Summer!

Hooray! We finally have some sunshine! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was beginning to feel a bit like Margot in “All Summer in a Day.” Which I said to my husband and younger daughter, and they hadn’t read the story by Ray Bradbury, which surprised me. It is a good story and very, very short. Look, you can take a few minutes and read it now. In the process of Googling to find the story, I noticed that there’s a Cliff’s Notes version, which, what the hell? It is four pages! Seriously, how lazy can you possibly be? Jeepers.

I’ve been slow to post here in part because I’ve been catching up with the massive undertaking of updating my big list of FREE Summer Concerts, Shows, Movies, and More. Yes, it IS fabulous, thanks for noticing! One of the things that makes this tricky is that many municipalities plan these events and then they are simply terrible at getting the word out–stuff is just buried on web pages and/or they do a new web page for the same event each year (don’t do that, you guys), so it takes some time. I’ve also updated the day-by-day list of events, which includes most of those free events as well.

Anyway. Summer is approaching quickly. I just dropped M off at her first final and she seemed curiously euphoric. She has been studying and attending review sessions like a maniac, and she had eaten breakfast after Googling brain food and she’d sharpened her pencils and put on some of her most comfortable clothes and she was on track to arrive 15 minutes early and just seemed super-psyched at the notion of starting to knock each final off her long list.

M was in such a good mood and the weather was so lovely that I felt quite upbeat when I arrived back home until I discovered a little storm cloud hunched over the kitchen table. Poor J has one major project left, and it involves writing about herself and goals and such, but many of the specific portions of the assignment are repetitive, which makes her crazy because being repetitive feels sloppy to her, so she’s trying to answer nearly-identical writing prompts in wholly unique ways without just bullshitting, which is difficult. M, who has zero problem with sprinkling bullshit into her school assignments, sailed through this particular project. But J is just a big knot of angst. In her mood, she found the sound of me chewing my breakfast really quite offensive (even with one’s mouth closed, complete silence is difficult, and I’ve tried) before Cute W arrived to assault her twanging nerves with some cheerful singing. It was lovely to say goodbye to her and wish her well for the school day.

Enough of this! I am closing in on catching you all up with the Paris trip, but first, I need to take a walk while this weather lasts!