Shucks

At this point I suppose maybe I should assert that I simply went on Memorial Day vacation a bit early? There were a variety of reasons for me to leave off the blogging last week, none of them really worth digging into here, the biggest one probably being simple, boring old burnout. I know that there’s a part of my brain that really craves structure and repetition and whatnot for their own sake, but I also suspect there’s an equally deep-seated desire in me to have rules in place explicitly so that they can be broken. The nice thing about holding myself to an expectation of daily weekday posts is that if I start to feel overburdened I can just give myself permission to blow off the daily posts; it feels like I’m shirking something (which admittedly can feel pretty good) but the stakes are low and the repercussions are zilch. It’s the old joke about how long-distance running is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer: it feels so good when you stop.

In any case, Memorial Day has come and gone and I am going to climb back on the horse. The actual long weekend itself was pleasant, especially since it somehow managed to combine my wife being off from work with a lack of major plans or traveling. Saturday we had a very casual take-out dinner with some friends in D.C., and even the extra traffic from Rolling Thunder didn’t cause us too much delay in either direction. Monday saw us observe our various patriotic and civic duties, including stimulating the economy by taking advantage of a Memorial Day furniture sale to acquire a new master bedroom set (really just a bedframe and his-n-her dressers, but that’s really all we needed) and also buying some new summer clothes for our munchkins, as well as me mowing the lawn before it got too aggravating to the neighbors, although that had to wait until about 8 p.m. Monday night. We also, of course, remembered the troops.

But for my money, summer officially began on Sunday evening as we got ready for dinner, because the menu that night was simple cookout fare including burgers, dogs, baked beans and corn on the cob, and part of my prep duties included husking said corn. Since it was the first time this year the corn has been in season, and the first chance I’ve had to strip ears, sitting out on the back deck peeling leaves and silk into a bag, it’s the first time I’ve really felt like it was summertime (as opposed to overly warm springtime). And the entire dinner was delicious if I do say so.

So that catches us up, more or less. In theory I should have plenty to yammer about after a week of keeping things to myself, but we shall see how long it takes before I’m scraping for subject matter once again. Hopefully I can make it to the big family vacation in August without another major outage, but only time will tell.