happiness

Strawberry milkshake heaven.

It's all I'll ever need.

What can ruin a 100-degree, sunny, summer day?

A stuffed up nose and a foggy head and a sore throat.

What's the cure?

An all day nap in the air conditioning.

getting up early and going to bed early, just how summer should be.

I love love love my new summer schedule. I'm like a normal person with evenings off. I get to go to work in the morning and actually spend the evenings at home. Or playing tennis. With friends. at the beach. Barbecuing. It's amazing what a normal life can be like.

I'm very excited to tell you that I have officially converted Ryan from the land of Windows. His poor computer has had a short and tragic life thus far. I won't say anything against the company that my dear mother used to work for, but they just don't compare.

Today, Ryan's battery has given up hope. No matter how much willpower and logic Ryan puts in, the battery does nothing. All that law school hasn't done much for him yet.

My lovely little macbook is trying not gloat. But its hard. My computer is more than twice as old as his and still working smoothly. After all, things are supposed to get better with age: wine, cheese, sisters.

So while Ryan spent his afternoon talking with some tech person who knows where, trying to stop the endless problems with his laptop, I got to do . . . well, whatever I want.

He says the worst part of the whole ordeal was when the customer service person asked him why he didn't visit their online site to solve his dead computer problems instead of calling on the phone. Just think about that one for a sec.

hiring a maid.

Yes, my blog posts come in spurts. Deal with it.

I pulled out and dusted off my ipod this morning. It was a last resort in order to motivate myself to clean the toilets. (It's ridiculous how quickly summertime laziness kicks in, for some reason the more time you have to do something the harder it is to get started and do it).

Anyways, I had Phantom of the Opera songs running through my head this morning, so I decided to start there as I pulled out my cleaning supplies.

By the time I had finished the bathrooms and gotten through half of the kitchen, I was fully engrossed in the story and the music. Unfortunately, just after one of my favorite songs was ending, my ipod stopped. Then I remembered that the second cd of the sound track has been lost for quite a while and that's where my music stopped too.

Usually it doesn't bother me, but today... let's just say, I haven't gotten any more than half the kitchen clean. The music stopped and so did I.

The main reason, besides my short attention span, was that all I could think about was the last song of the musical. Its the one at the climax of the story, where all the characters sing together and I cried when I first watched it.

But no, my music stops way before that.

So I pulled out my computer and decided to just buy it online. I found all those songs in the second half of the story that I had been missing. That is, except the one that I really wanted. That one you can't buy. Who makes these kinds of decisions? And why do they want to ruin my day?

I'm tempted to call my sister and demand that she send me the dvd. Just so I can listen to that last song and get it out of my system.

Now all hope of finishing my cleaning is officially lost. As well as any hope of doing anything productive today. Good thing its summer.

Summer Bummer

I've been trying to renew life into my blog for quite a while. You may have stumbled upon a modified blog face only to find it back to its original green boringness the next time you visited. But now, I finally actually changed it. After 5 years.

Hopefully this one won't be stuck here for the next five.

In honor of summer sunsets that I can no longer watch on the beach, as well as the extended hours of outdoor daydreaming that are not paired with taking cuttings or painting buildings: my new blog.

Although summer weather started long ago (at least for those of us whose weather is not coming directly off the freezing Pacific), this week feels like the first week of summer because school is officially out. That leaves me with long mornings to sit on my deck and read through the stack of book I recently picked up at the library.

This month's summer bummer, however, is that Ryan and my schedules are completely opposite. I spend the mornings in a quiet apartment while he's at the courthouse, and he spends the afternoons and evenings at home...by himself.

The good news is that his internship is half over (I honestly don't know how that has happened so quickly), and my summer schedule will start soon, so we should be able to spend a little time together. We are planning on spending that most of that time at the beach. Because it is way too hot, and the one thing the Atlantic has going for it is lovely, warm water.

So summer can never really be a bummer, since it is, after all, summer.