It’s Saturday afternoon, hot and sunny with no immediate threat of storms, and I just finished a lovely swim. The neighborhood swim team’s Divisional championship was this morning, and it was fun to be there as a spectator with no jobs to do. The team did well - they came close to a win but we only got one of the relays. Relays are worth a lot of points, and if the Dolphins had won all five relays or even four of the five, they would have been assured of a victory. There’s always next year.
We are leaving shortly for a quick visit to Philadelphia. My sister is having a midsummer party, with a “Jaws” theme in honor of the movie’s 50th anniversary. I’m wearing red white and blue because “It’s the Fourth of July, for Christ’s sake.” We’re going to the beach next month, and my sister wants us all to go to a special “Jaws” screening. I swim in the ocean, and I’m not excited about the idea of watching “Jaws” and then getting in the water the next day. My sister never goes in the water past her ankles, so she’s not worried about it.
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We're on our way back home now. It's Sunday morning, 10 AM, and I'm in the passenger seat this time. It was a fun summer get together. The weather is unsettled, as usual. This summer is going to live in memory for a lot of reasons, mostly bad, including this absolute cluster of Old Testament weather. Terrible weather, middle aged white people caught cheating on their spouses at a Coldplay concert, and Trump's swollen ankles. Just ridiculous. The very stupidest of all stupid timelines, as they say on the Internet.
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I lost my Wordle streak a few days ago, and not on the word that everyone was complaining about. It was just one of those letter combinations that could have been any word and I ran out of guesses. I had a 177 game streak and had hoped to pass 200 but it wasn't to be. But my win percentage remains 99% and I have a new streak underway.
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I have to give a speech this week, which makes it one of those weeks that I just need to get through. The first half of this week is going to be a bit chaotic for a lot of reasons. It'll be fine. And I don’t love the idea of wishing away several days of my life, but I will be glad when Friday is here.
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Since we’re covering the sports and weather, I’ll also update you on the news. My old lady is alive and well; rather, she’s as well as can be expected. As I wrote here, I knew that she had been taken to the hospital, and I thought that she’d gone from the hospital to a rehab facility but I didn’t know which one, and the ones that I called denied all knowledge of a resident by her name. After a few weeks, I stopped calling her and checking at her house. I Googled her name every so often wondering if she had died, but there was no obituary. It was a mystery.
Then last week, I got a call from an unfamiliar local number, and I actually picked up the phone. I usually ignore calls from unknown numbers. And there she was, calling from a rehab facility in Rockville. There’s lots more to this, of course, and I’ll share it with you in great detail and at considerable length, but right now I’m going to just keep documenting this odd little week.
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It’s Wednesday now. I have a house full of electricians working on my husband’s crazy pet project of electrifying the gazebo on our patio. I absolutely don’t need electricity in that gazebo, but my husband is very excited about this. And I don’t mind except that I do wish that he’d schedule contractors to come at a time when he’s going to be at home. They never fail to ask me questions that I cannot answer.
My speech is written and it's longer than I planned, but it’s very good if I say so myself. I’m pretty sure I’m going to bring the house down. I’d still so much rather be in the audience listening to someone else give this speech. I’d rather be pretty much anywhere other than in the spotlight. But I’m sure I’ll feel differently once I get the first laugh.
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I killed that speech. I know it’s boastful to say that but first of all, who is reading this and second of all, I’m not the only person who thinks the speech was good. Many people complimented me. My children complimented me. It’s so nice when a thing that I dreaded turns out better than I expected, and it’s also nice that the whole thing is over.
And the electrical work is done, too. Tuesday and Wednesday just felt like very chaotic days - I had an overnight guest, which was lovely; and I had contractors stomping in and out and making noise all the livelong day, which was not; and of course I had that speech hanging over my head like the sword of what’s-his-name. But it’s Thursday now, and everything is quiet and back in order. No one was home tonight, so I didn’t have to cook. The work week is winding down and I have a no-plans weekend for the first time in many weeks. I have volunteer work to do and the house isn’t going to compulsively clean itself but I will get a day or so of down time, just in time.
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The longed-for Friday brought a return of the intense heat, which I happen to like, but only because I have air conditioning at home and at work and in my car, and I have a swimming pool around the corner from my house. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t like the heat so much if I had to endure it without the ability to escape into a cooled space or jump into lovely blue water.
But the summer is winding down now. Now that I no longer live by the swim team calendar, the crepe myrtle are my signal of the beginning of the end. It’s hard to complain, though, when you live in a neighborhood filled with crepe myrtle trees because they are just so beautiful, bursting with pink and magenta and white and red flowers. And even though their presence is a daily reminder that we’re about to be strapped onto a freight train that begins on Labor Day and goes top speed with very few stops until Christmas, we still have about six weeks of swimming and evening daylight. I’ll take it.
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