And the livin' is easy

I did in fact make it to my blood draw on Friday afternoon more or less on time (really ten minutes late, not because I failed to leave the office on schedule but because I spent several minutes driving slowly around the small office park where I assumed the lab would be before cruising along the adjacent strip mall and discovering the lab was, in fact, situated between a dry cleaner and a Quizno’s) and afterwards found myself with about an hour and a half to dispose of before picking the little guy up from day care. I could have picked him up early, but then he would have missed his scheduled singing/dancing/cooperation reinforcing as well as his late afternoon snack, and one of the more prominent lessons of the past twenty months has been that he really is at his best when his days are predictably on-pattern. I also could have gone home and kicked back on the couch for ninety minutes, but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth. The new dog, still somewhat accident-prone, gets crated when no one is home and if I stopped at the house only to leave again shortly thereafter, I would be forced to tease the dog with a brief furlough before tossing him back in the doggie clink, so it struck me as less cruel to simply let him out once and for good when I got home post daycare pick-up. All of which is a long way of saying that’s how I found myself at the used bookstore on a Friday afternoon.

I had been driving around with a box of old CD’s in my trunk that I intended to sell, and I managed to accomplish that objective and picked up a half-dozen books for myself as well. All six books, unsurprisingly, are sci-fi/fantasy genre ghettotastic fare. Those kind of books tend to be printed as cheap paperbacks to begin with, and therefore people are probably more likely to sell those to a used book store than to hold on to them for any reason (from sentimentalism to shelf-dressing), not to mention that the used book stores in turn know they can’t really re-sell cheap genre paperbacks for more than a buck or two, so if that’s what you load up on you get more bang for your buck, and of course I revel in the pleasures of cheap genre fiction so I tend to think of used book stores as SF/F Emporiums anyway … as I said, unsurprising.

Stocking up on pocket-sized paperbacks promising overwrought pulpy goodness generally makes me feel like I’m going to the beach, because those are the perfect reading material for time whiled away on a blanket under the sun. (Or, again, so I tell myself because that’s my own personal preference and viewpoint-validating experience.) We do have a family beach trip planned for the end of the season, but if I’m already stocking up reading materials for it then the season must be starting, right?

Summer is without a doubt my favorite season of the year so I’m happy to define it as being over four months long, from May 1 until Labor Day or so. Setting aside obvious actual sidereal considerations like the solstice and whatnot, a more mainstream opinion might hold that summer begins around Memorial Day, but I have found that date steadily creeping earlier and earlier for me. The college years, and the end of the semester and completion of finals by the first or second week of May did a lot to unseat Memorial Day for me, and the ad campaigns from our friends at Corona and Dos Equis have pushed Cinco de Mayo out in front in terms of warm-weather holidays, too. Might as well round it off and say that if summer starts sometime (any time) in May, then when May starts, summer does too.

And in fact we found ourselves hopping this past weekend from a birthday party to a pig roast to an actual Cinco de Mayo celebration, and the weather was obligingly summery (which in Virginia means warm and humid, oh goodness yes was it humid) and the ice cream van managed to serendipitously show up at the pig roast. I also mowed the entire lawn on Saturday, including the entirely-too-steep-for-safety-but-what-can-you-do side yard. And my dear wife, alarmed by my blog-kvetching about the dearth of new music in my orbit, made sure that the satellite radio was tuned to the new alt-rock station at every available moment (defined as moments when we weren’t trying to catch the scores of what ended up being an O’s sweep of the Red Sox, to which I add: BWAAHAHAHAHA!)

So, just to serve general notice, as far as I (and therefore this here blog) care to consider it, summer has officially arrived. Dress accordingly.