Just think! We could have stayed at home and read a book

This is the joy I have to tell myself I can experience, placing my days at the calling of a child's educational life. I get to follow where there is the visit to a working sand quarry, held after hours when it is turning dark and is barely visible, while the rain, the hardening rain, begins relentlessly hammering down until my clothes are soaked through, my skin reaches maximum rainwater absorbency, and I am caked in building sand until I am all but beaten flat on the quarry floor, crawling and whimpering for warm and dry, begging for mercy. Then the second part of the visit, to the sand processing plant next door, is conducted in near total darkness, bar the odd blinding floodlight, which serves to pick out the sand heating thingummy and the torrential deluge that is now a plague of rain beating upon my hard hat which bears dents thanks to the passing hailstones. But I tell myself that learning is the pursuit I have chosen, and because I never will throw in the towel, even though I actually do use the old towel I keep in the car (thank you, experience), I will maintain an evening like this is pure educational gold, the sacrifice of my dissolving body worth it if the offspring understand the economy of sand and gravel a little better, and anyway, I have no other life to make euphoria of, so better make it this one, in a quarry in the dark, in the cold, with the coarse sand for consolation and the relentless rain beating down on my cracked hat.

Happy you can join us, from the comfort of your computer screen.