Fruits and vegetables

I started writing something a few days ago. It's coming together I guess. Today I had an idea for a conclusion and I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget. What was the idea, you ask? Well, I know that it must have had something to do with the words "inverse proportion." I’m sure this made perfect sense to me at the time, but now I really don't know what I was getting at. I don't know what I was thinking. 

That last sentence? An answer to the question: Can you write your autobiography in 7 or fewer words?

I'm only about halfway sure that I will eventually remember what "inverse proportion" was supposed to mean. It's OK, though. I'll think of some way to finish the silly thing. It does bother me that I forget things. A lot. 

Both, really. I forget things a lot and it bothers me a lot. 

*****

The next day, I wrote down the word “banana,” certain that I wouldn’t forget what it meant, and I didn’t. A banana is a concrete thing, after all, not an abstract idea like inverse proportions. A few minutes earlier, I had walked through the lobby of my building today, past the glass case with the scale model of all of the buildings on campus. I really love architectural models, and sometimes I stop to look at this one. Today, as I walked past, I saw that someone had left a banana on top of the glass case. I’m easily amused, and that banana made me laugh right out loud. I mean, a banana, right? Even the word is funny. I don’t think that it was intended to serve as a comedy prop, but I’m telling you, a banana just left where it obviously doesn’t belong is hilarious. I imagine that someone stopped there to dig through their bag, placed the banana on top of the glass case to free up their hands, and then forgot about it. It sat there pretty much all day. It was a perfectly good banana, and no one wanted to throw it away, I guess. 

Later, I had to sit through a required active shooter training video. I’d rather actually face the active shooter than watch that training again. I'm never more restless, more tear-out-my-hair desperate to escape than when I am watching a mandatory training video. Mandatory training videos serve to remind us that Annie Lennox was right: Every single one of us is made to suffer. 

Well of COURSE I don’t want to face a REAL active shooter. Just a little bit of hyperbole, for effect. I really needed to convey just how much I hate mandatory training videos. I hate them a lot. 

*****

It’s Friday now, late afternoon. I’m finished work for the day, though I haven’t logged off yet. I stay connected for a bit at the end of the workday, just in case someone needs me. I’m very dedicated. 

But there’s such a thing as being too dedicated. For example, we’re going to the Nats game today. Not only are we going to the Nats game, but we’re leaving insanely early so that we can arrive insanely early so that we can be among the first 10,000 fans, who receive a bobblehead, which my husband is so insistent that we must obtain at all costs that you would think it was the gosh-darn tesseract. So we’ll arrive about 90 minutes early for a late-season game between the third-worst (Cincinnati Reds) and worst (Washington Nationals) teams in all of Major League Baseball. I mean, I love the Nats, but this is a game that I’d be happy to half-watch and half-ignore in the comfort of my air-conditioned house. Instead, I’ll be hustling through the Glenmont and Fort Totten and Navy Yard Metro stations, trying to catch up with my husband who will break into a full run rather than miss a train and possibly lose his bobblehead to another, more fleet-of-foot fan. It should be fun, really.  He’s buying the drinks. 

*****

It actually was fun. Gollum secured his Precious, which made him very happy and if he’s happy, I’m happy. There was a pre-game concert and as it turned out, we know the band, so that was really fun. Trust me, we are not cool people, but we do have some musician friends, which allows us to occasionally bask in reflected “we’re with the band” coolness. 

We had seats in two separate sections of the stadium, because another bobblehead fanatic friend was unable to attend and asked me to go in her place and get her bobblehead. These people are crazy, I tell you. But the stadium was half-empty and it’s late in a now-meaningless season, so we found seats together in the much better of the two sections, sat down with our drinks, and watched the game. Stadium personnel (who are lovely, by the way) were not checking tickets last night, so people could sit wherever they wanted. Our team has the worst record in the entire league, but there’s an upside to everything, right? 

*****

This wasn’t supposed to be a “that was the week that was” kind of a post, but here we are. It’s Sunday morning now, and I’m probably going to go to Mass, but right now I’m sitting in my backyard listening to cicadas and pondering a tomato. Our tomato plants have underperformed this summer. They’re not achieving their targets. They’re not meeting their metrics. And they don’t give a shit, because they are tomatoes. 

