It was a seamless transition back into grades three and six respectively. I met my youngest daughter’s teacher (a very lovely lady we’ve had before with our older child) and I told her about what we are doing to support her learning outside of the classroom with a tutor, so we have an understanding about how to catch them up in class, and how many years it could take to do so. Hopefully encouraging for everybody involved. Covid really put a damper on both reading and writing, so we are taking steps to address that with both kids.
So far so good. I met a few other parents I haven’t seen in the last nine weeks, and we had a brief catch up session while we waited for all the kids to filter into the school. They have new classrooms, hooks/cubbies to claim, and desk order to find. Today might be a slower day, or they may just dive head first into new material with little to no time to spare. I do not know. It’s anybody’s game at this point!
Us parents have a dinner excursion planned for Saturday evening, so we can hopefully all catch up, commiserate about the hot summer, and how it feels both too short, and oh so very long all at the same time. I did see several familiar faces in my youngest child’s class. The best friend was placed elsewhere, but rosters aren’t final until the first week of October, so no need to worry too much yet. I think I saw a student returning whom left after senior kindergarten, so that might be an interesting update for my youngest, as the student was a treasured friend at the time. We will have to wait and see.
My back is a bit better, thankfully. So yesterday I trimmed a shrub out the front to make me feel like I did not waste the whole day with aches and pains. Today I have taken down one of the two limbs I want removed off of the maple. I took the smaller, lower one, because I can do it with a hand saw, loppers, and about 20 minutes of down time. I need a ladder, saw, some ropes to tie off limbs so I don’t squash our fence/gate directly below it. I don’t fancy hanging off a ladder with a heavy chainsaw while my back still hurts. So maybe I can get to it on Friday, or Saturday morning.
The maple is dying, slowly at that. So I see a bunch of dead limbs that could be a spot of bother in the future, which I want to remove. I don’t have the right gear to get too high into the tree, but my ladder can reach 20 or so feet, so I’ll do that much, and no more. I fully expect this tree will need to come down within the next 5-10 years. Easily. Its had bark coming off it for ages, and the outer reaches are dead, and much of the very top is dead too. Now don’t get me wrong it still gets a full canopy of leaves, but in amongst all that is a whole lot of dead limbs, and crumbling, flaking bark. I’m no arborist so I don’t know which pestilence it has.
I can not bring myself to wrench on the pull cord of my chainsaw for twenty minutes just to get it started either. My back is tender as it is without seventy tugs to get the old girl going. I bought the Stihl ms170 in 2006, so it can be a bit of an operation to start it for the first time in a season. That is also why I am not chomping at the bit to get going on tree work. I made myself feel ill pushing and lifting the Seadoo docking pods, and I don’t feel like going that hard for a little bit longer. Bit of a shock to the system to go from all out leisure to push till you puke sort of thing.
I really do need to work out as that feeling will persist until I can get beyond it. I look forward to getting back into doing Olympic lifts again. Not vanity lifting, but good for the bones heavy lifting. I miss it. You can listen to music and go slowly. I like that very much indeed.
Wow! Can you believe it? The first day is school is really here. All ready an hour in. Madness. Now I need to turn my attention back to working since my time is mine own again for seven hours each week day. Fare well. Until tomorrow!
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