Snapshots: Now THAT's Rain

I could not believe my eyes when I looked at our rain gauge after a night of rain.

Almost full!

We had got a half inch the night before, as well, which means that the total for these two days is actually almost a quarter of all the rain we get on average in a year.

So that was pretty exciting.

Let's see what else . . .

I made some pickles with my award-winning Armenian cucumbers after I picked them up from the county fair display.

Using an old pickle jar, of course.

At work, I found piles of books someone had dumped in the back storage room we use for classroom texts, and since books are my domain at school, I was sorting through them this past week when I had time during teacher in-service. Many of them were old textbooks, and one of them is pretty much our family manifesto:

Yup.

I didn't actually read the book, but I think it's about rhetoric and argumentative writing and so on. In any case, this is now what I say whenever anything devolves into a verbal squabble at dinner. Which is a lot. My kids say, "Stop saying that, Mom!" To which I reply, "Then stop arguing."

Never.

Speaking of school, it starts tomorrow and at least one child has been getting ready:

I found her school supply list on the school Facebook page and she started going through the box of supplies I bought to find hers, put her name on everything with a Sharpie, and put it all in her backpack.

Her brothers showed no inclination whatsoever to prepare themselves for the dreaded event, so she asked if she could sort out their supplies for them.

This girl, man. Built different, for sure.

And what do her brothers wish to do instead of going to school?

Add to their collection of spent ammunition, for one thing.

It was pretty funny that when that boy said, "Hey, Mom! Come see my shell collection!" I thought, "He has sea shells? How'd he get those?"

Silly me. You'd think after all these years in the country, I would know he was talking about gun shells. I'll just never be a real country mouse, I guess.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.