Oh, hi. Remember back in May when I said I wasn't doing Facebook much anymore and I hoped it would lead to more writing over here? Those were more innocent times, weren't they?
Yeah. Hello. I have no idea what I've been doing for the past couple of months. But the photographic evidence suggests I've been hanging out in hospital emergency rooms (I wasn't the patient, and everything is fine, and that's all I'm gonna say about that), and I've been buying flowers at the farmer's market, and cooking some stuff, and buying a new chair for my office, and killing yet more plants, and knitting a whole hell of a lot.
AND ... planning another trip to Dublin, with additional stops on the Isle of Man and in Cheshire, UK. I know! Exciting! That's all happening at the end of August/beginning of September and I'm super freaking out over it.
See, my people aren't really travelers. Growing up, I think I got the idea that, much like sleep-away camp, it wasn't something on which working-class people spent their money. I didn't know a single kid growing up who went to sleep-away camp, not until we moved to Texas. The kids I knew all spent their summers the same way I did: running around our blue-collar suburban neighborhood engaging in casual misdemeanors. And I never knew anyone who traveled internationally unless it was across the border by car into Canada or Mexico, or unless it was a military thing.
It's so weird to me that this is a thing I get to do now, that my kids are adults and my parents are still in relatively good health and I can just do this, leave the country for a couple of weeks. Go to a completely other country. I know for some of you this is a typical Thursday or whatever, but for me it's just SO weird. I'm like a little kid with this. Wow! I get to go to Dublin AGAIN! And I get to go to the Isle of Man, who's done that?! (Wait, have any of you done that? Tell me everything!) I get to go to England, where I've never been, and stay in a little inn near Manchester and stomp up and down the canals and drink cider. CAN. NOT. WAIT!
So yeah. Wow. What a summer, eh? H moved into an apartment with friends and got a promotion at work and is doing so great with the adulting, I am SO SUPER PROUD of that kid. C is thisclose to getting his driver's license and did great in his summer class and has been making tons of new amazing music and has a new job, maybe? (I feel very first-trimester about the whole job thing right now, so please just keep your fingers crossed, okay?) So super proud of that kid, too. P is busy getting ready for the conference that is the whole reason we get to go to Dublin again in the first place. And I'm just obsessively googling "minimalist travel wardrobe" and drinking matcha lattes and stress-eating way too much guacamole. Oy.
Actually, that's a lie. I've been reading books! I know! I only have good books to recommend to you anymore, because if a book isn't good within the first couple of chapters I just delete it from my Kindle and move on with my life (and eat more guacamole). This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I have upwards of 500 books loaded onto my Kindle and that I'll likely only live long enough to read 426 of them. You know, if I'm lucky. And don't get ritually sacrificed to Manannan for trying to use euro in Douglas in a couple of months.
But yeah! The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: excellent. Required reading if you read and liked Harold Fry. Daniel O'Malley's Stiletto, the sequel to The Rook: excellent. Tig Notaro's I'm Just a Person: excellent. Code Name Verity: excellent! I liked Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different VERY much, apparently much more than a lot of other people did.
Right now I'm reading Captain William R. Anderson's The Ice Diaries, about the first nuclear submarine and its Cold War mission to explore the Arctic Ocean while completely submerged under polar ice (all covert-like). You wouldn't think that would be my kind of thing, but (a) I love true stories about Arctic and Antarctic exploration for some damn reason, and (b) my father-in-law was a career Navy officer and navigator and both of P's brothers served in the Navy aboard nuclear subs. Mostly this book is making me miss my father-in-law because I think he would have LOVED it and I'm sad that I can't buy him a copy.
Anyway. That's what's going on around here. We'll have to talk about TV another time (OMG GAME OF THRONES BROADCHURCH CLAWS WRECKED YAY).
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