In case you have been sitting in anticipation of a follow-up to my last post, I did not end up buying any shoes or boots.  I am sorry if I caused you any sleepless nights.

I guest blogged over at CoMO Whine and Dine today. I have been reading that blog for awhile. Long ago, I had the idea of writing a blog about being vegetarian in Columbia, but did not get it off the ground. Since they were looking for new participants over there, I decided I should be one of them as I have a different perspective as a vegetarian. I will submit a few more guest blogs in the next few weeks and see if it’s a good fit. Like I need a new place to write, right? I don’t have enough blogs already.

Last week was a long and crazy week. I started it off by seeing Winter’s Bone with a couple of friends. It’s been at Ragtag for weeks and weeks now, which goes to show that Columbia loves it some local films. It is set in the Ozarks of Missouri and was filmed near Springfield. It also has done pretty well with critics and festivals: a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating, a score of 90 on Metacritic, and it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival. I hate to say all that and then say that I didn’t love it, but… I didn’t love it. I thought it looked pretty authentic, but there were a lot of parts that didn’t ring true for me. It was okay. It was spectacular for a Missouri film, let’s put it that way.

On Tuesday, I volunteered at the Missouri River 340 race.  I really, really enjoyed myself.  I signed up for it on a lark.  I like to volunteer, and I don’t know anything about river races or kayaks or canoes or even boats.  It turned out to be a great time.  I learned a lot.  I volunteered in an overnight shift, and the weather was perfect on a night with a full moon.  The racers would appear around the bend of the river, only visible by their headlights or the small LED lamps on their boats.  I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I cannot wait to volunteer again next year.
I took the picture above on the river with the light of the full moon. I think it turned out really cool.

On Wednesday, I played my weekly trivia game and then went to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops in concert in front of the Blue Note.  The concert was free, so there were a lot of people there just hanging out with drinks, talking in circles.  I had to be pushy to get to the front where I could actually hear the music over the chatting.  That was particularly annoying, because CCD are exceptionally talented musicians and it was kind of wasted in that environment.  But once I was close enough to hear, most of the people around me were really into the music, and it was a good show.  I’m only disappointed that it took me awhile to push through to the front.

Here, you should listen to this.  This is awesome.  I actually, embarrassingly enough, don’t usually love instrumental songs, but there aren’t lyrics worthy of this tune, honestly.

I love the hell out of the CDs this group has put out, but they were fantastic live.  Really amazing.

On Thursday, I was heading home from work when I got rear-ended at a stoplight, pushing my car into the car in front of me.  It caused a bunch of damage to my car, some of which I suspect is mechanical, not just cosmetic.  So I get to haul it around town for appraisals and estimates and eventually have it actually fixed.  I had a rental car over the weekend, but I returned it last night and borrowed one of my dad’s cars.  I am much less fearful of doing something stupid in Dad’s car than in a rental.  That didn’t keep me from calling him in a panic today at lunch when I thought all of the oil had drained out of the car in the PetsMart parking lot.  (It hadn’t.)  Anyway, fun times are being had, car-wise, in my life at this time.

I spent the weekend mostly exhausted and hanging out with family.  Tracy was in town for the last time in a long time, so we partied appropriately.  I had to clean my house in a hurry on Sunday morning, but that’s for the best.

This is a short week because I leave on Thursday night to go to KC, and on Friday I will accompany Tracy and her three cats and her parents and their dog to Portland, Oregon, by car caravan.  I am ambivalent about this trip.  On one hand, I love road tripping and I like to help people move in a self-satisfied sort of way.  Tracy is particularly bad and I am particularly good about shoving her cats into cat carriers and dealing with their harmonized yowls of discontent on car trips, and I have scars to prove my skills.  I offered, long ago, to help with this move, though I think I was thinking more in terms of moving her to, say, Cleveland or Pittsburgh and not Portland, Oregon.  It is a very, very long car trip to make with three unhappy cats.  Not to mention the ex-wife and former in-laws and a dog who has never, ever liked me.  So that’s the other side of the coin.  I will get to drive through Utah and Idaho, which I am excited about, even though it will just be interstate highway.  And there will be roughly 36 hours in Portland next week, which is great in itself.  And, ambivalent or not, I am doing it.  I leave on Thursday.

It’s really been a summer of trips for me.  I am very happy about that.  13 states, and three of them new to me.  Very exciting.  I love to add states to my “States I’ve Visited” list.  I have a definite goal of seeing all of them.

So that is the plan for Labor Day.  And then it’s September.  Actually, it will be September tomorrow, right?  Where does the time go?  It will be September tomorrow, and I am busy every weekend in September and most of October and then it will be Halloween and then it’s the holiday season.  Ugh.  (My sister-in-law has already started Christmas shopping.)  I do not understand why it goes so quickly.

I am shoe shopping online.  Something about the students flooding into Columbia this week has me thinking about my winter shoe selection.  I wish I had a better selection of winter shoes.  Shoes are the only kind of wearable thing I’m allowing myself to buy at the moment.  I have managed not to buy any new clothes since early March.  Which actually puts me on trend- there are people online doing “shopping diets“- and you know how I love to be on trend!  Anyway, I can buy shoes.  I want to buy boots, but they get so expensive and I can’t quite commit.  Even to whether I want black or brown!  Decisions.

Not that I’m really ready for fall.  I just get into shopping moods.

August is really not flying by.  I thought it would, and then I keep being surprised that I have had so many weekends with not much going on.  Not that I haven’t been able to fill the time adequately (I’m very pleased with what I’ve accomplished this summer), but the time isn’t flying by.  It’s just kind of moseying.

