Woohoo! I'm doing the happy dance here. One of the things I like about winter is that Mrs. Boss goes on a ski bus on Tuesdays most weeks so I get to work Monday through Wednesday and have a 4-day weekend. It comes around fast and it makes me soooo happy. I go for three days and do my work like a good girl answering the phone and waiting on customers and then, ta da!, Thursday comes and I get to stay home and sleep in and do whatever I want to do for four whole days. The trade off is that Mrs. Boss goes away quite a bit, at least she is this year, so when she's gone I work five days, one of them Saturday. I know, horrors! But then I get nice fat paychecks and my deep stash gets an infusion of pictures of Ulysses Grant. Don't you worry about me, I keep up my strength with homemade soup for lunch and I keep lots of knitting projects handy so I don't run out of things to do. There's always Netflix videos to watch on the computer, too, or books on CD that I borrow from the library. I keep myself busy.
February 15--Thomas Cole, The Titan's Goblet. Jacob stood on the landing in Great-aunt Mattie's big old house staring up at the painting hanging opposite the window. He wished he could get a ladder and climb up to get a closer look. Danvers, Great-aunt Mattie's houseman caught him with one foot on the banister working his way up to the sill and pulled him down. Danvers informed Jacob in his stiff British accent that "young gentlemen are discouraged from clamoring up walls." When Jacob protested that he was trying to get a better look at the painting, the houseman bent forward ever so slightly and said "use your imagination, that's what it's for" and then he stalked off making no sound. The painting, called The Titan's Goblet, showed an enormous chalice perched on a cliff surrounded by barren mountains and glassy seas. Inside the massive bowl was a great expanse of water with sailboats dotted over it. Arrayed on the wide curved lip were trees and villages and country homes with veils of waterfalls seeping over the lip between them. Jacob spent many hours imagining a boy sailing on that goblet lake, climbing over the wide lip, and sliding down a rope to explore where no one else had gone. That afternoon Danvers caught him at the top of the grand staircase getting ready to launch himself over the railing on a rope made of every bathrobe belt and necktie he could find. The next day a young man arrived from the nearby college to accept the position of companion to Jacob, to keep him alive and out of mischief for the rest of his visit.
Oh, I like an inventive and determined child, don't you?
--Barbara
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