This busy life

A day of pleasantly warm sunshine to break up days of chilly fall rain. Although I've always thought of September as being the month to usher in fall, this is the first in a long line of years that I remember it being quite so chilly and actually fall-like. This isn't really a bad thing, although since the new furnace doesn't go in until tomorrow there were a few rather chilly nights in the house last week when temperatures outside dipped below forty degrees. Brrr.

Today I was faced with the bare fact that a discussion of evolution must bring with it a discussion of mating. Years of conventional thinking causes a spark of indecency when this lesson comes to mind, and yet I see nothing unnatural in the progression towards that topic. For now, though, I am going with the time tested tradition of providing information on an as needed basis. Steve Jenkins, in his book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, says simply that "Many living things reproduce sexually. This means that there is a father and a mother and that each baby has a mixture of the qualities of the parents." For now this has answered our needs and sparked no further questions.

We re-watched BBC's Walking with Monsters, penciled in a timeline of life on earth, and read a few books on the subject, most notably the above noted. We also went to lunch with family, shopped for winter clothes, groceries, and craft items, went on a nature walk, practiced the piano, tried out some map scaling worksheets, took notice of the warm sunshine, and straightened the house for the sake of the people who are coming tomorrow to put in the new furnace. October is a lot closer than I keep thinking.