Spring

It's full-on Spring here and the weather has been mostly fantastic. I missed my chance to take photos of bare branches against the winter-grey sky because now everything is either blooming like crazy or leafing out in a green so bright it hurts your eyes. Or both.

I've been grilling dinner pretty much every night and walking the dog pretty much every morning and sneezing my head off and trying to just BREATHE whenever I get a chance, because from now until late May it's going to be one long thrill ride of band concerts and theater competitions and high school course selections and birthdays and standardized testing and summer camp registration. Whew! I kind of wish I hadn't written all that down.

... breathe ... breathe ... breathe ...

In other news:

• Son C bought a trumpet. Yep. He plays tuba in his high school band, and before that he played it three years in middle school, and he has no desire to switch to trumpet, you know, professionally or whatever. He just wanted one and saw a used one on Craigslist that he could afford. This kid can play any instrument you hand him, so it was no surprise that in less than 24 hours he sounded like he'd been playing for a year. I don't know where he gets this freaky savant-like musical talent. I only know he didn't get it from me.
• Daughter H is getting ready to say goodbye to middle school and hello to high school, which I sort of can't believe. Didn't I just give birth to her a couple of years ago? She already has a dress for the 8th grade formal, which is like a mini-prom, and she's picked out all her classes for next year and her graduation track and everything. So super exciting. H is a planner and she has pretty much her entire life mapped out. I hope she lets me visit her at her summer home in Paris someday. I mean, SOMEONE will have to dust all those Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards, right?
• I've been reading House of Thieves, a short story collection by Kaui Hart Hemmings, and it's pretty great. Hemmings wrote The Descendants, the book on which the movie was based, as an expansion of one of the stories in this collection and boy howdy, I haven't seen the movie or read the book but I can hear George Clooney's voice delivering every line of his character's dialog in the short story. That was some perfect casting, right there. I'm not sure what I'll read next but I am SUPER excited about Lauren Groff's Arcadia, which will be out later this month. I haven't been this excited about a book since Joshilyn Jackson's A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, which was excellent, by the way.

That's about all that's going on around here. I'm still making granola and eating salads and just trying to breathe.