bright. I'm on the lookout for fabulous wall sconces for more and better lighting. The door at the left on the edge of the picture is the linen closet. At the end of the hall is Joseph's room, and at the top of the stairs is the master bedroom.

Joseph's room got a coat of a sage green paint, which is a massive improvement on the dark jailhouse gray that was originally on the walls (forgot to take a before pic, but it was a color the owners before us had painted on). Doesn't the wall color look so nice with the floors?

We were going to use the same sage green in the master bedroom that we'd used in Joseph's room, but I just wasn't feeling it. I love green, but I've been craving indigo forever now, and that's what I wanted on the walls. Fortunately, Husband was game, so we picked this luscious deep sapphire blue and put it on all four walls. There's so much natural light in our large room that the dark color doesn't make the room cavelike, but at night the color becomes cozy and enveloping.

I also loved the idea of stenciling a wall or two instead of using wallpaper. When I first suggested that idea to Husband, he had this mental image of a row of bowtie-wearing geese marching around the walls near the ceiling, and he said, "Ookaay...you can do whatever you want." He was very relieved when I explained what I actually wanted, and we were both thrilled that the Royal Design Studio stencil I fell in love with was on sale.

I love the way it turned out, but I was so sick of stenciling by the time I was finished.

I made a plumb line with materials I had nearby--orange yarn and a paint can key--so that I could keep the stencil on the straight and narrow. Pro tip: work your stencil along vertical columns as much as possible. I went diagonal once when I was first starting, and that created a situation where I had to tape off and repaint some of the wall to correct the pattern.

Here I'm making progress, but I realized that I have to wash the stencil after every nine or ten uses to prevent paint buildup on the spokes of the star. I started scrubbing the stencil of all paint after completing each column. It added more time to the project, but it was worth it.

After several days, I had a completed wall. The last column took about three tries, and I had to keep taping off sections and repainting them until I got the pattern to align correctly. I love the high contrast with the blue and white, but I could have gone more subtle by using a shade or tint of the blue or even a quiet silver or gold.

It was late by the time I got the headboard painted and hung. I used Vintage Mustard chalk paint from Behr on my brown vinyl headboard that I made a few years ago. It took three coats, but it turned out really well. I love the yellow against the starry background. 

My mother's neighbor ordered this rug from Wayfair but found it was too large for the room she wanted to put it in. Because she offered it for free, we happily took it off her hands. Unfortunately, we both hated it once we had it unrolled in our painted room. Its traditional pattern clashed heavily with the style of the room, even though I was using it to inspire my color choices. I don't mind an eclectic style, but the rug really is awful with everything else.

We found a smaller, more serviceable area rug at Walmart to use until we find something we really like. Meanwhile, that same neighbor who gave us the rug also didn't like the chairs she ordered, so she gave those to us, as well, and we created a little seating area at the other end of the room. I'll put a small coffee table in between them as soon as I find one that I like. We moved only one of the three bookcases back in (the other two fit happily in the hallway without impeding movement) and heavily culled our book collection. The massive massage chair is by the window now, and the office desk is gone.

Husband found a glass and metal bar with a definite art deco vibe that someone was selling for a very reasonable price. We needed a place to showcase his rock collection, and on the bottom shelf, he has his flutes and the speaker he uses when he hooks a mic up to whichever flute he's playing. 

I'm working on the details of the room--the wall hangings and the bedding and all the other little decorating touches that make a room look cozy and lived in. I'll bore you with more pictures once I'm satisfied with the result.

Meanwhile, we got tons of apricots off our tree this year. 

And in other news, Husband found a great deal at the place where we stay when we go to St. George, the Sports Village, which has a nice pool, tennis courts, mini golf, racquetball, and a bunch of other fun things in the clubhouse. Usually, we go with my in-laws and as many of the kids as are available to come with us, as well as any relatives who have come in from England or elsewhere. The two- or three-bedroom condos we've booked are spacious and very clean and comfortable.

This time, it was just four of us: Husband and I and the boys. My in-laws were out of state visiting two other sons and their families, and my parents were dealing with some health issues. We booked a one-bedroom that said it comfortably slept four (there were mattresses we could bring in from the garage).

Unfortunately, although the condo was impeccably clean and stylishly decorated, it was tiny. Microscopic. The kitchen was so small that you couldn't fit two people in at the same time, and so narrow that you couldn't fully open the dishwasher door. The bed looked absolutely lovely, but it was a queen, and it was stacked so high on two bases that you couldn't sleep on the edge without rolling off. The two of us with our body pillows were uncomfortable all night. We ended up putting a mattress on the floor of the bedroom--squeezed in between the bottom of the bed and the closet--where Husband slept. There was a rollaway bed that Little Gary used in the living room while Joseph slept on the couch, but Joseph snores. Loudly. We were all uncomfortable and tired, and we ended up leaving a day early because the boys were homesick. Other than that, we had a good time.

The road home.

Summer's just about over. Husband has mandatory meetings this week, and I start my mandatory trainings next week. I'm feeling more than a little dread, but I suppose that's not unusual when you've become accustomed to decadently controlling all your own time.