Menagerie Elementary Summer School Is in Session!

Mr. Young Master helping his students settle in on the first day of school by describing for them what the summer session will look like.

And Mr. Young Master's class. A real menagerie before he called class to order.

Sartorially, not much going on here at Totleigh-in-the-Wold. Summers are pretty quiet here attire-wise. However, The Young Master and I do toss on decent looking, casual though collared shirts of one sort or another daily when we dress each morning along with with (my) chino, Bermuda, or Madras shorts and (his) jeans.

The Young Master sports a recent acquisition above, one of a number of new polo shirts his mother, The Grand Duchess, purchased for him last month given his rapid growth since January. Children grow like weeds as the saying goes.

As for me, otherwise known as 'Bad Dad' around these parts, I'm wearing a new seersucker number this morning, a Father's Day gift yesterday, with tiny navy, light blue, red, teal, and white checks. On the bottom half, very light khaki shorts with a 9" inseam, an olive green surcingle belt, and my usual very well-worn leather Sebago dock-siders on the feet.

I simply cannot fathom, as I remark so often here, why so many men walk around looking like shambling mounds of wrinkled, soiled laundry in 2020. It's really not that difficult -- or a hardship -- to present oneself well and pull oneself together. Even at home in warm weather.

Heinz-Ulrich

Comments

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

The Power of Ideas. . .

T he end is nigh! The autumn semester/term approaches. And while we still have almost two months of summer left according to the calendar, "Summer is over and gone," as the crickets sang in Charlotte's Web . At least for those of us who head back to the classroom in less than a month. In advance of a meeting with my program director late Monday morning, I spent about 40 minutes total during the weekend to jot down several ideas about planned workshops and related activities for the coming 2024-2025 academic year. At an opportune moment, I mentioned "I have a few ideas," and opened my leather portfolio. My director was highly receptive to almost everything I suggested, and we had a very productive planning session for just over 90 minutes. Just about everything I sketched out on Sunday aligns with his own ideas. It's nice when meetings go that well, and two related things occur to me in hindsight. One, it pays to exercise...

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 19...

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