I am definitely in the “what day is it” stage of summer, also known as the part where I’ve a little bit given up and am just riding it out to the end. It’s certainly a huge irony in my life that I get this five-or-six-week summer break, the kind of unstructured vacation time that many people would desperately want, and I’m not any good at it. Temperamentally I prefer more structure–this was one of the big lessons of grad school, for, me, discovering the extent to which I absolutely do not thrive with a lack of structure and oversight. I like my job. I miss my office. (Are my plants still alive? Hilda in Maintenance usually waters all the office plants over the summer but I thought we were trying to give Maintenance some time off this summer.) (Oh god, the plants. I’ve filled a lot of the space in my office with plants, windowsills and bookshelf tops. It’s a small office but I think I’m up to eight plants. In the spring of 2020, when school closed in early March I wasn’t that worried about the plants, but in April when it became clear we weren’t going back, I wrote to the head of school requesting permission to come to campus to rescue my plants. They gave me a time window to access my office and directions to not enter any other spaces on campus. I loaded the plants into totebags and ferried them all back to my car, filled the backseat with pothos and begonia and snake plants–I don’t even like the snake plant, that one isn’t mine, it was in the office when I moved in, but I felt responsible for it anyway. And then I had to find space for all those plants in our apartment, which was already too full now that no one ever left it.)
My brain is all to-do-lists right now; we never scheduled Declan’s dental checkup, not to mention my own, and he and I both need haircuts before the first day of school. We’re going today for our post-travel Covid tests. My annual physical this week went well but because I am Old they’ve referred me for a bunch of screening tests and I need to figure out the scheduling on those. There are a million house-and-moving tasks that we can’t even really get started on until we have the closing date set, I need to figure out the logistics around dropoff and lunches for Zoo Camp next week, and jesus christ I probably need to buy even more masks for Declan because no matter how much I wash them we always need more, he gets marker stains on them or bites little holes in them like a gerbil. The guidebook says that today’s tarot card, Strength, is about inner strength, mastery of emotions. Still working on that.