everyday life

Sunset, Wareham, August 31 2009 (iPhone picture)

Summer coming to an end. This morning, as I ran, I basically leapfrogged with a yellow school bus picking kids up (it would stop, I would run past, it would pass me, repeat). That is a pretty good sign my summer vacation is now taking place in the fall.

Reflections on the summer of 2009

Fastest summer in history, despite the fact that the early Memorial Day/late Labor Day one-two punch must have made this actually an extra long summer. More rain than I can ever remember in June.

In the past few weeks, with the slanting evening light, I’ve confronted my own shadow a bunch and have decided that I have Frankensteinishly square shoulders. It occurs to me I must be walking east a lot at the end of the day. Towards Mecca, enlightenment, both, or neither, I don’t know.

There are a couple of professional decisions slowly gaining purchase in my mind. I’m wondering where the line is between being patient while you allow your thoughts on something to settle (living the questions) and being a chicken and using that as an excuse.

Whit is, I think, officially swimming. Though his swimming is definitely in the graceless, dramatic-impersonation-of-drowning style, he seems to stay alive.

I endured my first real injury and had to take almost two months off of running. I am cautiously optimistic that I’ve rehabbed it now, though I need to keep being careful. As a condition of this rehab, my body required that my pride accept that for a while I will be running 8+ minute miles vs. 7:30+ minute miles. And my pride accepted that! (perhaps the greater accomplishment for me).

Grace is tentatively reading for real. Still not sure how much she enjoys it, but she’s delighted to have an excuse to sit in bed with me in the afternoons and read while I read (something deep and educational like US Weekly, usually – me, not her. She is read the Magic Treehouse series.). Of course this means I am a human dictionary, but I am still finding this quasi-charming.

My insomnia is in high gear and I am tired. One fall resolution is to lay off the elephant tranq doses of sleeping “aids” and to try to tough it out. Maybe I’ll get more reading done.

Whit skinned the equivalent of an entire body’s worth of skin. So basically he molted.

I quit biting my nails and then started again.

Feels like a lot of peopled died this summer: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ted Kennedy, DJ AM (one of these things is not like the others?). Watched the Kennedy service at the Basin Harbor Club with with tears streaming down my face.

Grace lost a top tooth and the remaining one has migrated to the center of her mouth. It’s a weird look, and definitely a Big Girl one. I’m guessing orthodonture is in her future.