Despite returning from band camp mid-August, I haven’t yet fully unpacked the last bits of sandy gear still stowed in the garage. I was back to work for a week before heading off to Chicago, my favorite city (sorry Detroit, you are a close second). We stayed in a South Loop loft with a view of an Al Capone hangout and a slice of the river and watched “Murder She Wrote” reruns. We visited the Gilded Age Driehaus Museum and the Art Institute for the Gustave Caillebotte exhibit and hosted a happy hour for some of Brandon’s college friends. The highlight was joining the Gallagher family reunion with 50,000 other Oasis fans on a windy, cool evening at Soldier Field.
Then after we got home, we had a few days to do laundry and soothe the cats’ mad feelings and catch up at our respective jobs, and we welcomed Brandon’s family to stay for a few days.
My kiddo’s last year of high school has now started and it will be an autumn of marching band and football games and band competitions and “lasts”. The weather has taken a cool turn so the afternoons are honeyed and the evenings downright crisp. I’m sure we’ll have at least one more return to summer weather before it’s all said and done.
Watching: La Vuelta (last of the cycling Grand Tours for 2025)
Reading: I’m in between books right now after finishing two excellent reads – “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones and “Silver Nitrate” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Making: a custom bag charm by request (my kiddo wearing hers around is great advertising), a pair of vanilla socks that I started during band camp, and if you can believe it I still have to finish the Perfect Knit T-shirt which I said I’d do in July.
Wearing: shorter hair after getting 6 inches chopped off; my Adidas sambas, boyfriend jeans, loving my Katie Kime monogrammed Oxford, and a new pink Teddie sweater from J. Crew.
No schmaltzy title quote about August – let’s cut right to the chase – it’s August!!
July was long. It’s Tour de France month around here and being a good fan of professional grand tour cycling is a time commitment. For three weeks in July, Brandon and I watch four to five hours of stage racing every night except for rest days, and then usually another hour or so in the mornings listening to podcasts and reading news about the cyclists, the teams, and the stages. It’s fun to be that obsessive about something but by the time the peloton rolls into Paris we are ready for the podiums; we shed our tears and reclaim our lives and free time. (But not before we saw my favorite cyclist Wout van Aert take a blistering victory in a shockingly thrilling stage 21 on Montmartre!)
In spite of our commitment to the Tour, we also spent time at our pool club, ran a 5k, went to a couple of local parades, annoyed the neighborhood with fireworks, and spent a lot of time indoors because our neighbors did a complete overhaul of their yard, paving, and landscaping that took two months and involved seemingly every possible variety of heavy machinery. They luckily escaped to one of their other homes during the construction, which saw our street clogged with construction vehicles for the aforementioned two months, but as we are humbler types, we simply had to crank up the air conditioning for white noise and become friends with the workers (who were all really nice fellows). Then our air conditioner wheezed to a halt and one of Brandon’s friends Frankensteined a new motor for it that has been happily cranking away keeping us cool ever since and we’ll replace the whole old unit in the fall.
Looking ahead, August will be a busy month. The kiddo is wading into her senior year activities and every once in awhile I realize that the clock is ticking down on her childhood. I am then seized with such a wave of complex emotions that I can’t begin to process without sinking to the floor in a fetal position, so I push it off and like Scarlett O’Hara, tell myself that I will think about it tomorrow. In the meantime, she asked me to chaperone her final marching band camp and God help me I agreed so for a week later this month I will be overseeing a cabin of band campers in a remote location without cell service in the forests of western Michigan.
In the meantime, this weekend I have a lot of free time – Brandon is at Jazzfest in Ohio with his childhood friends. The kiddo and I have the last college tour on Monday, and before then I want to buy new porch flowers as my wave petunias crapped out mid-July, and break my week of non-running. I did great in July with running and then this last week just felt totally fatigued and unmotivated. Last night the kiddo went to bed early (she’s working a lot of hours outside at the garden nursery this summer) and I whooped it up on my bachelorette Friday night. I watched “Mr. & Mrs. Murder” on Hulu and ate a thin crust pizza and went to bed late and left my socks on the living room floor and did ZERO KNITTING even though I have two projects that I’d planned on finishing in July.
I’m almost looking forward to having some band camp stories to tell later this month. I’m told the food is good but in my head this is how I picture myself.
The days are long and bright here in Michigan, with the big western sky full of light in the shifting clouds until after 9pm. It’s my usual season of languid ennui that has not fully come to fruition yet. I love taking a bit of time off in July and just going summer-feral, but I’ve had to keep my nose to the grindstone instead. So I’ve been trying to grab all the time I can in between to read, run, and be inspired with making and crafting.