The tomato that I am pondering is ripe enough to pick, I think, but perhaps it would be better to wait a bit. Perhaps it needs just a little bit more time. And it’s not the only one. Today is the last day of summer (yes, I know it’s still August but school starts tomorrow and although it’s maybe not the complete end of summer, it’s the beginning of the end), and I think I would benefit from another day or so. I think I need a little bit more time. I’m going to let that tomato sit for a day or so. The rest of us have to keep to a schedule, but tomatoes are free. I never did remember what “inverse proportion” was supposed to mean, but this thing is over 1,000 words of absolute drivel, and so there’s an inverse proportion for you. The less I have to say, the longer it takes me to say it. 

Re-entry

Just like that, Beach Week is over and with it, summer or so it seems. It’s Monday, my first day back at work (which was just fine after an hour sorting through last week’s emails in conversation view) and it was unseasonably cool; cloudy and gray and slightly breezy with a few drops of rain here and there. I don’t think it got any warmer than 72 degrees today, and that is cool for August in Maryland. 

I write about the weather a lot, don’t I? 

Anyway, school starts in two weeks. That is the end of summer as far as I’m concerned, but the cool temperatures and the October gloom are encroaching on my last weeks of sunshine and warmth, trying to fool me into believing that summer is already gone and that I should just get started with the pumpkin spicing (no) and the Christmas shopping. And I’m not having it. It’s 6:30 and the pool is still open for two hours and the water can’t have gotten that cold overnight (it was just right yesterday) so I’m going to put on a suit and swim laps before I cook dinner. No one here is in any danger of starvation, so dinner can wait. The remains of summer cannot. 

*****

Ha ha ha, that was ridiculous. “The water can’t have gotten that cold overnight,” she says, blithely skipping out the door with her bag and her towel. I should have also brought a space heater and a parka because it was actually freezing. 

Well, let me clarify a bit. The water itself was in fact not that bad. It had gotten a bit colder but it was still quite a nice temperature or would have been had the air temperature not been in the high 60s. Plus, it was rather gray and a bit breezy, and without the sun sparkling on its surface, the pool water appeared dank, which made it feel that much colder. 

My son and his friends were working when I arrived at the pool at 6:45. I was the only swimmer in the place, and my son shook his head when I signed in. “It’s cold, Mom,” he said. “I mean, it’s been colder, but just warning you. It’s pretty cold, especially when you get out.” 

And he was not wrong. Getting into the pool was quite a bit easier than getting out, as a stiff breeze made the already cool air feel downright chilly. It was Baltic, I tell you. Baltic. 

*****

What is it with Wednesdays around here? I am once again writing at work as I await resolution of a technical issue. This time it's everyone, not just me. There's a partial power failure right now where I work, the result of a fix gone wrong. The library is one of the few places where there is both light and WiFi so that's where I am. But it's taking some time for the shared public workstation to set up Windows and sync all of my files and whatever else it has to do. 

30 minutes later and I'm sitting in the courtyard waiting for a call from the help desk. They need to reset my SSO password and they cannot connect to the PW reset application, leading me to the question: What do you do when the help desk cannot help you? And an even bigger question: Who helps the help desk? Who are they supposed to call?

It's 9:30 now; still quite early. I could just go home and work and if this continues for much longer, then that is what I'll do. But we're all in this together and I kind of want to see how it all turns out. Meanwhile I brought a tuna sandwich and some fruit for lunch, so I could just have brunch now rather than waiting for lunch. Tuna salad is good any time of the day. 

Yes it is. 

*****

I’m home now. I worked at five different desks today. I’d connect for a bit and then the connection would drop, and then someone would message me that I could come to room x in building y, and I would be there for a bit and then the whole thing would start over again. I accomplished about three hours’ worth of actual work today, but I  got to hang out with some new people, and I also came up with a really good idea when I was sitting around waiting for my password reset, so it was a pretty productive day altogether. 

*****

It’s Thursday afternoon now, 5:30 PM, and I’m just home from work. I left my phone at home today, not on purpose, of course. But once I was sure that the phone was actually safely on my kitchen counter and not in a ditch somewhere (why would it be in a ditch I wouldn’t go near a ditch to save my soul from Hell) I realized that it’s quite nice to spend a day semi-disconnected. Now I’m catching up on correspondence, and responding to what seems like 50 text messages. It’s not 50. It’s maybe 15. But it’s a lot. Why are these people texting me all day? Am I the only person who works on weekdays? 

