August is almost over and with it goes the summer, at least for kids going back to school.

I have actually already been back to school, since a couple of weeks ago when I went and welded together a bunch of big metal frames in a new elementary school. I’ve been going back to school every year for a lot of years, now. Actually, I’ve been doing it since I was last attending school….

Anyway, welding together frames is not a bad way to spend your time. It can be a bit noisy, since there’s a lot of grinding, but everything is at least a little noisy. Noise means something is getting done.

It’s hard to say if my kids are at all phased by going back to school. Their summer activities are different from what I did when I was their age. I spent most of my childhood summers outdoors, messing around with whatever was handy, making things like go-carts (i.e., box with wheels) and forts (nailed up boards in the woods). They, however, spend their time sitting down playing video games or watching tv or ‘computering’.

There’s no name for general use of a computer. ‘Computering’ is good enough.

Every year, I get them new backpacks. My youngest son used to walk home from school dragging his behind him, so it tended not to last very long. Thankfully, he’s stopped doing that. But the backpacks tend to last only half the year, even when used properly, since the material is very thin and the stitching seems to be made from dried cheese.

I tend not to buy them much of anything else for school. They can forage. It’s a survival skill. I’ve been in enough schools to know that pencils can be found on the floor at any time. Pens are bit rare, and when you find one, it normally doesn’t work. But who needs pens?

A few years ago, I made one of my kids a pencil box. He was mildly interested in doing something in the workshop, so I brought him down there and made one out of some thin pieces of oak I had. He used it through that year.

The next year, I made him and his younger brother pencil boxes. They both took them to school. One returned at the end of the year, but the other one disappeared somewhere. How do you lose a pencil box from a desk? It’s not like it’s something anyone wants.

Ah, kids don’t like things like pencil boxes. They prefer laptops. If you have a laptop, you don’t need any pencils.

Actually, now kids prefer phones to laptops. I can’t blame them, phones take up less space.

I’ll be going back to school again tomorrow while my kids finish off their summer break. I will be installing doors on classrooms while they enjoy the sun shining out of their computer screens.

I need the exercise, anyway. I’m starting to find that the less I move, the less able I am to move. Computering doesn’t count as physical activity. I can’t say that working in the workshop does, either, since it’s mostly standing in one place messing with little things. The greatest physical strain involved in being in the workshop is in trying to restrain yourself from breaking things when you discover the cabinet doors you made are the wrong size.

Speaking of that, I just remembered the best part of that story, which I neglected to mention. I needed to make four doors the same size. So, I cut all the parts and had them all nicely stacked up. I went to assemble them and discovered I had actually cut the parts for only two doors. So, I had to set everything up again to cut to width, cut to length, cut dados, etc. Then it turned out it was all wrong, anyway. Talk about needing to go back to school….