The Doings Report

Ah, Sunday. We are basking (suffering) in a bit of a heat wave. It hit 90 today and is forecast to be "much warmer" tomorrow. How will we ever survive????

Perhaps by imagining what it would be like tomorrow if we were in the south or southwest. :-)

Chloe is visiting friends in Victoria, BC, for a few days. They have two kids, a girl not quite 2 and a boy not quite 5. Her visit is sort of a job interview, or maybe a mutual interview. If all parties are amenable, she will be their au pair for an undetermined while. Chloe wrote her own (very business-like) emails, made her own arrangements, rode the ferry and went through customs alone, et cetera. (Does anybody know where Chloe learned to write with a formal tone? Sometimes—oftentimes—unschooling amazes even me.)

If all parties are amenable, Frank and I will have an empty nest for a while. Jeezum Pete.

My sister is in town. We had a family gathering today, and I got to visit a bit with her and her family. Loved it!

We are also enjoying a visit from MJ, who came up for the aforementioned gathering and for an orthodontic appointment. She likes it here well enough, but she is glowingly happy in her new digs/life and will return there in the next couple of days.

Frank continues prepping two sides of our house for exterior paint. We settled on two sides as an achievable/adequate goal for this summer. We'll do the other two sides next summer. He has scraped and pressure washed and is now sanding. Then primer, then paint. Colors are either decided (if everyone goes along with my green-with-blue-trim preference) or under negotiation. You be the judge.

I continue working. It seems I will finish one contract on Aug. 31 and start the next on Sept. 1. Continuity is a good thing, but I am lately engaged in detailed fantasies of extended roadtrips. Perhaps something can be arranged, since I work from home mostly anyway. It's the "mostly" that's a stumbling block: "mostly" is not the same as "always."

The girls head to camp next week Tuesday with a hundred or so of their closest friends. Camp has been restructured from two one-week sessions to one two-week session, so they won't be home (Chloe to here and MJ to Salem) until after Labor Day. Judging by chatter here and on Facebook, they and the aforementioned friends are all extremely excited. Extremely. Excited. NBTSC is evidently heaven on earth, more fun than anything else (except perhaps a good year at LIFE is Good), but we parents can only imagine since we are not invited. *sigh*

After that, Chloe comes home or heads to Victoria, depending, and MJ heads to Chautauqua.

It's really a shame how isolated and overprotected unschoolers are. Poor, deprived children.

Also next Tuesday (a week from Tuesday) marks the 20th anniversary of my wedding to Frank. Yes, 20 years. Wowza. I have Big Plans for the day, but Frank has not been apprised of these, so I'm not telling. Yet.

Frank and I attended our first Seahawks game yesterday, a preseason battle with the Tennessee Titans. The game was fine, fun, blah blah blah, but the game viewing experience was, in a word, HOT. Our seats are on the sunny side of the stadium, which is a good thing come November but which makes for a bakefest on a summer evening. We sweated it out with about 25,000 fellow fans, watched the Hawks win, and left disgruntled because the Hawks took a knee instead of going for an easy field goal that would have netted each of us a short stack of pancakes at IHOP. Very bad coaching decision that, but I bet IHOP didn't suffer much since by game's end we were all craving pancakes.

Our next game is next Saturday evening. Frank and I are thinking of staying away until about 7:30, when the shade hits our seats.

For the sake of frugality/greed for other things, I'm going to put all of our regular season tickets up for sale. Whichever games don't sell, we'll attend. If any of you have a game you'd particularly like to go to, let me know; friends and family get good prices and first dibs.

I'm off now for a sunset walk. It is *beautiful* out there now, rosy and warm and a reminder of why we put up with the gray skies all winter. Summer in the northwest is how summer was meant to be.