I must admit that I was quite surprised about the number of us who engage in fantasies of impalement on wrought iron fences. Is it that my blog attracts others with similarly overactive imaginations? Or is such a substantial portion of the general population suffering from visions of grave injury when confronted with a span of fencing? If the latter, I wonder why there are any wrought iron fences around at all.

It was sunny and Novembrish today and it seemed like everyone was making hibernation preparations. The neighbors across the street began hauling trash out of their garage this morning. Our next door neighbors said they cleared out ten bags of toys, all bagged and ready to donate to the local shelter. At our house, my husband worked outside, raking the last of the leaves and burning the debris left by the phone companies recent visit. Inside, I cleaned the ovens in anticipation of Thanksgiving and vacuumed and began what will be a long process of cleaning out my office, which as gotten even more cluttered and dirty since I�ve been teaching. I vacuumed, washed the walls and floors and steamed the rug. I shredded documents and took out several bags of trash. My inbox is still piled high, and there is still a lot of clutter to be dealt with, but progress has been made. At least it smells clean down here now. And I can once again see AJ�s photo gallery smiling down at me. I still need to face the mound of filing. That will have to wait until next weekend. And possibly several weekends after that. I never seem to learn to file as I go.

I have also been burning CDs. CDs will be in the mail to you and you tomorrow, assuming I can find the time to get to the post office.

This week marks my last full week of teaching � after that I have only one lecture the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and one the Tuesday after, plus an exam review session and the exam itself. Then it�s a dissertation to finish and two conference papers to write. Thursday is visitation day at AJ�s school, which means I�ll race from the train to catch the last 15 minutes of AJ�s class at work. Friday we get AJ�s very first report card and have our first parent-teacher conference. I have a mile of questions. I need to try to get myself organized.

Yesterday at the mother-son bowling event, AJ and I shared the lane with two six-year-olds and their moms. The other two moms knew each other and were talking about their kids and parent teacher conferences and in that fine art of momly one-upmanship (should we perhaps call it simply one-upmomship?), managed to brag about their kids while pretending not to. None of us is immune to this particular game � I�m sure that I engage in it, probably even on this page, because I love my kid and I�m proud of him � but it�s always fun to watch someone else playing it. The rules of the game seem to involve citing your child�s abilities as examples within a conversation. The conversation cannot actually be about your child � that would be boasting. But you need to use your kid�s talents to explain something else. These two women, both bowling with their youngest of several children, and thus much more experienced with the game than I, were world class players. I learned that one kid, although held back for a second year of kindergarten, was a football prodigy and a gifted athlete all around. The other, a first grader, is apparently reading at a fourth grade level (although the details of his reading she was describing made it sound less advanced than what AJ is doing, so I have my doubts about it really being a fourth grade level). You see what I did there? I just told you AJ was a great reader while I was supposed to be talking about something else. That, my friends, is one upmomship. I learned from the masters.

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