Archives - Weekly Update

This Friday finds me on the way to Chicago. And no, I did not fly in for the Blackhawks Stanley Cup celebration, though it was to overlap with my arrival. Instead, my early morning flight was cancelled due to violent weather last night that kept my plane from arriving. May I saw two words? Mercury retrograde. Yes, it came back Wednesday for three weeks of communications snafus. If I make it back from Chicago on Monday, I will be happy. When Mercury is roaming crazily, anything can happen.

I'm looking forward to today for a few reasons. I LOVE the first day of summer and that it brings the day of the year with the most daylight in the Northern Hemisphere. This time of year, I am energized by the bright light that surrounds me, and this week we have had a few days of spectacular weather.

More importantly, around our house today, we celebrate a milestone as my younger son, Cory, graduates from high school. Wow, that was a FAST four years. He’s headed to the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the fall, where he received a really nice merit scholarship to study mechanical engineering; he inherited his dad’s engineering brain. This whole week, I have been ticking off a whole lot of lasts, and I confess that I am pretty emotional about them. This is the end of a really big chapter for us, and when I focus on it, a big lump forms in my throat. I do know that lots of good things are ahead, and I look forward to watching Cory as he makes his mark in the world. By the way, when he was in middle school, he read a book a day. This is his first summer without required summer reading, and I think THIS is among what is making him really happy as he graduates.

Rain and cicadas were the backdrop of this week. We are experiencing both in earnest. For those who do not know about the cicadas, here’s a quick study from The Washington Post from May 29th: “The ground temperature officially reached 64 degrees last week and Brood II of the 17-year periodical cicadas have emerged in large pockets from Virginia to New York. The cicadas will have four-to-six weeks to mate and lay eggs before they die. For the next several weeks, their mating calls will be quite loud. In July, however, it gets quite bleak for the bugs. They all die.” Well, right now there is a whole lot of mating going on in our neighborhood. On Sunday morning, I found my husband on the patio reading with noise-cancelling headphones on to drown out the drone of the sounds of nature. We joke that sex literally is in the air all around us! And while we have had a lot of rain, it has not drowned out these little buggers.

Just when I thought I was making nice headway through my “to be read” pile, along came BookExpo America. My pile of reading treasures grew enormously last weekend. For someone who is addicted to books, a new season of publishing solidifies my “junkie” status. On Saturday, as we were trudging to the car in the wicked heat and humidity, I told Greg that I wanted to run up to the office and get a book that I wanted to read. He looked at me like I was daft, knowing how many books we had at home and in his computer bag. But I had heard Elizabeth L. Silver talk about THE EXECUTION OF NOA P. SINGLETON at a breakfast, and I really wanted to read it. I knew Greg was as tired as I was, and I did not push this point, opting to get the air conditioning going full throttle in the car. So I have this book to look forward to this weekend!