Early August on the home front (8-9-09)

I haven't written in a while, been too nuts this summer. It's been a weird one for sure, with rain, heat, busy weekends, a shift change for Cynthia at her job, summer school for Kevin. Hopefully next summer won't be quite so eventful!

I've been told that I convey the beauty of these Castle Rock evenings from the balcony here at the house pretty well, and I appreciate that feedback! It's not my intention to brag or anything, it's just I never thought I'd have a place of my own at ALL, never mind a place with a balcony (OK a SMALL balcony, barely enough room for 2 chairs) facing west into the sunset, a loving family and really a pretty damn fine life. Tonight the sunset is a deep red (almost post-apocalyptic), there's a great lightning show going on in the northwest--too far away to hear the thunder but still cool), the temperature is perfect, and basically the universe is in order for us, for now anyway. The other thing I love about this balcony is that there are no mosquitos or other nasties up here; it's higher up than they typically fly. The main problem is those small moths, they're attracted to my laptop screen!

As I mentioned, the summer has not been without its craziness, more than I generally like to see. First off, we've had a lot more rain than usual. I think I mentioned in my last post, the sump pump has been going off and on since April; I never thought the thing would ever kick in at ALL when we bought the house. I figured it would be much too dry, but not this summer. Until last week, it had literally been raining every three to five days, and I mean HEAVY rain. It's been so wet that I went out last month and took a bunch of pictures of the hood and the surrounding hills and mountains, just because I've never seen it this green out there at this time of year. Now over the last 2 weeks or so the moisture has dropped off quite a bit, we haven't had any rain to speak of. But there were a couple of other dry periods like this, only to have the rain start again in earnest. Lets see what happens this time.

We've actually enjoyed the moisture, and the timing of it has been perfect what with getting all these new plants from Lavonne and Lana. But it's just gotten rather intense at times. Last month we woke up at about 11:00PM one evening to find that it was pouring rain INSIDE the house because of the high winds driving the rain inside the windows. We wuick shut them, but then went downstairs to find that there was water dripping in through one of the built-in surround speakers in the TV room. AARGH! We were buggin that the speaker was going to croak on us, but it seems to still be working fine. There have been other nights though with electrical storms keeping us awake so that we were a wreck the next day.

Then there's been summer school for Kevin. He had to make up a couple of classes from when he went to brick-and-mortar school (and therefore had to deal with all the crap thereof). Douglas County has offered these classes online as summer classes, thank God or else we'd be screwed, no way of getting him to a physical school with both of us working. But the classes are 2 weeks in length yet have a months worth of work for Kevin to have to do. Add to that the typical summer vacation no-work-and-all-play mentality that we all have, and you can imagine it's been crazy for him to try and get all this work done. There was math class in June, then a social studies and an English class in July. They're finally done now and he's passed them all, and he gets a couple of weeks break before he has to start regular online school again in mid-August. From here on out though it should be smooth sailing for him as long as he's willing to do the work, since again he doesn't have to deal with the rigmarole of early mornings, bus rides, ridicule and derision from "peers" (like I myself had to deal with), early lunches and subsequent hunger in the afternoon--any of this ring a bell for anyone? Thanks mainly to the efforts of his mom getting him enrolled in online school, Kevin doesn't have to deal with any of that, so the rest of high school should be good.

We had a period of three weekends in a row too this summer where we had some major thing going on. I should preface that by saying I REALLY hate that. Some people can work all week AND all weekend, but I'm not one of them. By the time Friday night rolls around, I am SOOO done, I don't want to do anything during the weekend but chill around the house, maybe go out to dinner or walk around the hood, but that's IT. We could have gotten a preowned house in an established neighborhood with big trees and parks and all, but we instead chose to get a new house out here in the boonies (well sort of the boonies, feels less and less like that every year hehe) so that we would have no home improvement issues to wreck our weekends. So you can imagine it was pretty disconcerting to lose three weekend in a row this summer. During the first two, we were entertaining family, though it was still great to see them. Then the third weekend we had a wedding rehearsal and then a wedding, and we each had to work both of them. Cynthia was the greeter and I was one of the photographers. Now don't get me wrong, the cause was definitely a righteous one, and it's not like nobody killed a Saturday afternoon to come to our wedding in 06. It just all added up to a lot of work and not much relaxation, no bid deal back when we were 20-somethings but now that we're near or (in my case) past our 40's, it sort of wears on us. Does this sound like petty whining? Then so be it, but dammit we want our R and R!! ;)

Cynthia changed shifts in her job, which hasn't been a hardship on the family really, but had made for some adjustment on each of our parts. I'm actually really jealous myself. She has the same 15-minute commute (mine is 40 minutes EACH WAY), but now there's no rush hour traffic to deal with, and she can work evenings while still being at the house in the mornings so that she doesn't lose the whole day to work, like most of the rest of us do. She can schedule appointments, get Kev motivated to do school work, walk the dog, chill out, whatever she wants, then work in the evening. Now as you might imagine, the down side to this is that we don't get as much time together since she' gone during the evening. But we knew going in that less time together is only as tough on a relationship as we MAKE it; what counts is our attitude, and we've each agreed to keep a good attitude toward the situation and to acknowledge that it will be good in the end, if only for purposes of Cynthia being able to work with Kevin on school stuff. And we still chat on the computer, call as often as we can, and of course we both have access to Facebook. So we'll see how it goes, but either way its added a touch of chaos to an already chaotic summer, though it's a good chaos IMHO.

The summer heat kicked in last month, and though that's par for the course, it's evertheless somewhat taxing. Our AC unit does it's damnedest to keep us cool, but it just can't quite keep up when it's 90+ degrees out, and the more past 90 the worse it is. The 2nd floor is the worst of course, and Kevin was so hot that we finally had to move his room downstairs to the basement where he's much happier. That leaves us though, and the heat is worse for Cynthia than it is for me because she still gets headaches, which tend to play havoc with the internal thermometer. Now one nice thing for her though is that she'll now be at work during the hottest part of the day, but its still a challenge. We're better off in Castle Rock than the lower elevations are because it gets cooler at night so we can just run a window fan and not have to run the AC at night (OK window fans are a little trailer park but hey, it keeps us from spending a fortune on AC!!). But I myself can't complain; I do hot MUCH better than I do cold.

If my blogs seems extensive BTW, it's because I've always done the journaling thing to some extent. I kept a journal as far back as grade school--I should really take a look at that thing again sometime--and it's just something I've always been good at. I don't do it as much now, because generally the time you spend journaling is time that isn't going toward bettering one's life or position or status or whatever. Still, it's a good exercise from time to time.

Well, I better enjoy the rest of this evening. It's gotten even better than it was, believe it or not; our imbecile neighbors behind us actually refrained from turning on their obnoxious back porch lights, so it's actually DARK outside at night. Bonus plan. Peace!