Randomday, with Olivia

In the midst of my blogging wilderness, crafting purgatory and end-of-year teacher exhaustion, I won a lovely package of Olivia the pig fabric in the Sew Mama Sew giveaway week, from QuiltzbyStephanie.  Thanks so much, Stephanie!  It made my day to get it!  I have another fat quarter of Olivia fabric somewhere that wants to play with this.  The possibilities are all fun.

Only another two weeks of school, but it's going to be hard.  My neck and shoulders are already so tight it hurts.  Tertia's play production is next week, and though I don't have a graduating senior this year, I know a lot of them and there is a vast round of social obligations in the next few weeks.  To top that off, there are all my students, some of whom love learning a dead language but many of whom, as is typical of their age, are always looking for creative ways to avoid memorizing vocabulary or studying verb conjugations.  And I get to grade all their papers, and find things to say that will not set their parents permanently against me or make them think I am persecuting their precious offspring.  All of this while fighting exhaustion and fielding requests for extra Latin Jeopardy days.  I think I do all right, most of the time, but I'm too bone-weary to hear anything but the negative comments.

I finished the French language "tree" on Duolingo and started Spanish.  I'm trying for a full house of the Romance languages, but I'll probably jump ship to German soon, and then to Dutch when it becomes available.  Nothing wrong with wanting to be a polyglot, is there?  I still want to work on the Proto-Into-European books I got for Christmas.

All of this means very little progress in quilting or knitting.  I think it's going to have to wait a little bit longer, but just as soon as school's out, I'm locking everyone out of the house while I blast Celtic music and have a rumpus in my sewing room.  At this point there is no chance of finishing graduation, wedding, or baby gifts so I don't know what I'll sew.  But I need to produce something.  There has been a tragic dearth of hand-crafted items from me ALL YEAR.  That tears at a person's soul at least as much as workplace stress.  Oh sure, I have made about 8 inches of progress on the body of my sweater, but I haven't finished anything.  In five months.

We are grilling -- or I should say, Daniel will be grilling -- tonight for the first time this year.  Quarta is working on cleaning the house to "pay" for her Red Cross babysitting course.  Daniel donated blood today and Peter is working to accumulate some community service hours for school.  I'm hopeful that he will be able to count some of his National Guard training toward that requirement, because his free time is going to get increasingly scarce.  Steve has been puttering in the garden and planting the zucchini plants he just bought.  We have a fairly nice garden put in, but the jungle is always trying to reclaim it.