Life Lately | Early July 2024

Hello friends out there! Long time, no write!

I didn’t meant to let June get away from me but this has been a busy summer. Most of it was planned out months ago as we had to figure out when Forest would spend his few weeks with grandparents. Due to various scheduling conflicts between two sets of grandparents + a summer vacation in July, it ended up being instead of two weeks back to back, once in June and once in July, single weeks spread out through June and July/August. Which has meant more driving back and forth for us to and from DFW. Such is life but I’m glad we and his grandparents can accommodate him coming to visit for long periods of time in the summer! And Forest loves it, especially when he gets to hang out with his cousins, so I’m glad it is now something of a summer ritual around here.

That has meant a lot of busy weekends, trying to pack in time to hike and botanize/naturalize in between it all, plus working during the week. Chris managed a small house project in early June with painting our living room. It hadn’t been painted since we moved in 12 years ago and was in need of a freshen up. I’d honestly thought we’d make it through other house projects this summer, too, but the one week we could have done it didn’t pan out, though I did do a lot of gardening that week. And the other week ended up being one for a lot of grieving as Chris’ dad unexpectedly died two weeks ago. We didn’t find out until several days after and so the chaos of that situation has bled over into the weeks after. Paired with preparing for our upcoming trip, I haven’t felt much like writing here or anywhere.

I’d also hoped to do more hiking this summer for my book and have only been able to carve out a bit here and there. Progress is progress but I would have liked more.

I love/hate how busy the summers are right now. I think part of the busyness is nice for memory making and looking back upon in the future, but in the heat of it all it feels difficult to work through. There’s not enough time to “do it all” and all of the ideas I had on my list for the summer are quickly evaporating. I told Chris that next summer I wanted to take a week off from work and stay home and do things at home that a stay at home mom would normally do with their kid in the summer, like going to the pool and the museum and zoo…I want to do that with my kid before he’s a teen and not interested in doing these things! I got to enjoy a lot of that with my mom growing up because she didn’t work in the summers (for the most part) and as a working mom I have definitely felt like I’ve missed out on so much of that. Especially when he was a baby/toddler. I didn’t get to have any of those mommy and me groups. It was one of the most infuriating and isolating things about the early baby years because all of those groups met at like 10am on a Tuesday and they didn’t do shit on weekends. Not like I would have wanted to on every weekend anyway, between catching up on chores and sleep…but to have that option would have been nice.

What else is up??

I’ve been gardening some. I worked on removing invasive Perilla frutescens from our right-of-way out front. It has slowly been becoming worse in that area over the last few years and I was tired of looking it so I started hand pulling it. It took several nights/hours to get it done but it looks good for now. I’m sure I’ll have to spot check it in the coming years. I also went through and removed invasive Scutelleria racemosa, South American skullcap, from one area of our front yard a few months ago and need to go back through and do it again. This last week I weeded most of the pathways in the edible/fenced garden, though will have to attend to more of that later this summer. At least the whole situation looks manageable again! As someone who was always a “summer person”, as I’ve aged I’ve become more reclusive in the summer than I used to. But I find if I make myself just go out and get sweaty and covered in dirt from gardening I end up feeling a lot better. Embrace the sweat! And I think it builds my heat tolerance up somewhat, too.

Writing and art—not much on that front. I’m working through editing photos for my book and photos from our Spring Break trip to the Smokies. I’m still trying to figure out how to use this blog going forward. I miss writing as often as I used to but I can’t keep up with bloggers who write daily or even multiple times a week so I know I can’t expect people to keep up here. But then I’m also like, “Write for yourself, Misti” and that’s valuable because this is basically an archive of my life in some ways. I don’t know, it just feels a lot different than it used to.

I need to do another book report here but that might not come until August. I have been reading a lot, or more than I was planning to this year. I’m currently in the middle of The Nineties which is about the ’90s of course, but a reflection on its cultural and political/historical value 30 years later. Obviously having lived through it I remember a lot of what the author writes and some of the details I read more about later because obviously at 11 I didn’t fully grasp the consequences of Ross Perot, but I’m enjoying the book so far. Especially because I know a lot of folks my age tend to look back nostalgically at the 80s and 90s when we’re dealing with everything now, but really the 90s gave us everything today.

TV/Movie wise: I told myself I’d try to pull back on how much I was binge watching on streaming this summer and I have kicked it back a bit but I’m currently going through Dexter on Netflix. I recall watching one or two episodes in the past but never the full series. So I’m towards the tail end of the first season and am loving it so far. It makes me miss aspects of living in Miami a lot. In late May/early June I went through all of the Killing Eve episodes and loved, loved, loved that! Season 4 was a bit of a miss but the first three seasons were really great! And of course Bridgerton! But S3 was also a slight dud, too. I wish I could fill some of this time with reading but I find myself not being able to focus, especially in the evenings, and I enjoy zoning out to a show to decompress. I could also probably just go to bed…

And that’s really about it. Life is very busy, Forest is growing like a weed (a quarter inch in June, apparently, according to my mom), and we’re trying to find time to get outside in between it all. My brain is full of creative projects that I don’t have time for/need to make time for.

Oh, and don’t get me started on SCOTUS right now. Good god. The consequences of the 2000 election reverberate through time. I actually started thinking about alternatives to that election if Gore had won. We likely wouldn’t have had Obama in 08. I’m thinking it would have been 2001-2009 Gore, 2009-2013 McCain or maybe 2009-2017 depending on his health, and 2013/2017-2021/2025 Obama, likely not Biden as his VP, maybe Pete Buttigieg if it is 2017. We skip out on TFG in 2017 because no Obama and by the time Obama comes around later he’s too old and we all know what a shit head he is. I don’t know, but we can dream. What a different, and likely better, world we would be in now. Anyway, none of that matters. But it is nice to play make believe sometimes.

Please comment and let me know how you are and what you are reading/watching and if you have any great hiking plans this summer!