*****

My son attends the University of Maryland, which (of course) is now reporting its first case of monkeypox. And there has to be a better name for it, doesn’t there? Monkeypox. Gross. 

I’m not even particularly worried about this; not yet, anyway. It’s Friday, and my mind is blank, and my hands are just moving across this keyboard in an almost-reflexive way. Everything about today, the sunshine and the light and the coming transition from summer to fall, reminds me of 2020. A school year was about to begin and no one knew if or when that would involve entering a school building. The pandemic raged on with no end in sight. The election was around the corner and although I couldn’t wait to see the end of the Trump presidency, I also knew that chaos was going to ensue no matter who won that Godforsaken election. I went to work every morning in my little home office, watching the birds and suburban wildlife outside my window, and wondering if normal life would ever resume. I wondered if anyone even knew what constituted normal life anymore. I still wonder about this. 

*****

But it’s Saturday now, not quite 10 AM, and I’m sitting in my backyard letting my hair dry and listening to the birds, just like I did every morning at the beach, but with different birds. The birds here are quieter. You’d think that inveterate pests and thieves like seagulls would go about their business a little more quietly, draw less attention to themselves, but Avalon’s seagulls are out there and they want you to know it. Hold on to your kids’ sandwiches, they cackle, taunting. Don’t leave those corn chips unattended. Silver Spring birds are politer. You can eat your lunch in my backyard, and your sandwich will remain unmolested. 

But even if a rogue oriole absconds with your lunch, that seems like the worst that could happen right now. Monkeypox and COVID and war and inflation and the constitutional crisis of the day are all out there, but they’re keeping quiet for the moment. With the warm sunshine, birdsong, and clear blue skies, it’s shaping up to be a perfect tail-end-of-summer day. Everything is almost still, except for the trees, barely rustling in the breeze.  

Weather and birds - that is the content that you came here for. 

Proust's sardine

When I was in my mid-20s (and several times after), I read Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, one of her great novels about postwar life in London whose female protagonists were pretty much Muriel Spark herself. I just looked up a summary of Loitering with Intent because I couldn’t remember if one of the characters I was thinking of was in that novel or A Far Cry from Kensington. It was the former, as I’d suspected. 

Almost all of Muriel Spark’s novels are about writers or writing, and Loitering with Intent is no exception. The protagonist, Fleur Talbot, is a young woman who lives in a cold-water London bedsit with a coin-operated gas heater. Like all of London in the post-war years, Fleur is always a little hungry and always a little cold, but she never complains or even thinks of complaining. She is young and talented and free and loves her life as an aspiring writer and secretary for Sir Quentin Oliver’s Autobiographical Association. Sir Quentin is up to no good, and clever Fleur soon sees through him, but she holds herself aloof from the intrigue and drama swirling around the AA. The novel is told in the first person and Fleur often ends a chapter with the words "I went on my way rejoicing." 

Of course, Fleur is annoyingly smug and superior, as talented young people sometimes are. But I first read Loitering with Intent when I was 25 or so, and I recognized her among my friends and in myself. My friends and I were a bunch of wise-ass snarky post-college young quasi-professionals in 1980s Philadelphia and Fleur was a young Englishwoman in post-war London and we shared similar sensibilities and similar outlooks and a similar belief that we could participate in the productive economy as amused bystanders, superior to all of the career-driven striving that supposedly characterized young Americans in the 1980s or the social climbing snobbery that supposedly characterized young educated English people in the 1940s and 1950s. 

*****

Do you know how sometimes you read a scene in a novel or memoir and it just strikes you as perfect in some way, even if–especially if–the scene is really minor or trivial? There’s a scene in Loitering with Intent in which Fleur invites Sir Quentin’s elderly mother, Lady Edwina, to have dinner with her in her tiny bedsit. Fleur takes great pride in her refusal to acknowledge the social hierarchy that makes her an entirely unsuitable hostess for the aristocratic Lady Edwina, who is herself a rebel who loves to annoy her stuffy and pretentious son. Between post-war rationing and youthful poverty, Fleur has only sardines on toast and tea with powdered milk and a bit of her sugar ration to serve Lady Edwina, who is delighted by the simple, bohemian supper. The two sit in the tiny, cozy bedsit, listening to the wireless and drinking tea and laughing at Sir Quentin and his ridiculous pretensions and snobbery. 

