Sluggish

Perhaps I'm in the winter doldrums, but I'm quite sluggish this week. Just downright BLAH. I want to sleep. I'm barely functional at work. Right now, Adam and I are both wishing it were 9:00 p.m., but it's only 8:00. At 9:00, we tell ourselves that it's legal to put on pajamas and start heading for bed. We're going to bed earlier and earlier now, and getting up earlier also, I'm sorry to say.We are old people. I know this is true because Julia regularly laughs at us and tells us we are.

 Adam is supposed to be resting this week. He's been sick with winter crud on and off through January. Finally I made him go to his doctor. They prescribed a rescue inhaler, an antibiotic, prednisone, and a breathing treatment. His oxygen was quite low, and his lung function was not good. When he went back on Monday, he was actually worse. He got a chest x-ray and now has pneumonia in his right lung. Thus: resting. So he sits on the couch and makes books. He finished the pulling-apart and putting-back-together of the Greek New Testament he was working on last week. That was simply skill-honing. He just has to put the final outside cover on it.

 He thoroughly dismantled the entire thing and resewed it all, covering the boards and forming and gluing the spine again.
Then he started on a sketch book for Julia. He's using some stiff cardboard covered with a painting canvas as the outside of the book.

 He bought the paper and cut the pages, stitched them and bound them. He's enjoying this hobby.
He also bought some lovely scrapbooking pages at Michael's to use as end papers.

 He presses the books between boards and tightens it all with clamps.

 Julia is doing a little drawing/sketching for me. Adam wants to bind a copy of my first kids' book, Three Against the Dark, and he wants Julia to do the art work in it.

 I had a hard time remembering what the characters looked like! Then she asked about the lay-out of the house in the book, and she did a quick sketch of that.

So we're having a quiet February. The greenhouse is nearly done, and then I'll start spending many hours there planting seeds and starting our garden. For reading material since Christmas, I slogged my way through The Singing Line. 

Author Alice Thomson goes back and forth in her book between telling of her own travels across the Australian wilderness and trying to track her famous ancestor's feat of putting in the continent's first telegraph line. I found the history quite interesting. I found her own trip almost a bore in comparison. I'm glad to have read it and learned a new chunk of history, but I will not be keeping the book on my shelves. In fact, I really need to cull quite a few books and give them away. I've been lugging around so many literature books for so many years. I will never re-read them. I think it's a good time in life for a purge!

For family and family-friends -- since I surely won't get around to an email update anytime soon ... Julia is doing well in her last high school semester. She is probably going to attend Western Carolina University in the fall, all things permitting and the stars align. It's nice that her big brother has been there. Peter and Shani plan to marry in May. After long deliberation, they have decided what they would truly love in a wedding is to have close friends and immediate family with them for a whole weekend, and have a "destination wedding." So we will be going to the Berkshires for the happy event, along with about 30 folks, for an intimate celebration and some very lovely scenery. Anna has returned to Japan and is doing very well. She has cautiously entered into the "online dating" scene and is enjoying getting to know a few young men. It makes good sense, considering her situation overseas. I think she's finding it entertaining and fun. Philip and Kara are doing fine in Chattanooga. Philip is busy and doing great at his job. Kara now works in a Head Start school with a bit of a commute. When she shares about her struggles working with little ones, I can commiserate! My job each day (about 2:30 - 6:00) is quite strenuous, and I'm one of the younger ones working there! It is not easy working with 31 1st and 2nd graders after school each day. I do not think I will work there this summer, and we will have to see if I am up to it next fall. I'm still wearing my compression stockings each day. Without them, I could not work there on my feet on the concrete floors. I continue to teach a weekly ladies' Bible study, and I still sell my wares at the farmers' market in Oriental. Adam enjoys his pastoral work and his farm work, and we find farm life generally peaceful -- a setting quite conducive to what we want for ourselves: a quiet, tranquil life in later years, close to the soil, close to the Lord, close to each other. With limited budget, improvements to the house and farm are limited and slow, but we continue to move forward. So that's a little update on us, if you were weary of knowing what I'm knitting but not what the kids are doing :)