I'm back, Lucius.

This week has been SO busy! I have had NO time to write posts! Actually, that's not quite true, but I haven't had MUCH time. Add to that the fact that I have had NO inspiration at ALL to write, and you may realize why it is that I have not.

First of all, the biggest news of the week is that we have been redoing our roof. Our neighbor Mr. Z. has been doing it with occasional help from me and/or Daddy. Roofing can be pretty fun! The first part is best: tearing out nails, ripping off shingles, generally performing mass demolition. It's awesome, let me tell you! I like laying shingles, but it is not so nice as ripping old ones. Laying shingles just doesn't have the same, shall we say, exhileration to it: slowly working up the roof row by row, measuring and cutting individual shingles, working around the flashing (you have to in demo too, but just not the same way), and smashing skylights. In case you wondered, that last part was unintentional. Fortunately, I had nothing to do with it. Anyhow, the front side of the house is basically finished, and next week we will move to the back, which though much larger, is less steep. It contains fewer skylights, too.

I finally cleaned my room yesterday after floundering in mess for weeks. It's amazing what a difference it makes! It's also amazing how much much less work it takes to mess it up than to clean it! Bother those stupid laws of thermodynamics...

Having a clean room is especially nice because this week I will be able to do my school there. Of course, I could have before anyway, but it can be just so hard to concentrate when you are surrounded by clutter! I have been doing most of my school subjects in the living room, dining room, or basement, but there are a lot more distractions in the first two and the third is relatively dark. Distractions can be fatal when you're doing such subjects as Calculus or Economics, both of which require constant concentration. As a matter of fact, so do Writing, Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Italian, Vocabulary, and music (if you're doing them right, anyway)!

Thursday I worked on the same problem in Calculus for close to twenty minutes and still got it wrong. SO frustrating. Fortunately it was one of very few. Also, I have been getting the same kind of problem wrong for DAYS...and all because I keep not noticing when they say "diameter" instead of "radius." Grrrr. School has not all been sadness and depression, however. In fact, so far I have been enjoying pretty much all of my school subjects, albeit overwhelmed a bit here and there. Even little things people say every now and then remind me of a new concept I studied recently in Chemistry, or a poem from Literature. (Did anyone spot my allusion to Nancy Boyd's (Edna St. Vincent Millay's) "I Like Americans" in my paragraph on roofing?) For a rather weak example, something Elizabeth said the other day reminded me of something from chemistry...something about the penetrating abilities of radiation from atomic bombs?...ok, so that's REALLY weak. But I have also noticed numerous applications of supply and demand!

Today I read an Agatha Christie through from beginning to end. It was a nice Sabbath thing to do; so relaxing! Alas, I didn't figure it out. The murderer was the very person of whom I said to Cara, "Well, the very LEAST likely person is such and such...", not counting Poirot or the narrator, of course. Near the end I THOUGHT I had it all figured out, but it was a red herring...a secondary crime meant to cast suspicion on a character who is shady but not completely shaded, if you know what I mean. Oh, Agatha! How do you do it?