Only now do I recognize that both Fleur and Lady Edwina are also rather insufferable. When I first read the book, I identified with Fleur and wished that I had my own Lady Edwina to hang out with. The next time I went grocery shopping (I used to shop at a tiny Korean corner market down the street from my apartment, because I didn’t have a car), I bought sardines and bread, and I had sardines on toast with tea for dinner several nights in a row. It was delicious. 

*****

A few days ago, I saw a headline that contained the words “COVID” and “rebound.” I pounced on the story, eager to read all about how experts from NIH and the CDC are seeing hopeful signs that the pandemic is ending and that the United States and the rest of the world are rebounding from COVID. Instead, it was a story about President Biden’s rebound infection that of course concluded with the usual austere reminder that this shit is not over, not even close, with a lighthearted little “oh by the way” note explaining that if you do get infected and take Paxlovid, you will probably recover quickly and then immediately get COVID again. Thinking about COVID makes me feel like I have COVID. But it’s all good, because at least it’s a break from worrying about monkeypox. 

“May you live in interesting times.” That saying is sounding more and more like a curse every day. I’d prefer, really, to live in far less interesting times. I’m sure that it was dull for Fleur Talbot’s generation in post-war Britain during the years of deprivation, but the worst was over, as far as they knew. Germany was defeated, the nightly bombing raids had ceased, and all they had to do was live with the rationing and the strikes and the general social upheaval resulting from two generations decimated by war. No big deal, right? Britain in 1948 might have been bleak, but I’d take it over Britain in 1939 any day of the week. 

*****

This all comes back to the sardines. I hadn’t given Muriel Spark or my youth in Philadelphia a single thought in quite some time but then one day I was working from home and looking for something to make for lunch and there it was–a can of sardines in mustard sauce that I’d bought months earlier. I didn’t have bread to toast, but I did have rice cakes, which are an excellent vehicle for sardines (or anything else). I spread some sardines on rice cakes and I was back in my tiny post-student apartment in West Philadelphia, avoiding the laundromat and imagining what it might have been like to be young in London in 1948. Some day, someone will wonder what it was like to be young in Philadelphia in 1987. They should call me. I'll tell them. 

Beach Week 2022

It’s Sunday morning now, my first full day back at home after a week on vacation, but I wrote a little bit at the beach every day because I write every day no matter where I happen to be. I think I started writing about beach week (I should say Beach Week) maybe in 2017? We skipped a year in 2018 (Montreal) but thanks to COVID we have been to the beach for every vacation since 2019. You can read about 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021 if you like. Fair warning: None of those posts differ significantly from this one. You’ve seen one week at Avalon, you’ve seen them all. But we keep going back, don’t we? 

*****

It's the first Saturday of August so I must be crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. As a passenger, of course. It's day one of Beach Week 2022 and I just entered New Jersey. We should be in Avalon in an hour. 

I wanted to go somewhere else this year. But I'm happy to be going anywhere, and the Jersey Shore is one of my favorite places. I love driving through the flat New Jersey pine barrens and tomato fields with all of the other bike-laden cars and SUVs carrying vacationers to Ocean County and Atlantic County. We’ll stop to refuel, and we'll sit in our car while an attendant fills up the gas tank because this is New Jersey and that's the law here. I imagine that there are people in New Jersey who don't even know how to fill their own gas tanks. In a little while, we will cross another bridge, this one over the inland bay that separates Avalon Manor on the mainland from Seven Mile Island, home of Avalon and Stone Harbor. 

*****

It's Sunday morning now, and we're here. I'm sitting on an Adirondack chair on our tiny second floor deck, listening to seagulls and letting the salt breeze dry my hair. It's 8:30 AM so the rest of the household is asleep and will remain so until 10:15 or so when I will wake them up to go to Mass. They'll complain about this. I think I'll go full-on Catholic mother and remind them that Jesus died for their salvation so they can sacrifice 45 minutes of their vacation to attend Mass. They’ll love that. Lol. 

Our little beach condo rental is simple but very pleasant and spotlessly clean. There's a bookcase in the bedroom, in a corner next to a window where the sun comes in in the morning. It was nice to wake up to the sight of that sunny little corner. 

