No More Excuses

Summer is over—at least as far as the school year is concerned because it's still a thousand degrees outside everyday—and I've started back to classes this week. The good news is that I did get a position as a Graduate Research Assistant, but could have applied to be a TA (teaching assistant) instead. There's always next year, possibly. I will be working with Dr. Rice on the English Department's communications projects (i.e., newsletter, etc.), and I always enjoy working with him. He's extremely busy though, so I may end up working with others more than him.

Quickly, here are some "highlights" from my extremely exciting (not) summer:

• My car broke down twice, costing me about $1300 in repairs. Hey, what do you expect of a 9-year-old car? So, I can't really complain, although my bank account sure did.

• The kids and I built a deck in the backyard in order to put up one of those metal frame pools for the them. It wasn't really that hard to build, but since we were working in temperatures that were in the near vicinity of hell, it seemed like slave labor. However, the deck turned out really well; I'm proud of what we did. Even little Quinn helped drive the screws.

• We were able to go to the lake several times with Wayne and Steve (Cameron's BBBS big brothers). I was able to convince Quinn to try "tubing" when we went. She's not much of an outdoorsy adventurer, but I was very proud of her when she decided to give it a go. I think she even enjoyed it. Cameron also learned how to go tubing and had a blast, although Wayne told me Cameron was petrified at first. He hates roller coasters, so I think he thought of tubing as though it would be a roller coaster on water but without the lap bar. We all managed to survive Wayne's manic boat driving.
  

• My parents actually called about seeing the kids this summer in late May. It had been two years since they had seen them. They went down to Florida for two weeks to stay with them. Miracle of miracles—my parents actually drove up to Atlanta to get them. My only irritation about their two night sprint up and back was that they didn't even bother coming out to the house. Instead, they spent the night with their friends, Betty and Herb, and I took the kids over to their house the next morning.
  
  During the time the kids were gone, I got absolutely nothing accomplished at home and went into a deep funk because of the situation with my car. I laid on my bed and mindlessly destroyed brain cells by watching television all day and night. I stocked up on Stouffer's Lean Cuisines and devolved into eating microwavable, pre-packaged, factory-manufactured bricks of frozen food. On top of that, the summer temperatures began firing up into the realm of Hades while they were gone, and it became unbearable to work in my shadeless front yard where I was halfway finished building a new stone patio.

• Cameron and I cleared out a large portion of the wooded area of our property. The canopy is mostly hardwood growth, but the understory is overgrown with barren muscadine vines and demonicly evil greenbriar vines that can cut like barbed wire. We must have clipped or pulled up literally hundreds of sweetgum seedlings. Those trees are as prolific as rabbits and as hardy as kudzu—you just can't kill the damn things.
  
  During our clean up we discovered places where our wildlife residents had nestled themselves. The three rabbits we often saw in our yard—and destroying my liriope—had made their den under the knarly roots of a large, rotting poplar tree that fell a few years ago; we discovered an enormous black rat snake had taken up residence in an old and very deep hole that our dog Rumor dug about 3 years ago; and we found a good number of mockingbird nests in the tangles of greenbriars. They were all abandoned but still cradled wafer-thin remnants of brown- and cream-colored speckled eggshells. Oh yeah, and then there was the lovely dog tick that decided to make a home in Cameron's forearm.
  

• Earlier, I referenced the stone patio out front, which still remains unfinished. However, I'm pleased with the way it was progressing before construction came to a halt because of the summer heat. I look forward to finishing it up and hope it turns out well when I finish it up this fall.

• The kids and I started collecting anthropomorphic vegetable and fruit salt and pepper figurines. We had fun scouting them out on eBay, etsy.com, and Ruby Lane. Our favorites have become the 50s-era Japanese Py/Miyao shakers; they are just adorable. I got a little off the trail of salt and pepper when I became smitten with the anthropomorphic Lefton cocktail and jelly pots, so I started collecting them as well. My bank account has also begun to complain about buying all these collectibles too.

As usual, the dogs' coats became enmeshed in matted ropes this summer, and I am still in the process of shaving them all down. Every spring I promise myself I am going to cut them down before the summer "coat blow" begins. Yet when the time comes to sheer them, they have developed these wonderfully chocolate caramel-colored, velvety curls over the winter months, and I can't bear to cut it all off. I dupe myself into thinking that if I constantly keep them in the house during the hot months, the heat won't decimate their lovely, plush coats. Unfortunately, I seem to forget what a delusional joke that is, and I end up with three dogs that look like they've been knitted up and bound inside some bristly, ill-fitting, angry hirsute at the end of the summer. *Sigh*

As the school year gears up, I know things will start to fast track again, which is why I tried to get some structured organization into my life over the summer. We'll see how long that lasts. I did decide to be nice to myself though. I dropped two of the four classes for which I had registered back in Spring semester. I came to the realization that the stress of carrying twelve hours of graduate-level coursework and fulfilling my obligations as a GRA would probably whip my tenuous nerve-endings into a puddle of quivering custard. I think I did the right thing by dropping back to six hours: one English course and one Linguistics course.

Interestingly, in my English course we are actually required to establish and write a personal blog. Now there will be no excuses for not posting entries.