busy few days

I've been pretty busy the last couple of days. Besides work, I have been trying to get a two week cushion of lessons ready for home schooling. I am pretty much there with The Odyssey - we are at the good point anyway, where Odysseus is recounting his adventures. In astronomy we are on the final unit - stars and galaxies. I am nearly there. I have not even started history yet. It is this huge college textbook, Oxford's History of the American West. I need to read over the next 2-3 chapters and make up questions for Steven. I will keep working on it until it is time to go to work, and work on it some more when I get home from work.

It is finally winter. The ice storm of last week has been followed by many small snows. The one last night was just enough to make the roads pretty slick. It was a white knuckle drive home, but since so few people were out, all was well.

Dan and I are working on getting my vacation requests for 2007 and early 2008 in order. It is always a great negotiation between us each year. I hope to turn the requests in this week - they are due at the end of the month.

As part of that, I looked over the various schedules of plays and concerts from now until the end of the winter/spring seasons and ordered tickets. Five concerts and two plays. I ordered most of them on Friday nights, as I have those off anyway. Two of the concerts will be on work nights, and I have already requested those two nights off.

I hate having to be that organized. One thing that this crazy once a year vacation request system has done is to force me to be organized whether I wish to be or not. Unfortunately, you miss many weddings and reunions and the like - many people do not plan so far ahead!

I am tired. Part of that is reading a book that was part adventure story, part thriller, part horror by Dan Simmons, called The Terror. I should not have picked it up on such a busy weekend - it was nearly impossible to put down. Two British exploratory ships are caught up in Arctic ice in the winter - their third winter on the ice, the second they have been trapped in this particular place in the ice. Supplies are running low, and morale sucks. And there is some sort of terrible thing out there, circling the ships and picking off the men one or two at a time. So I stayed up really late reading it, and got up really early in the morning to keep reading it, even though I had a million and a half things to do. Me bad.

Tags: Dan Simmons, The Terror