Yesterday we unpacked and made the beds and got the lay of the land. We found the coffee maker and the outside shower and the bike rack. My son, of course, dealt with the Wi-Fi. I went to the corner store and handed over $70 for coffee, tea bags, sugar, soap, sunscreen and some peaches and tomatoes. Last night my sons drove to a 24 hour CVS in Cape May Courthouse, and so now in addition to peaches and tomatoes, my little temporary kitchen is stocked with Doritos, Tostitos, Cheezits (but not Cheetos), Haribo Happy Cola gummy candy, and pretzel chips.  We'll go to a proper grocery store later. For now, it's shaping up to be a perfect beach day. 

*****

And it was an almost-perfect beach day. I say almost perfect because it was very windy on the beach, which made it feel downright cold in the water. One block inland and it was August-hot but the beach itself felt like April. My son has already started on our shell collection, and I’ll collect a few more today. The boys won’t be around today; they are driving to Cape May to spend the day with friends whose family has a place there. My sister and her family are here in town, too, as are my neighbors and friends and their three children. There are lots of text messages back and forth regarding when and where everyone’s going to the beach and to dinner. Everyone wants to hang out with us because why wouldn’t they? The more the merrier. 

We did go to Mass, and I’m happy we did although I can always do without Father Whitey O’Maga inserting his trumped-up trumpity trumpster politics into what was an otherwise quite reasonable homily. Father, you should probably know that The Grasshopper and the Ant is a pagan fable written many years before the time of Christ, and that the moral of that story does not accurately reflect His teaching on how we should treat the poor. SMH. SMDH. 

I’m sitting on the deck again and because it is now Monday and not Sunday, it’s pretty noisy. Today is a trash collection day AND there are several new houses under construction on or near the block where we are staying. There are signs around town encouraging voters to “preserve Avalon’s quality of life” by rejecting some ballot measure or other. That reads to me as code for “there are just enough of us around here, and there are far too many of you.” Avalon is a nice place and people want to come here. So make room for them. The more the merrier. 

*****

I often tell people that Avalon is the preppiest town in the United States, and I stand by that statement. Yes I know that it has stiff competition but I believe that it stands alone (well, we’ll include Stone Harbor in there) atop the peak of preppiness. Begin your day by counting blond heads on the beach or on Dune Drive, and I promise you will lose count well before noon. Same promise applies if you’re counting golf carts used as transportation, college or prep school flags flying over multi-million dollar beach houses like they’re Navy ships at sea, and people wearing Vineyard Vines apparel or the like. 

In preppy vacation towns, you will not only find expensive restaurants and stylish boutiques and galleries, you will also find odd little niche enterprises dedicated solely to helping rich people dispose of their excess cash. Only in Avalon or Stone Harbor will you find BOTH a dog bakery (a bakery that caters to dogs, I kid you not) AND a dog ice cream parlor. Only in Avalon or Stone Harbor will you find personal concierge services that will take care of every errand and chore, including setting up your beach tent and chairs in the morning and returning them to you in the evening. 

And then of course there are the beach yoga studios and the juice and acai bowl cafes and the interior design studios that sell $300 custom versions of the “Relax” and “Vitamin Sea” and “Toes in the Sand” wooden signs that decorate every beach rental on Seven Mile Island. I thought I’d seen everything, and then I walked past the infusion cafe on Dune Drive and that’s when I knew that I had seen it all. 

Yes, I know. But I don’t know how to explain this except to say that there is a place right next to a yoga studio that offers infusions–honest to God stick a needle in your arm INFUSIONS– of various solutions purported to improve one’s skin, boost one’s energy, balance one’s emotions, and I don’t even know what else. I don’t have any idea what these solutions contain nor if the personnel administering the infusions have any medical qualifications whatsoever. I walked past the place with my friend and her daughter yesterday at 10:30 or so in the morning and after we wisecracked for a bit about scheduling infusions in between our hair and nail appointments, we also noticed that the place was pretty much empty. Normally, I feel a little sorry for storefront businesses that seem to be on the brink of failure but I took it as a hopeful sign for civilization that offered the opportunity to submit to snake oil infusions at the hands of amateurs, rich women (the place is 100 percent geared toward a wealthy female clientele) are wisely deciding to skip the dodgy infusion treatments and just drink water and take vitamins and see a doctor every so often. Common sense prevails sometimes, and that is all to the good. 