I have a few finished projects that I’ve been saving up to show you. First – like many of us I had several terra cotta pots in the garage and when I saw this Pinterest tutorial I was smitten. I think they turned out pretty well! Two quick observations- one, the supplies were a little pricey – the mesh stencils alone were about $20, and I needed to purchase all the craft paints (white, brown, and black) and spray sealer. The upside is that I have supplies leftover to make many more of these if I want to, or find different projects I can use them for. I do think that I may need some different sealer, because once they were planted with flowers and soil, they have started to discolor a bit. I don’t mind it and think it adds to the vintage look, but hopefully they last.
I have also been making loads of simple earrings and bag charms. I’m not much of a jewelry person but I do love a minimalist earring. I also have a deep and nostalgic love for seed beads so I’ve been trying my hand at several different variations. I’ve ended up with so many new supplies that I actually opened a little Etsy shop to get rid of some of my finished objects (a girl only needs so many earrings). —-> see Etsy icon on my sidebar.
It’s a win-win because I can test my designs first and modify until they turn out well – in terms of aesthetics and durability. I just keep, repurpose, or give away the projects that don’t turn out quite well enough to list. It’s more work than it looks, an Etsy shop, and my photography skills are definitely in need of improvement. A better camera is on my wish list (which will also come in handy for my daughter’s senior year in high school)! These (below left) my favorite recent finished objects. I modeled them after a pair I saw while out shopping with my daughter and used Miyuki seed beads in the “Art Deco” color.
I did a beaded anklet for my daughter, which she liked until the hemp cord stretched out and the cheap beads I used (remnants from my old original bead box) began to lose their paint. She is a great tester – her job at a plant nursery really puts my designs through the wringer (particularly when she has to water her most-loathed plant nemesis, the roses). So I tweaked and modified and in my search for better beads, I found some that are made from recycled wooden skateboard decks! She likes the vibe and I was able to modify the sizing and the adjustability to accommodate for the relax in the hemp.
Lastly, knitting away. I am not much of a garment knitter but I am DETERMINED to finish this Perfect Knit Tshirt by Originally Lovely for Lion Brand Yarn. I had to rip it back once already because a mid-project try-on revealed that it was just too big. And I believe this yarn (Lion Coboo) will grow. It was a setback but I’ve just separated for sleeves and am going gangbusters on the body so with any luck, a July finish? (Don’t bet on it.)
I hope you are finding time to be inspired and creative and try your hand at some new things if you are so inclined!
What’s everyone up to for the long US holiday weekend? I’m off today so it will be a nice 4 days for me. I haven’t taken one long vacation this summer, just a few long weekends, which have been welcomed. This week felt like a really long one with storms and a power outage one day as well as the kid’s first marching band performance at the first home football game. (I don’t like the early season games – it’s so fricking hot and last night the stadium was almost as full of bees and wasps as it was half-dressed hormonally charged teens.)
The kid started school on Monday which feels weird to me as a Gen-Xer who always started school after Labor Day. Lots of memories of that last sad Labor Day weekend (possibly spent watching the Jerry Lewis telethon on my grandparents’ screen porch) which I usually couldn’t enjoy because of the looming back to school jitters. However she has today off so assuming she gets up in time we’re going to do some back to school shopping. Otherwise, this weekend I want to get a couple of runs in, have breakfast with my bestie tomorrow, and do some cleanup in the yard. We still have lots of branches down from the storms.
Oh and my knitting mojo ramps up as we near the ‘-ber’ months. Finished a pair of socks for the kid and have pulled out another sock wip to hopefully make good progress on this weekend – maybe listening to my current audiobook “The Villa” by Rachel Hawkins.
Hope everyone has a very safe and happy Labor Day.
It feels so good to post a finished object! These are the “Vanilla Socks on 9” Circulars” which is a fantastic pattern by Kay Litton aka Crazy Sock Lady. The yarn is Knitting Lizard Fibers Super Soft Sock (75% superwash merino & 25% nylon) in the “Carlson’s Fishery” colorway which was a special offering via Wool & Honey’s Sleeping Bear Yarn Club.
July has flown by and here we are with August ahead, which used to be a summer month (albeit an elderly one) but is now the back to school month. The kid has a driving test on Sunday, and then the hustle begins with pre-band camp, band camp, her sweet sixteen, picture day, and then the first day of school before Labor Day.
