AJ was in rare form today. After a deceptively cuddly morning, wherein he crawled into my bed and watched TV with me while I also read the Sunday paper, he spent the rest of the day barking out orders and complaining about things. His dad escaped for a bike ride and, when he got home, I escaped to my office, where I fired out a bunch of emails regarding my class. To my great astonishment, I heard back from almost everyone within an hour. I think I�ve found the solution to quick responses � send messages when no one�s supposed to be working. After a productive morning of class logistics and commute planning, I�m feeling much more relaxed about things. The syllabus is virtually complete � I�m awaiting one last detail from an in-class performer. It looks like we�re going to have one of my favorite early music ensembles coming into class to do a demo one day, which I�m very excited about. Also, it appears that by teaching at an insanely early hour of the day, I�m going to shave about an hour off my commute � it should be four hours as compared to last year�s five. Of course, I have to do it in the winter. And I won�t have as much time for shopping downtown. But still � I should be able to make it home in time to pick AJ up from school most days.

After AJ drove his dad insane by asking nine million questions about the Bears game they were watching together (fortunately the Bears won anyway), we decided to check out the Harvest Festival in Woodstock, IL. Woodstock, which you may have seen me write about before, has a quaint, Mayberry-esque downtown area full of Victorian houses and complete with a town square with a gazebo/bandstand and a cannon. It was the location of the filming of Groundhog Day, which the town will never let you forget. The festival was a fusion of several formerly separate events � a small farmer�s market, a craft fair, and a folk music festival and Old Timey fiddling competition.

Woodstock is quite small and our past experience with events there was that they were always smaller than we expected. Woodstock is the seat of McHenry County, a county full of farmland, so naturally we expected them to have a decent farmer�s market. But it was tiny with only two stands featuring produce. The rest sold things like honey and handmade soap. The folk festival was not quite so small in scale, but was still relatively little. But the music was great. When we arrived, there were fiddle players standing in odd corners all around the square, practicing their competition tunes, while on the bandstand in the center a small group played fiddle, bass and dulcimer and sang old Irish songs and early American folk songs. The crafts were not too inspiring, but were fun to look at. AJ was particularly interested in some elaborately carved pumpkins in front of the opera house. The small bar next to the opera house was open and another folk concert was going on inside while weavers and quilters displayed their prize-winning designs in the opera house lobby. At the far end of the square a potter had set up his wheel in his tent. He drew a large crowd of onlookers watching him add clay and subtract it as he pedaled the wheel around and around until it looked like a vase.

Unfortunately, our outing was cut short by the threat of rain and by the incessant whining of AJ, who demanded to know when we were going to do something fun for him and then, when we finally got him back to the car, complained that he didn�t want to go yet. Fortunately, a clap of thunder settled the matter and we returned home where we recovered our moods while watching a Sherman and Peabody video that AJ had picked out of the library. I found myself trying not to wish for a Way-back machine of my own, a way to escape occasionally in a world where there are no complaints or demands, only blessed silence. And maybe a little fiddle playing.

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