Intention and Exhaustion

I was walking to work one morning this week behind a father and his two young daughters. They were practicing spelling. The father would give each girl a word and she would spell it and use it in a sentence. The older girl got the word "intention."

Her sentence? "It is my intention to push you down the stairs," she said, gesturing at her sister.

Ah, yes. Family life.

This has been an exhausting and somewhat dispiriting week. Aside from the news, which was bad enough, our whole school seems to be running on empty. There's such a whirlwind of activity at the end of the year with everyone trying to finish papers and projects and put on plays and concerts. (Dave's high school concert is tomorrow, and I'll be attending that.) We just gotta get this school year done.

I'm making progress on collecting overdue materials, but of course not as much as I would like. I also cleaned out the library lost & found bin yesterday and set everything out on a shelf, hoping that putting it at eye-level would help students see their stuff and take it home:

As usual, water bottles are a big part of the problem. A lot of that stuff has been in the lost & found for months, so my guess is even if the kids know it's there they probably don't want it. Perhaps you recognize that lunch bag from last fall -- someone took one thermos but left the other behind. And some of it's pretty weird. Who lost their electric toothbrush in the library? Their hairbrush? Their deodorant?

(Probably all the same person.)

I checked out a stack of books for summer reading, maybe more than I will ever finish:

1. "Hidden Valley Road" by Robert Kolker
2. "The Tender Bar" by J.R. Moehringer
3. "The Great Believers" by Rebecca Makkai
4. "A Dutiful Boy" by Mohsin Zaidi
5. "The Wych Elm" by Tana French

6. "The Secret Place" by Tana French
7. "Ready When You Are" by Gary Lonesborough
8. "Crossroads" by Jonathan Franzen
9. "All Over But the Shoutin'" by Rick Bragg

Some of those have been on my reading list for years -- the Bragg and Moehringer books, for example. We don't start summer checkouts until June 6 but I figure it's a perk of my job that I can grab mine early.

I walked Olga a couple of mornings ago and she had fun sparring with the neighborhood cats:

Did you see the cat in the distance on the sidewalk right at the beginning? That's what she was chasing. And you could probably hear another cat spit behind that door, which is what prompted Olga to return for the attack. I've talked a lot about how low-energy she is these days (in fact she's still in bed as I type this), but as you can see, when it comes to felines the adrenaline still surges!

(Top photo: A blooming elder up the street from our flat.)