The weekend started at 5 PM Friday with a trip to Roche's for haircuts for O and T. While Owen was in the chair, Taylor took a nostalgic look back at the reading he'd done at the barber shop over his many (nine) years, and observed aloud that he liked the opening to Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (Virginia Lee Burton), which goes

Mike Mulligan had a steam shovel,
a beautiful red steam shovel.
Her name was Mary Anne.

In my opinion, it's a better opening than

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.

Too much of a statement of intent for my taste. It's a heresy, I suppose, for me to admit this, but whenever I've read Virgil's opening, I have heard a banjo and the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies in my mind. Virg did better later in The Aeneid, but he didn't grab me up front, not like the intro to the story of Mike Mulligan does.

Virgil didn't have the voice that could spin out an intro like Dickens could, a writer whose introductions rollick and sprawl like this one:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...
(A Tale of Two Cities)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
(David Copperfield)

Nor was Virgil as pithily aphoristic as Jane Austen was when she wrote these introductory words:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
(Pride and Prejudice)

Anyway. We agreed that Ms. Burton had written a very engaging introduction to the Mike Mulligan story. And we got our hair cut.

My Friday/Saturday class went well. I lectured Friday night, but it was a good one, and Saturday, I rested, and tested them. In fact, all my classes went well this week -- compensation perhaps for other troubles. Oh, I might have forgotten to mention that Josh had an accident in the pickup on Monday. No injuries (except eventually to our insurance rates.) He turned left, failing to yield to an oncoming vehicle. The truck turns left really well now. Another time maybe. For now, I will seethe silently, and will refrain from discussing the possibility that he was driving under the influence of testosterone.

The kids weren't in a mood to get out of doors on Saturday, despite the fact that for the entire weekend we had sunny skies and temperatures near 60 F. We started the afternoon instead watching Field of Dreams (don't ask me to explain why), but O and T lost interest about midway through when they discovered it was all metaphysics and no action. I, of course, watched to the end.

I spent the rest of the day and evening taking care of domestic crap and grading some student work.

In the evening, Taylor attended a birthday party at hyphenated Ben's. The high point was the campfire in Ben's woods, illegal within the city limits of course, but the house is isolated enough that the police wouldn't notice it, and the neighbors won't mind. Ben's uncle from Lexington, Mississippi, was visiting, and was bundled up in a parka, while the rest of us were in sweatshirts.

Sunday I stayed home from the fellowship in the morning and watched one of the Die Hard films (the one with the subway) with the boys. Later in the afternoon, they were reluctant to trek out to the Konza Prairie with me, so we made a trip instead to Stone House, a few minutes away.

The day was bright and beautiful, sweatshirt weather. Robins, a tufted titmouse or two, starlings of course, two red-tailed hawks, one of those "confusing fall warblers" that I can never identify, and a downy woodpecker. No cardinals. A turkey vulture soaring over the hill.

A ramble in the woods, a romp through a pasture. A game of tag. Barbed wire scratched my leg, punctured my hand. A thorny locust scratched my face and scalp. The kids -- highly maneuverable little critters that they are -- came out unscathed.

Madame Bovary on PBS in the evening.

A good weekend.

Probably my all-time favorite resource: The Internet Public Library.