Brandon is still in Iowa but we managed to carve out a long weekend for a Chicago museum spree. (And gosh, I love Chicago. Maybe being a Midwesterner makes me biased, but that city has a vibe and an easygoing indifferent accessibility – a history and a style – like none other.) We stayed in a glass loft on the South Loop with a view of the rail and the river on one side and a glittering expanse of Lake Michigan on the other. It was blistering hot and stormed at night, lightning brighter than the city lights all around us.
“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
We saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘My New Yorks’ exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art and although I’ve never been a huge fan of her flowers or Southwest motifs, seeing the city through her eyes and brush changed my opinion on her altogether.
“New York Night” by Georgia O’Keeffe
“The Shelton with Sunspots”
I’d vastly prefer my mister to be here, but with him gone, the structure of the summer has softened and turned uncertain. With more time to myself, I turn inward. There have been lots of summer evenings on the front porch with books, watching the sun wheel through the western sky and come down in sprays of green and gold through the leaves of our old tulip tree. I’ve read some really good things this summer – I loved a book of Kate Atkinson short stories ‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’, and Lev Grossman’s ‘The Bright Sword’ was wonderful (and the last sentence flooded me with unexpected emotion and tears). I am reading a fantastic biography of Georgia O’Keeffe that reads almost like a novel and having these other little worlds to dive into after the workday is done (and sometimes before evening calls with my colleagues in Japan as we negotiate a thorny contract) has been like a swim in a very cool pool when you’re hot and sticky.
I head out on a business trip tomorrow which will likely be a short and uninspiring parade of a boxy interstate hotel and strip mall restaurants and then home for a weekend of hopefully not much by the pool with Georgia as she meets Alfred Steiglitz. There is a cardinal sitting in the pine tree outside of my open home office window singing for the feeders to be refilled. August ahead looks – busy? and short with all of the activity. It is a birthday month for a few very important women in my life – mother, grandmother, and the kid. Anyway, I hope to greet it on the porch with a book and possibly armed with a knitting needle. Be well and enjoy the last heavy breath of summertime.
The kiddo’s summer job at a nearby plant nursery is costing me a fortune even with the “employee mom” discount. She doesn’t have her license for a couple more months so every time I pick her up or drop her off (or make a trip to deliver something she forgot – hat, sunglasses, sunscreen – or bring her Dunkin’ or Starbucks- because I am a good mom slash pushover) I see some new plant that makes my eyes go googly. And let’s not even talk about the times she texts me a picture of some flower or vine and I tell her I’ll be there asap to bring it home.
birthday month commences
It’s been the last full week of school with all the accompanying hustle. Even though my last real post ended with how much of a withdrawn introvert I am, since then I’ve experienced a burst of vitality. In the past week I’ve gotten the kid’s physical taken care of for the next school year, helped out with soccer uniform return, gotten us pedicures, run a Board meeting, run a Shareholder meeting, negotiated with a major automaker or two, mowed the lawn, met up with my bestie for breakfast, checked out our local art fair, planted, run 10 miles (not all at the same time), and gotten us / her to work, school, and band on time. This is no small feat and my Hobonichi is smoking.
I’m sleeping fewer hours – the long Michigan days have a discernible effect on my energy. It’s not fully dark now until after 9pm and I feel almost manic with vigor. This will wane along with the daylight as we move through the summer solstice but for now I am weirdly – awake.
The other night my eyes opened at the ungodly hour of 3:30 to the sound of a single disoriented bird singing. I listened for awhile, then got up for a drink of water. In the bathroom, I leaned on the sill of the open window. The backyard was bathed in moonlight and it was creeping through the pines at an almost perceptible pace. A clutch of deer drifted in absolute silence through my garden, pausing only to nose among the plants for their evening nibble. They moved like ghosts and for a long time I stood there and watched them, almost unsure they were real. The solitary bird sang on and I thought how odd it was to be awake and see the citizens of night, whose world it is, in this night land, when we are all asleep.
*”the hours rise up putting off starsand it is dawn into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems” – e.e. cummings
Labor Day weekend has been very hot and sunny in SE Michigan. As always, I look forward to the cooler days of fall, and am ready to put the summer behind me. I love Michigan summers and they have to be valued and spent wisely, but Labor Day feels like the real New Year. I’m prepared for shorter, darker days with a more rigid routine of school for the kid and work for me, with more office days per week.
