Five More Weeks of Summer
It was mid-afternoon yesterday when the trucking company called and fractured my attention for the rest of the day. Four pallets of books, 5000 copies, will be arriving at my house tomorrow afternoon. We have suddenly shifted into book shipping season and I wasn’t expecting to hit that until the middle of next week. Early is good though. It means I can ship books to GenCon with a comfortable margin to spare. It means that Howard has more time to get the sketching done. Yet there is this list of things I wanted to complete before the books arrived and now I’ll be running things in parallel, which is more normal than not, but I keep dreaming of finishing tasks before starting other tasks.
We’ve entered the middle of summer muddle. This is when Howard and I look at the shamble of our schedule and have a conversation about how we really should be getting up before 9 am and also perhaps regular meals would be better for the children than letting them forage through the cupboards. I’m not yet to the point where I look forward to having school as a provider of schedule in our lives. I may never reach that point this summer because the onset of school brings with it challenges that sound exhausting. However I do wish that our days had more structure without me having to be the one to create and maintain it. I’m far too prone to letting the structure go wibbly wobbly.
It does feel like the arrival of the books this afternoon will tip us over into the approach to summer’s end. We have five weeks and that time begins to feel short for all the things we have to do. For Kiki it feels quite long she’s ready to begin her college adventures now. Among the things I’d like to do in the next five weeks are some of those summer activities, like swimming, that we’ve yet to do. Sometimes I feel vaguely guilty about that, because summer is when families go on trips and see relatives. Instead we’ve mostly stayed home. I’ve got five weeks. I should do something more with them.