I am so ready for a vacation, y'all. Fortunately, I only have to get through two more days before I get one.
But first, where I've been. So, Sunday was Father's Day. To celebrate, the Young Prince and I decided we would let Not Your Average Blogger make us breakfast. He obliged, with pancakes which were quite lovely.
Then we went for a 3-hour hike in the Bull Run Mountains Conservancy, a lot of it uphill. It was a lot of fun, I'm pleased to say. Before we left, the boy and I had negotiated a bribe/promise of a whine-free outing, and he came through on his end beautifully. He ran ahead for big parts of it, lagged behind looking at rocks and plants for other parts, and only mildly mentioned his feet once and his desire for lunch once.
We tried to tell him a couple Civil War stories, since the Battle of Thoroughfare Gap took place up there, but he was much more interested when I started telling him about the summers I spent with my grandparents as a kid. Virginia has a lot of quartzite, and every time he finds some of the shiny sparkly he's just fascinated by the "crystals." I remember feeling the same way when I was about his age and I'd find that stuff in Leesburg, so I started telling him about how my job when I'd visit my grandparents was to get all the rocks out of their vegetable garden, and how I was supposed to throw them into the bucket scoop on my grandfather's tractor, and how occasionally my grandfather would hit me instead of the bucket, or one would bounce out and hit me, and I decided gardening was all hell and the minute I was grown up I'd just be buying my damn peas at the store, thank you very much.
(I still don't understand part of that story myself. The vegetable garden was in the same place every year, yet every summer there seemed to be just as many rocks to get rid of as the year before. I half-suspect my grandfather pitched them all back in at the end of the growing season just to give me something to do when I came back.)
That segued into other stories, and it didn't seem like all that long before we were at the top of Bull Run Mountain and it was time for lunch. Going down was a lot easier, of course, and on the way back we cheated and went off the trail and along the railroad tracks instead, getting closer the ruins of Beverly Mill and some homesteads. The train tracks were a story in its own right -- the YP was utterly grossed out by the (days afterward) aftermath of when a train connects with a deer. It was pretty nauseating, I admit. The smell alone could have knocked you over, and I've never seen so many maggots so busily at work. But, you know, teachable moments and all. Not least of them, "don't get hit by a train, duh."
This week is the boy's first week off school, so he has been coming into the office and lounging around waiting for me to get done and take him home. I'd feel guilty about this, except I know that sitting in my office reading, watching TV and playing video games is about as close to paradise as he gets. If I could get streaming Netflix in my office, he'd never leave, so I figure I'm indulging his idea of a vacation.
With a few minutes out for math and writing, of course. I'm not a total debauch.Yet, anyway.
After this week of office-dwelling, the three of us are packing up Friday and taking off for a wedding in Rhode Island. ("We've known this guy for ages, and we absolutely love the girl he's marrying. Seriously, how often does that happen?" asks NYAB. Answer: Almost never, if you are us.) When we get back, Good Friend Katherine will be blowing into town for a few days of fun and baseball, so I am working mornings and running wild with her in the afternoons. And then it will be July Fourth. Huzzah for summer break!
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