The kiddo and I hit the outlets for some shopping on Friday, and having some new clothes made me conscious of the stagnant energy in my closets. So after a day of pounding the outlet pavements, I came home and filled six bags of donation clothes, shoes, bedding and linens. Goodbye dusty ankle boots that in pre-pandemic days, I wore to work with trousers that are now too small. Goodbye too-tight sweaters and summer tops that don’t spark joy. It made me super happy to hang up some nice new things in my closet and see the empty shelf space.
Brandon & I met up with his cousin for drinks at the brewery downtown. We went to the nursery where we bought a gorgeous new azure blue pottery planter for the patio, half off, and fall plants for the containers on the porch. We ordered a couple of full size skeletons to sit on the porch for Halloween and I pulled my basil plants and dried the leaves & flowers. I spent time on the porch reading until it just got too hot and we watched the Vuelta de Espana (one of the professional cycling grand tours). We talked about fall bucket lists that include trips to the orchard and the Renaissance Festival.
It’s going to be record breaking hot today. The porch and patio are scorching hot and the hummingbird feeder is attracting all of the angry bees who, unlike me, aren’t looking forward to the change of seasons. I don’t want to go to the crowded pool for the last day festivities and instead, am planning a day on the couch in pajamas, napping and reading, and getting ready for the week (and the fall) ahead.
July is strange – the whole month feels like a weird suspension of normal routine, with the 4th holiday, many people in my office taking vacations, the kid at camp, and the Tour de France. This week felt particularly disjointed – bouts of torrential rain and oppressive humidity, two very productive and busy office days, and many hours spent with the Tour.
The Tour has been good this year except for my overwhelming disappointment that Mark Cavendish – an oldster at the ripe age of 38 – crashed out and broke his collarbone in what he’d declared was his last TDF before retirement. He was trying to break the record of the most stage wins (he’s currently tied at 34 with Eddie Merckx). It was a good lesson not to get too attached to any one rider or team because it’s a fairly brutal sport and you can love someone and they can get knocked out in a millisecond and then you still have endless stages ahead of you to feel disappointed. In addition to the 4-5 hours a day viewing the stages, we also spend another 1-2 hours listening to Lance Armstrong’s podcast The Move to analyze each stage. Yes, I know that Lance is a douche but since it’s very difficult to find any mainstream news coverage of the Tour, my July is filled with his mellifluous boasting and I’ve come to enjoy it heartily.
In other news this week – solid office days (office days have become a vital part of my week and although I enjoy my work from home days, I’m finding that I need the anchoring of a couple in-person days, too), fresh salads from the new office lunch delivery service, a couple of exceptionally humid morning / lunchtime runs on work from home days, and doing my first Cologuard. This may be TMI but you know, health matters. It feels inappropriate to poop in a jar and have to take the conspicuous box to the UPS store (they could at least give you an anonymous box) to mail it somewhere – but that’s life these days. And dear God, those Cologuard people will run you to the ends of the freaking earth to get that jar back. I think I got at least twenty calls, emails, and texts from that happy little toilet so I was relieved to be able to dump it on the UPS counter and be done with the damn thing.
The kid has been at camp with no phone. She’s written a few letters, and I purchase email credits so I can send her an email every day that she’s gone. In one of her letters, she described writing snail mail letters to me like ‘screaming into a void and not getting any answer back’ and that’s how I feel about the daily emails I send her, too. So imagine my surprise when she convinced her unit director to let her call me on Thursday afternoon because she was feeling a smidge homesick and just wanted to hear my voice. My kiddo has always been brave, extroverted, social, and the type who from very early on didn’t want to hold my hand when I walked her into school, so, in the summer she turns 15, for her to want to write me letters from camp and call me just to hear my voice – well, that is quite gratifying for me.
I’m reading ‘A Deadly Education’ by Naomi Novik, which is sort of a violent and edgy Hogwarts school tale mixed with a bit of ‘Hunger Games’ and I’m really liking it so far. It’s part of a trilogy and I picked it up from the library after seeing the most recent one in a bookstore in Cincinnati. I am hoping the weekend will be full of some front porch reading and wine drinking, although Sunday will be a completely lost day as I travel 6+ hours round trip to fetch the kid from camp. It’s worth it – I can’t wait to hug her – and July rolls on.
Living in Michigan, summers are valuable and fleeting. We can reliably count on a solid 3 months of good weather – some years more, some years less – and that good weather comes after months of cold. I love autumn, and the time between Halloween and Christmas, when hygge coziness is in full effect. I despise January thru early April, but understand that maybe I wouldn’t love summer as much as I do without the contrasting months of cold and dark.