*****

It’s Wednesday morning now, mid beach week. I’m on the deck again, looking at the garden of the beach house next door. I could just call it a house but it’s very distinctly a beach house of a particular Avalon style, long and narrow, with gray clapboard-style siding and white trim. This type of house appears from the front to be a tiny little cottage but the view from the back, which is my view, makes clear that it’s a full-size house–long and narrow, but big. 

The garden of this house is also very typical of Avalon gardens in August, full of hydrangea that are beginning to fade and crape myrtle that are in peak bloom, with some black-eyed susans and those orange daisy-looking flowers whose name I don’t know and won’t bother to look up. And right in the middle are two huge sunflowers, well over six feet tall. I don’t know if they are intentional or opportunists (“volunteers” as my gardening friend calls such plants that just appear without having been installed by a gardener) but they look like they’re in charge of all the other flowers, towering high above the garden, not exactly lording it over their lesser brethren but keeping watch whether or not anyone wants or needs them to keep watch. Very pleased with themselves, that is how those sunflowers look. And why shouldn’t they be? No other flower can attain that height and it’s more than likely that no one planted them there, and so they are proud of the hardy stock from which they came, a variety so adventurous and independent that it can spring from the soil unaided by human hands and outshine its cultivated friends in a matter of weeks. Yes they’re full of themselves but maybe they earned the right to be.

*****

It’s Thursday now. It’s 8:40 AM and I’m sitting on the deck again, which is drying out after an overnight storm. That’s the best kind of beach storm–the ones that begin around 10 PM and rage for the next 8 hours or so, getting all of the rain out of the atmosphere’s system in time for another lovely beach day. 

Actually, I don’t really mind a rainy day or two at the beach, and it’s not yet clear that this will be a sunny day. It’s still cloudy and wet. A little patch of blue is fighting for a place amid the clouds, but that is a fight that could go either way. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, I have Plans A and B for today so if the clouds win then we’ll execute the contingency plan. 

*****

I know that this has been a busy news week but I have remained near-ignorant of current events. Of course it’s hard not to know that there was an FBI raid in Florida. (“If it can happen to a former President, then it can happen to anyone!” Well, yeah, it can happen to anyone who spends four years criming for 12 hours a day–I think that’s the point). But aside from that very happy news, I have no idea what’s happening in the non-beach world. I’ll listen to news radio on my way home on Saturday, and scroll Twitter, and I’ll be caught up by the time we’re crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge out of New Jersey. Catching up on news is part of the re-entry process. It can wait until Saturday. 

*****

Friday morning is a little bit cloudy and overcast but it seems likely that the sun will come out and our last full day here will be a perfect beach day. Yesterday, it rained a bit more later in the morning and then remained cloudy and cool and damp until about 3 pm when the sun emerged and immediately burned off the remaining damp and cool. The temperature, it seemed, went from 75 to 88 in a matter of moments. We had already had a very nice day, browsing the Stone Harbor shops in the morning, and then bike riding and beach walking and reading in the afternoon. When the sun came out, my husband and older son, settled into their cloudy day lounging, decided to stay put, but my younger son and I put on suits, ran down to the beach for a bit to test the water and finding it colder than we like, drove to my sister’s beach rental (60 blocks away), which has a pool. We swam laps with my nephew and then went to the boys’ favorite ice cream place. Beach week pro tip: Get your ice cream at 4 PM rather than 9 PM. The lines are much shorter. 

*****

Thursday of beach week is when I feel like I’m completely adjusted to vacation life; like I’m fully settled into the town and the daily routine of morning walk or bike ride and afternoon beach time and swimming and the house where we are staying. That is the day when I really feel that I’ve left my normal life behind. By Friday, I’m thinking about reentry, but I won’t worry about packing or preparing for our trip home until tomorrow. We’ve done this so many times that we just need two hours on Saturday morning to pack our bags, clean up the house a bit (a service will come in and clean it properly), attach the bikes to the carrier rack, drop off the keys, and go. That’s all for tomorrow. We’re still on vacation today. 

*****

Let's look at the data, shall we? Let's look at some metrics. 

