Five For Friday: Early September By Numbers

 I have never done a Five for Friday. Do they have to match? I don't know why I'm asking, they're not going to.

1. Okay, let's do the first day of school pics I still coerce my kids into sending me. Angus sent his with the caption "Angus's last first day of school ever", and if that wasn't sufficiently heart-piercing, he.... *whimpers*... has a moustache in it.

Never mind, I said I wouldn't complain about it (too much). Here is Eve's. If she ever insists on sporting a moustache, I will endeavour not to be ungracious about it for her too.

2. Wednesday was my first day doing two schools in one day with classes in. I made an unintentionally vague reference to a job interview in a post in June, because it was just the same job interview I always have, just for yet another school - I'm at four now, I never know where the hell I'm going when I leave the house in the morning. The first couple of weeks there are no classes because we're waiting to get all the student information and print out class bar codes. In a way it's okay to have a few days of quiet getting things organized, but in a way it's... I don't know, weird? Or I am? I'm trying to make peace with the my strange mood cycle - January until June is tough, going into summer is hard but then summer is good, and then I'm expecting my fall upswing and it wasn't happening and wasn't happening, and I was kind of drumming my mental fingers impatiently because fall isn't that long and I have shit to get done. I feel like my mental health has become a washing machine repairman who says he'll show up between twelve and five and then leaves you sitting there until five-seventeen like an absolute unit, but then he shows up and you kind of feel like tongue-kissing him anyway. 

So Wednesday the classes came in and my new job means I do one school Wednesday morning and another Wednesday afternoon and I honestly kind of felt like I was crushing it, even though I had like five junior kindergarten classes - so cute. So dumb. So impossible to coax into saying their names with any degree of audibility. It was fun, and the day went fast, and I felt like my hair was good, which matters much more than it should.

3. Before Eve's friend Marianna flew back to Vancouver I took them and Jackson to the art gallery. More on this later, but this is my favourite picture from the day.

4. Indigo had a 'buy three get one free' sale in store last week. I wouldn't have made a special trip, even though the lure was strong, but Matt and I had made an appointment at the Telus store to finally update my ancient phone and then he had to go back to work and there I was right across the parking lot from Indigo so what was I going to do? As I was going in a pretty blonde girl was coming out carrying a stack of exactly four books and we beamed at each other delightedly.

The Ann Patchett because Bel Canto is in my Top Ten of All Time and she's an automatic read. Lute by Jennifer Thorne because it's one of my favourite recent reads and I was pleasantly surprised that they had a copy. The Sleeping Car Porter because I put it on our book club list this year and it's nice to have a hard copy to lend. The Chill because I saw it on an earlier store visit and tried to get it from the library - they didn't have it but I got another Scott Carson and it was excellent, so trying this one.

5. I've run out of anything vaguely related numerically. Last Tuesday bar night, everyone showed up. This is a relatively rare occurrence - someone isn't up to it, someone has somewhere else to be, someone is in frigging Italy or Bolivia (okay, just Matt). We almost can't all fit when we have a full complement. We got a celebratory picture.

Nineteen minutes until Saturday. Have a great weekend everyone.