Monday Morning and a Dinosaur Weekend

Monday morning here.  As you can see, I am still not back on my previous schedule, posting early as I did when I lived in the Hudson Valley.  But at least I found my tripod.  Unfortunately I did  not manage to find it when I was wearing my fabulous new jeans, or my lovely new Lafayette 148 blouse, and I still have to figure out the light and/or buy a full-length mirror.  The mirror issue may be important.  

Anyway, there is not much new here:  BR corduroy pants, white JCrew perfect-fit tee, blue tunic/dress.  All posted before.  The shoes are relatively new, picked up one day when I was running errands and my shoes, which I had been wearing all fall, decided to stretch out so that I could not keep my heels in them as I walked.  Or perhaps my feet shrank, but I think that is unlikely.  Anyway, I was hobbling and shuffling, and I stopped in the only shoe store in Knoxville I have found to be even passably worthwhile and bought a pair of black clogs, these black clogs, and I've been wearing them ever since.  

But back to Monday.  For now at least, in this kind of mixed-up world of mine, I am happy for Mondays.  On Monday morning I become relatively off-duty for a whole day, after having only part-time caregivers on the weekend.  This was my own choice, having the weekend with G, and also the hope of occasionally spending some if with family, including that charming grandson.  But very often by Monday morning I am just tired, and more than content to sit in my office with a second cup of coffee letting my thoughts meander along. Monday morning is my time to think, to play, to read blogs, to take a breath before I resume unpacking.

And I am still unpacking:  the office is still a mess, and it can drive me to distraction. But I have cleared a small corner at least, and I can turn my chair away from my computer and look out the window, which has now been cleared, along with the cheerful corner bookcase, which I finally assembled, unpacked, and populated with cookbooks this weekend.

As you can see, the books did not all fit, and the collection was substantially pared down before the move (although I probably have an equal number on my Amazon wish list).  The overflow is stacked on the floor, where I am contemplating the possibility of a Sapien bookcase.  But there is time.  There are a good half-dozen books missing, not enough for a boxful, so I suspect they were slipped here and there into other boxes, hiding away in other rooms.  I will get to them, and assess the needs for overflow shelving once the unpacking is finished. The simple truth is that I will always have an overflow of books and piles are just a fact of life, so there is no particular rush.

It was not all work and unpacking this weekend, however.  Sunday we went off to an extravaganza of dinosaurs with step-daughter and grandson and had a wonderful, if exhausting, time.   There were all kinds of marvelous things, with models of dinosaurs both sweet and menacing, eerie lighting, and all kinds of marvelous buttons to push, buttons that could make dino swing his head, stare you in the eyes, move his hands or his tail, or even watch dino-ribs moving in and out rhythmically as he breathed.  Fascinating to a five-year old dinosaur fan.  Fascinating to grandmothers too.

I would have liked to take dino-photos, but my feeble iPhone attempts are basically laughable with all kinds of odd glowing colors.  Oh well.  I could have gotten the feel of the place had I taken the time with my bigger camera, but then of course I would have lost that grandma time.  So it is, and this is perhaps why I have never been a particularly good at the casual snapshot or the recording of family events, my personal sense that I can live the moment or photograph it, with the accompanying feeling that the photographs never quite make up for the memories lost.