Summertime means long days, light until well after 9pm. It means hearing the deep tones of the wind chimes through windows open to catch an occasional breeze. It means gaining an extra room in our house, because we spend so much time on the front porch, with snacks, books, evening drinks, morning coffees, my knitting. Saying hello to neighbors passing by with kids in strollers or walking their dogs.
It means morning running and coming home sweaty to putter around with the hose, watering my flowers and filling the bird bath and then sitting for awhile in the sunshine to cool down.
It means the Tour de France! 21 stages of complete absorption in the world of cycling, several hours a day of watching and more hours spent listening to the podcasts analyzing each stage.
It means long drives to the west side of the state, busy roads becoming more rural and enclosed with greenery, to take the kid to her twelve-day music and art camp and then pick her up. Sitting in the shell with the sun on my neck on that final Sunday listening to the kids perform their musical selections (usually with sock knitting on my lap).
Summer means knowing that it is a season that won’t last and doing everything you can to soak up that sunshine and heat and store it in your bones so you have no regrets when the darkness returns.
Happy July! The last few days have been rife with terrible air quality from the Canadian wildfires, rage and disappointment at our ‘pay for play’ SCOTUS, and long days thanks to the kid’s Drivers’ Ed. But we are now in July and I have goals.
Before I get into that, though, when we last spoke, I was getting ready to head to Cincinnati with my daughter, her friends, and our mom troop. Unfortunately, my emotional battery did not hold its charge very well and I spent the first ~24 hours with a nervous stomach. We AirBNB’d a massive Victorian in the historic Walnut Hills neighborhood, which promised two floors and sleeping space for 22. We gave the girls the top floor, with their own kitchenette, bathroom, and living room, and the moms bunked on the floor below them. The house may have slept 22 but only if you included couches and multiple folks per bed. This, my friends, is not something I’d be capable of, so I guiltily scoped out a terrible futon in the turret room where I could at least pull a curtain and be alone.
The girls had an absolute blast and between my sick stomach and the endless stairs to haul luggage, food, water, and cooking supplies up to our roost, I lost 4.2 pounds.
Despite the constant threat of storms, we managed to get the girls to Kings’ Island, which is a favorite for my little family since Brandon worked there as a teenager. It was a perfect day – the park was not crowded and the kids didn’t have to wait longer than 25 minutes for any ride. The kiddo has been there before so she played what she called ‘airport dad’ with her friends and gave them the deluxe tour. Even the girls who weren’t too hyped about roller coasters became converts and we closed the park down at 10 with fireworks and the light show. The moms were all impressed with KI – it’s clean and compact with a high concentration of fun coasters and a charming little ‘Main Street’ with fountains, cafe tables under umbrellas, and sweets and souvenir shops under the shade of the ‘Eiffel Tower’. And something about an amusement park in summertime – even the moms got into a lighthearted, almost childlike state – dancing with Snoopy, buying fudge and candy apples, and one of the moms even buying a stuffed Bob Ross doll.
Also among the girl goals was ‘ shopping in cute outfits’ (hahaha – I love teenagers) so the next day, after one of the girls made waffles, we took them to the mall and they spent major bank at Starbucks, Sephora and Ulta. By all measures, a successful trip.
The Canadian wildfires created major air quality issues for us last week, which seem to be diminishing now. The kiddo finished up Drivers’ Ed and hopefully, we can pick up her permit before she heads off for 12 days at Blue Lake Fine Arts camp.
Altogether, June was a bit of a bust in terms of my goals – I didn’t get as many running miles in, or stay in my healthy eating zone for as much as I’d have liked. July will hopefully be better, less busy with the kid at camp, so my goals are:
50 running miles;
Healthy eating zone 15 days;
10-minute daily yoga sessions at least 4x / week;
10-minute daily knitting at least 4x / week.
I decided to pick up yoga again a couple of months ago when I temporarily lost my running mojo. I made it to several classes at my local studio. And I was inspired by one of my fellow mom tribe in Cinci, who brought her travel mat and did quick morning yoga videos every day we were there. Even if I can’t get to the studio for a full class, I can certainly fit in a 10-minute daily session several times a week. And since July is Tour de France month, wherein Brandon and I are absorbed in several hours of tour coverage every day, I can easily hit those knitting goals.
I hope everyone is looking forward to a safe and healthy 4th. I am working today, but will be off tomorrow for the holiday and Wednesday for kiddo camp dropoff, which is a 6-hour round trip. Be well and talk soon.
Six Ten 