I haven’t felt as drawn to type here…the world is a mess right now, and things are feeling really scary.

But here we are! The summer…I have to say, since I am not returning to my early morning school job in the fall, I am not dreading the fall in the same way I was the last two years or so. Summer has ended up being quite busy with work anyway, with 30-40 students a week plus some gigs. Not as many wedding gigs at this time, but plenty of musical theater gigs, and it’s been a lot of fun.

We’ve had time for some bike rides and plenty of evening events. Last week after getting home from visiting my family in Chautauqua, we went to several jazz shows, a musical, a wine dinner, and an opera.

It was a lot of busy nights! Sunday then Louie and I loaded up the bikes and biked from Augusta to Defiance, ate lunch in Defiance, and biked back.

We’ve been biking every week: it gets awfully hot here for hiking and Louie was pushing me to bike with him, so I’ve been plotting out various trails (mostly on the Katy Trail) for us to try together. We’ve enjoyed biking and eating lunch either at the end at a nearby restaurant or at the halfway point. Both have their pros and cons.

This week has been busy with teaching and getting ready to play Fiddler on the Roof at the Muny. I’ve been having so much fun playing with the group this summer: I’m sure they won’t need me as much next year if they have an audition, and while I’ll take the audition, who knows how it will go, so I’m trying to enjoy it now.

The rain yesterday was pretty crazy: we had some flash flooding and were super surprised by how much rain was falling. I had to get groceries in the middle of it: in retrospect I probably should have waited for the rain to stop, but my weather app said it would, so I headed out and then instead of stopping it got worse! I did make it home safely but there were a few sketchy moments. Good thing climate change isn’t a real thing and instead it’s just really strange that now we keep getting all this extreme weather, huh? I’ve also realized that the weather apps are simply unreliable and are fairly useless for anything except perhaps telling the temperature. They pretend to know when it will stop and start raining, but it sort of feels like gaslighting since it is practically always wrong. Why tell me it will stop raining in 7 minutes when that is just wrong?

But I digress. As I nearly always do! Cat time!

We have a great cat sitter who always takes tons of pictures of the cats interacting with various toys she brings. I’m always sad to leave the cats, but I know they are in good hands and probably enjoy having the house to themselves for awhile too, as long as their basic needs are met. They have each other too! I’m sad to think of leaving them while we are in Europe too, but I’m sure they will be fine…

What have you been up to this summer?