Bibliomama

 I feel like I'm SO CLOSE to being able to settle into my fall routine, after the bonkers four days of twelve visitors. But first I go to work for a couple of days this week (we start the week before school, which is fine but also annoying) and then we go to see Angus in Charlotte for the long weekend. And THEN I start normal work, and finally weed my out-of-control flower gardens, and get to all the areas of the house I haven't gotten to all summer ("I'm going to clean and organize this summer while I'm off work" I said. "I'm going to say YES when my friends want to do fun stuff and not stay in my house like a whiny depressive malcontent" I also said. My stupid friends had so many fun plans my house remains a disaster and I don't see how I can be held responsible for that), and go back to physio for my piercing neck pain and spasming lower back. The burgeoning roster of visitors was fantastic, exactly what we needed to distract us all from t

 I'm not done the camping posts, but I sat down earlier to dash off a quick post about how Zarah and Sophie (close friend from university and her daughter) are arriving tomorrow and I just started trying to tidy a little and then really looked around my house and had that moment of oh, awesome, precisely how long HAVE we been living in squalor. And then started rushing around like a headless chicken, moving stuff, shoving stuff into drawers, putting stuff in bags - all this despite the fact that Zarah and Sophie could not remotely care less about the state of our house and I KNOW THAT. But I was thinking that I was going to do so much cleaning and reorganizing this summer, and then my stupid friends planned all this fun stuff and what was I going to do? Be rude?  Eve and Sophie Anyway, I cleaned off a couple of key surfaces, made sure the spare room was habitable, and basically wrote off the living room where numerous tote bags and grocery bags and boxes are stacked, mostly for Ang

 Nicole's latest post reminded me that our site this year was only one road over from the comfort station, and there was a cut-through so you didn't even have to walk all the way to the end of the forest-median thing, you could just walk across the cut-through. The good part of this was that I didn't have to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night, which I generally do because the comfort station is just a little too far at 3 a.m. The bad part was that it was a gentle slope up and a flat path, but then a fairly steep step down on the other end with some roots. I was perpetually terrified that I was going to take a header in the middle of the night and be found unconscious in the morning. Fortunately it didn't happen. Aside from the reading, we sometimes have an activity at the campfire before and/or after dinner. There's a running charades game, where anyone can get up and do something and whoever guesses then goes next. One year we played giant hangman where

Anyone who said we eat really well camping - I KNOW, right? The thing is, if you only have to do one meal, it's pretty easy to go all out. But this year wasn't even the most involved - many years there are immense joints of meat spit-roasted over the fire, and by some sorcery they are not burned on the outside and raw on the inside.  Honestly, though, firepit pad Thai is hardly less impressive to me. The people that go grocery shopping in Picton the day of their meal and then come back and cook it - whoo. Once I am through the camp gates, I am At Camp. The thought of going into town and acting like a regular person who has recently bathed is beyond my imagination.  READING AT CAMP because we are so intellectual. Angus: The Midnight Line by Jack Reacher. After Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Warriors books, there was a long reading drought for Angus. Then a few years ago I gave him a mystery for Christmas that he finished before the end of his holidays. Now he says he forgets for m