Lazy Summer Days

Well, it isn’t quite as lazy of a summer as Rusty is having lounging in the office window to sunbathe for hours every day, but I did go into this summer with the intentions to move a lot more slowly and enjoy life’s simple pleasures a bit more.

We met my parents in Corsicana last Friday to drop Forest off with them for a week and this weekend he will transition over to Chris’ mom’s house for another week, so we’ve been kid free the almost the last week. We took some of that time and went over to Gus Engeling WMA to do some botanizing and exploration and I spent some time on Sunday doing solo errands and relaxing at home. I so rarely get the house to myself these days, something I really relished before we had Forest and Chris would go out of town. I could clean and the house would stay clean for the duration of my solo time at home! I had planned this week to pick up and organize the piles of Forest’s toys in the upstairs living area as well as in his room but that has not been ticked off the list quite yet. Maybe next week.

My slow summer plans, at least to start with these two kid-free weeks, were intended to be for gardening as long and as late as I wanted, which I have done a couple of nights. That has been really enjoyable because I can manage to get a significant amount of work done in an hour or two without having to cater to a kid’s constant needs. Oh, the list of gardening chores is still a mile long and it will end up taking all summer to even catch up, but getting big bites of it done has been great. I was also planning to read a lot these two weeks, of which I’ve only managed to do while we were driving last weekend and right before I fall asleep each night. And I wanted to catch up on my nature journal and work on cleaning up my studio. Both of which I’ve made minor progress on but a lot more work is needed. Really, there’s this pesky thing called work getting in the way of all of this progress!

Everything also feels a bit more chaotic than it should because I’m also taking care of a lot of doctor’s appointments since I’ve met my deductible this year with my hip. Various old and new nagging health issues I need to take care of need to be done this year, so I’ve been making appointments and trying to figure some things out. This takes time out of my work day so in an effort not to eat through all of my PTO I try to make up time by coming in early or working through lunch, which takes away from those edge times where I could do these other projects or at least just sit and relax a bit.

And pair all of this with the fact that summer as a time period off for kids just isn’t as long as it was when I was kids in the 80s, summer gets cut short by a month these days. We have about 7.5 weeks left of summer break and that will go incredibly fast. So much for a truly lazy summer!

Since I haven’t gotten to my Sunday Good Things in a couple of weeks, I’ll hit a few highs and lows here:

+White Lotus: I found the first season at the library last week and borrowed it. I’ve seen so many people raving about this show for the last few years and I don’t have HBO so this was my chance to watch it. It was…interesting…but also…boring. I stuck with it for the sake of finishing all six episodes–if it had been more than that I would have quit—it does not make any high ranking of top shows I’ve ever watched.
+Ghostbusters Afterlife: This was more of a direct lineage to the Ghostbusters story than the 2016 reboot film (which I also enjoyed) and there were some really great references to the first two movies in here as well!
+Waypoints: My Scottish Journey by Sam Heughan aka Jamie Fraser from Outlander: I’m listening to this audiobook and it is fantastic! It’s a memoir of his childhood and how he got into acting interwoven with a hike on Scotland’s West Highland Way. I would be ok if he became an audiobook narrator!

That’s it for now! How’s your summer going?