Summer is Almost Over (Thank God)

Summer is my least favorite time of year. The summer of 2009 was no different. I won't go into details but for the most part, this summer sucked, so I am not especially sorry to see the back end of it.

But this was a good week with which to end the month of August. And there was nothing especially amazing about it. Well, the weather broke so that was indeed a good thing after last week's heat wave. I think if the Russian kids who were staying with us last week were here now, they would have been exploring the city a lot more.

But I was outside a lot more. I visited a friend's mother who was returning home after visiting for a few months, I helped out with a Tuesday night community dinner and I spent the past two days volunteering at my friend's workplace to help organize things. My friend works in a private library setting and all I could think of was, "That was a wasted opportunity." I suppose if I went back in time, I would do a lot of things differently and taken an actual library job out of grad school rather than falling for the "dot coms are the here and now!" argument. Ah well...

But after two days of hauling boxes, sweating, running up and down stairs, handling books older than this country, getting red rot on my hands , I felt rejuvenated. It's a good thing I've been doing my four mile morning walks every day for the past several months because I didn't feel all that tired. But had I done this earlier in the year, I'd have been winded after an hour.

Man, it felt good to be working and useful again. Who thought I'd ever miss good old hard work?

And now as a reward, I'm heading out on vacation for a week (if one can really take a vacation when they haven't worked in forever. )