We just got back from another fabulous road trip. Truthfully, Louie and I hadn’t set out on a good camping road trip in a few years, so we were glad to do so in the past few weeks. We’d forgotten how to do a few things, but it came back pretty quickly. I’ll tell you more about it in detail, but in a nutshell, we spent about a week visting my sister Leslie and her family in Chautauqua, New York and then we spent time driving through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, camping, hiking, getting bitten by mosquitoes, and buying maple syrup, before driving all the way home in two days.

So here I am, home again, sending out oodles of emails and trying to convince myself to finish folding laundry and get those last few things out of the car. Lessons start up again on Monday, and things are…mostly scheduled at home, and starting to get scheduled at the college. I have spent entirely too much time at the computer, but Muriel loves it because she sits by me, glad that I am home. Miles is less glad, because we turned the a/c down to a cooler temp and I think he prefers the hotter temperature. He does enjoy the pets I think, but less from me and much more from Louie.

It’s going to be a busy year, again, of course, as things always are. Each year starts full of promise though, right? It’s like the shiny school supplies, the new start, the freshness of the new semester beckons. We are rested, excited to begin. The weather promises to start cooling down and get nicer as the months go on, and we are getting into the fun holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are getting closer (but not TOO close.) And honestly, I had a terrific summer, and we were so lucky with the tornado missing our house, and other than hurting my ankle (did I mention that? I rolled my ankle in June pretty badly) it was a good summer…so many nice trips, the Alaska cruise, the girls trip to Wisconsin, a New England Road Trip, so many evenings free, so many lovely gigs that paid pretty well and some fun times with Louie and other friends. I feel like it was one of the better summers in a long time.

(Other than you know, the whole *waves arms around* world falling apart around us. But what can you do? We are determined to do what we CAN about that, while not letting it ruin our lives any more than it HAS to. We did notice that we saw no Canadian license plates while we were on our trip, even though I have read many places that usually Canadians like to drive over the border to vacation in New Hampshire and Maine. We did see a fair amount of Trump signs. Inflation was rampant. There were many places where I had checked prices and made notes in early summer as to what things would cost and the prices were already higher by mid-August. My dad suggested maybe I had written down the non-peak season prices, and maybe, I could have made that mistake once or twice, but I am pretty sure that I made notes of what they said prices would be for the summer, and they just raised prices. And that’s just one small thing, the thing we were told would be changed, the thing that we were told Americans cared about, that I’m not seeing anybody doing a damn thing about, but instead rounding up and torturing people of color and shipping them off to concentration camps instead. So, yeah, that puts a damper on things. )

But I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the cats, that our amazing cat sitter took and sent while I was gone.