• 7 days. 6 sunny, 1 partly sunny and partly rainy. Average daytime temperature 85. Average nighttime temperature 68. Ocean water temperatures were unseasonably cool, in the low 60s, but that didn't stop us from swimming because almost nothing does.
• Four books: One nonfiction, one novel, one biography, and one memoir. 
• Lots of shells collected. I didn't count them and won't but I'm going to say that we got somewhere between 50 and 60 shells, mostly clam shells with a few oyster and scallop shells for variety. 
• 7 Wordle wins. 
• 2 ice cream cones and one "banana whip," which tastes exactly as advertised, like frozen bananas whipped into a kind of froth. It was pretty good, and frozen bananas are as good a vehicle for jimmies as ice cream.
• Wildlife: Two sunflowers, one skunk (we saw it before it saw us), dozens of seagulls (pests) and sandpipers (so cute) and a lone dolphin about which I had some questions, primarily where are your dolphin friends? That dolphin was swimming alone and it didn't leap out of the water even one time. I think that dolphin was a shark. 

Saturday, August 13, 7:30 AM

I woke up early on Saturday for one last bike ride and one last dip in the ocean (only up to my knees because I had already showered and dressed), and then returned for one last morning of coffee on the deck before the packing operation commenced. That part is easy for me because all I do is pack suitcases and totes. The men take care of the roof container and the bike racks. We dropped off our keys at 9:20, a full forty minutes early, and then after a late diner breakfast at a favorite place about an hour from Avalon, we were home before 1 PM. Two more weeks and summer is pretty much over. It goes so fast, almost as fast as Beach Week. 

The computer isn't the only thing that needs a help desk...

If the COVID and the monkeypox and the impending collapse of civilization weren’t enough for me to worry about, I’m scared to drive now. This is because I am a terrible, terrible, no-good driver. I used to be a very very good driver. Yes, yes, I know that everyone claims to be a great driver but you should believe me when I tell you that I was once an excellent driver because I am truthfully telling you that I am a terrible driver now. 

I say that I’m scared to drive because I’m a terrible driver but the reverse is equally true. I am a terrible driver because I am scared to drive. I am by turns apprehensive, fearful, and downright terrified when I’m on the road, and this does not make for good Capital Beltway driving, I tell you what. I used to drive the Beltway with carefree aplomb, every morning and night. I drove the Inner Loop from Silver Spring to Capital Heights every morning and the Outer Loop from Capital Heights back to Silver Spring every evening, in every kind of traffic and weather condition, and I never gave it a moment’s thought. Sometimes  I’d get to work and realize that I didn’t remember the drive. I drove the Beltway on autopilot, utterly fearless. Tonight, I had to drive the Outer Loop from the Clara Barton Parkway to Connecticut Avenue–a very short stretch in case you don’t know the Beltway, in pretty light traffic at 7:30 PM–and I nearly had a cardiac event. Who knows, maybe I did have a cardiac event. I should have an EKG. I’ve been home for two hours, and my heart rate is almost normal now. Almost. 

*****

It’s the next day now, and I'm at work. I wouldn't normally be writing when I'm at work, but I'm also on the phone with the help desk, so I can’t do any work because the technician just remotely took over my computer, and I think he and I are going to be here for a while. That's because I have at least four different open tickets, two of which are months old. I have a lot of work to do, so it's a terrible time for me to be in a veritable hostage situation with the help desk but I'm afraid that if I don't let them fix my computer now then I won't hear from them again until November. I learned to live with the problem I reported back in June but this more recent problem is affecting my ability to do my job or at least part of my job, so I need to get it taken care of now while I can. 

We're off the phone now, and I'm waiting with considerable trepidation for a firmware update to finish. My need-to-solve-now problem involved a Drupal dev environment so I don't know why I need a firmware update but I don't really know anything about anything so when the help desk tells me that I need a firmware update, I don’t argue. Still, the computer was just fine before, except for the Drupal thing, and now I'm worried that the firmware update will create a new problem rather than solving the old one. 

*****

It’s later, and I’m home. My computer was fine (except that the Drupal problem remains unsolved) and I finished work and drove home without incident. The routine daily drive to and from work is easy. It’s the detours and unfamiliar routes and the wrong turns that get to me. Eventually, I’ll start having the panic attacks and terror episodes when I walk to my mailbox and then I’ll be unable to leave the house for any reason. That is, if the monkeypox doesn’t get to me first. But for now, everything’s good. Heart rate and pulse are good, computer is working perfectly, and I don’t have to drive anywhere for the next few days. And obviously, I’m a super fun person, too, so I’m firing on all cylinders. Hash tag #winning, as they say on the social media.