It’s hard to keep up with a blog, especially when your laptop up and dies after a long and annoying period of time of being hardly useable at all.  That’s my “excuse” for having been away.

In addition, there’s just been much more living going on and much less reflecting on the living.  It has been noted that the unexamined life is not worth living. However, I have to disagree. I’ve been living it up lately and not thinking too hard, and it was definitely worth it.

Updates, updates, updates… hmm…. Garden is producing greenbeans, cukes, and sungold tomatoes. And the most enormous sunflowers I’ve ever seen. They were volunteers, as was the sweet onion I harvested and the four giant yellow crookneck squash that showed up somehow.   This summer has been ridiculously hot, but maybe that is good.  Blight hasn’t been an issue like I direly predicted. It’s nice to be completely wrong sometimes! I wonder if the heat has managed to kill off the evil moldy blight spores from last year’s wet and rainy summer.

I’ve been taking many roadtrips.  Since I last wrote a word here, I have driven to Florida and back, New Hamsphire and back, the Adirondacks and back, and Ocean City, NJ and back. That is a lot of miles on my old minivan.  I have gotten to be quite happy behind the wheel, with my books on CD and all.  When I consider how hard it used to be to travel when my girls were wee ones, I am so grateful now that we can actually manage really long car trips. The road is kind of fun once you figure out a way to keep boredom at bay.   I have one more trip to the Adirondacks ahead of me this summer before the school year begins once again.

I’ve also been a food preserving fool! I put up pickles, pickled beets, peach jam, strawberry jam, raspberry-mulberry jam, and I hope to do more before the summer is out. It’s a little daunting doing this on the hotter days, but I’ve been eager to put things up whenever I get the chance. I want to do tomatoes and later on in the season, apple pie filling.  I have this idea that home made preserves will make nice holiday presents for friends and family.

D has started a new job, and that has been both stressful and stress-relieving. He’s much closer to home, so commuting is no longer an issue.  He is teaching a twice-weekly class this summer, though, and that’s a bummer. I have been away a fair amount  (see roadtrips) with the kids, though, so his schedule doesn’t affect me that much right now. It’ll be great, though, when school is back in session. By that time, he will only be teaching one night per week. The lack of a commute really is huge for us.

I am thinking about getting a second job to help make ends meet.  Nothing huge, just a little extra pocket change.  The private school where I work is having financial difficulty. Because of this, the hope I’d held out that I might get financial assistance for the tuition we pay for the girls has pretty much been smashed. Instead of getting a break on tuition as I hoped, I (along with every other staff member) am being asked to forego a planned pay increase.  So… maybe you’ll find me asking “Do you want fries with that?” during the school day.

So there, that’s all for now. I hope it isn’t an entirely new season already by the next time I check in.  Gotta examine this life once in a while, right?