Monday, July 11, 2005

Summery

As D. and Ph. make final preps to leave for Kamanzi, Kenya day-after-tomorrow, I've been:

• thinking about how nice it would be to have a dog.  More specifically, the $700 pug puppy I saw at the mall this morning.  I still suffer bouts of dog guilt (fleeting though they are, both guilt and dogs).  Our lease?  No pets.  But this is a college town.  Leases are writ to be violated.
• not itching the phantom poison ivy I haven't yet caught.  The difference between a watch and a warning.  Or so my not-yet-red-and-burning ankle skin suggests.  Landlord is abroad, too, so I pushed the mower around this small lot yesterday.  Yes, those were nubs of poison ivy growing in the lawn, then chopped and sprayed in small bits around my socks and shins.  Certain of it.
• to the bone doctor for the third time in six weeks.  Today he cleared Ph. to resume all normal activities.  Are you sure his metatarsals can take it?
• non-stop tinkering with a perl script, the online journal, a domain change for a little side project I'm involved with and teaching.  Teaching: this was the weekend (transitioning from 5-of-8 to 6-of-8) when the workload spikes double.  And it lingers into this week for a few more relatively work-intensive days.  But I can't complain: reading and writing back to writing with vigor, vitality.
• wondering whether it'll be a family outing to Green Lakes or Southwick Beach tomorrow.  I have yet to swim this summer?
• reconciling the severe slow-down in reading pace I've experienced now that I'm reading just to read rather than reading against deadlines.  No crisis, this, but I haven't been reading as expediently during the summer months as I projected I might.  A slowing suited to rejuvenation.

And so D. and Ph. will be flying to Detroit then Amsterdam then Nairobi, leaving for about fourteen days.  Once there, D.'s leading a teacher's workshop for grades 1-3 on the science of simple machines (who says incline planes are simpler than pulleys?), and Ph. is involved with some other stuff.  All in all, an exciting trip; I'd love be along on it except that I'd have to concede the web connection for ten days and this fast-paced summer teaching couldn't withstand it.  So instead, I'm going to be moping around Syracuse, missing D. and Ph., looking for stuff to do--besides teaching, reading.  I'm pretty sure I'm helping a friend move from Syracuse to Ithaca.  After that, maybe I'll throw the bike in the Element and do a bit of Central NY bicycle-n-photo blogging--Finger Lakes or the Erie Canal from here to Rome.  Something, anyway.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 11, 2005 10:03 PM to Unspecified