In two weeks, I leave to help Tracy move to Oregon.  That is creeping up pretty quickly, actually.  I am helping with the move, like I said before, and I’m looking forward to the trip.  It will be a nice Labor Day weekend on the road.  Then, after that, I have several busy weekends in September and October.  Those weekends tend to fill up.  I don’t know why.

Picture above is a Rose of Sharon blossom from the tree in my backyard.  I took it as part of my 365 project.

I’m not feeling too talky today, but here’s a nice summery music video for you:

On Friday, as I mentioned many times in the last couple of weeks, I invited some people over to watch a movie.  I was using this event as an excuse to get the house clean, which I managed to do (with the exception of the one room that is still a total mess, but the door remained closed for the evening so no one was privy to my insanity).  The event went well, well enough that I am inspired to have a party sometime later this year.  Maybe at Christmas?  We’ll see.  Anyway, after clearing off the cups and plates and whatever, I woke up to a pretty clean house on Saturday morning.  I managed to run some overdue errands on Saturday and returned home to get some photos processed, which was great.  In the evening, I went with a couple of friends to the CoMO Derby Dames roller derby bout, which is the third time I’ve attended.  It was a lot of fun.  I really get into it.  They played against Oklahoma City and won.  I have the next bouts on my calendar and totally expect to attend those too.

On Sunday, I got up and painted the door frame, which I had scraped down last weekend.  That was kind of dumb timing, because everyone who came over on Friday saw an in-process project.  But oh well.  I am pleased with myself that I managed to finish it so quickly after starting it, and it was one of my Quarterly Resolutions as well.  Bonus.  It’s not totally done, but it looks fine from head-on and I hope to finish the rest of it after the weather cools off a bit more.

On Sunday night, my family came over to eat tacos and watch a movie, though the weather was nice enough that we spent a big portion of the evening on the patio.  I do not spend enough time on my patio, so that was all very pleasant.

After recounting all of that nice weekend stuff, and having a general feeling of being on top of things, I just remembered that tonight is photo club and I totally forgot to take a picture for the competition.  The theme is ‘tattoo’, which, well, I had thought about taking photos at a tattoo parlor but didn’t put that plan into motion.  Oh well.  So I don’t have a free evening after all.  Too bad, too, because I have a lot of photos to work on.  Maybe I can duck out of there early and get home to do some work before bed.

I’m not totally on top of everything.  My 365 project has suffered in the past few weeks.  I skipped three days in July and at least another one in August, including yesterday.  I should be proud that I’ve managed to take more than 200 photos for the project, and that I’m definitely on track for completing it (so many people start these and don’t finish them), but I’m disappointed that I’ve become forgetful.  I will have to do a good writeup after this project is over, because it has been an interesting experience.

I finished the series Rome last night.  It was ok, but not on the level of the other HBO shows from the same time frame.  I made myself finish the rest of the show this week after I took a break from it last week with season 1 of Breaking Bad.  I zoomed through that pretty quickly and get to start season 2 of Breaking Bad today.  It’s a great show.

School starts this week for a lot of the public school teachers and parents that I know.  The teachers complain on Facebook about having to go back to work, which makes me irritable since what do they think the rest of us have been doing all summer?  Working, that’s what.  Not everybody gets a couple of months’ break.  I am willing to argue with anyone that teachers work really hard during the school year and deserve some time off, but the comments on Facebook make me want to vote in a year-round school calendar.

At the same time, I am not finished with my summer yet.  Columbia is still pretty quiet since the students are arriving back in town this week and classes start next week.  Labor Day is still two weeks away, and I have summer-y plans scheduled through at least mid-September.  I refuse to let anyone make me feel like it’s time for fall, because it isn’t.  We still have weeks and weeks of summer left.  When it’s time for fall, I’ll be ready.  I love fall and winter, but I want to take advantage of the long days while they’re still here.

I enjoyed this link: Maps That Changed the World, from this roundup of cool map links by Jason Kottke over the years.  Here’s one that links a series of Wikipedia maps showing the social and political boundaries of the world through the ages.

I like maps.

I don’t like mosquito bites.  I have a lot of them and they’re driving me crazy.  Summer!

I like having my rooms clean.  It’s amazing how much floor space I really have when I tend to clutter it all up with stuff.  Just putting things away results in acres of free floor space.  It’s quite nice.  I am making good progress on the house, except for the front door.  I scraped it all up on Saturday morning and then got stalled by a piece of damaged wood.  I decided not to paint until I knew what to do about the wood.  Hopefully I will get it done this weekend, but I have a lot of photos to process as well.  The goal is to work on the door in the morning while it’s still in the shade, and then retreat to the air-conditioned office for the afternoon to work on photos while watching Rome and Breaking Bad (I’m in the middle of both).

Listening to Gogol Bordello lately.  Good stuff.  I missed their show in St. Louis last weekend, but I just didn’t feel like making the drive or staying overnight again.

Photo above taken in southern Montana.  The Madison River is one of three rivers that combine to form the Missouri River.

Noon on a Friday in summer.  Schools starts in a couple of weeks, and people seem to be trickling in and out of Columbia to vacation and field work assignments and business trips and who knows what all.  Lots of people seem to have August 1 pegged as the time to start stressing out about fall, especially those people who are involved with school in some way.  I have seen Halloween candy in the grocery store.  It is officially late summer.

I have had a productive week of work, which feels good.  I like to get stuff done.  My desk is a mess, though.  My office at home remains clean.  I managed to clean the kitchen nook last night too.  Well, the floor at least- the kitchen table remains a dumping spot for all kinds of paperwork.  Tomorrow I want to sand down and repaint the door frame of my house.  Or, at least, I want to get started on that.  It shouldn’t be that big of a project, and it needs to happen in the morning because the door gets full sun all afternoon.  It just bakes.  All in all, I think I am on target to get the house clean and in good shape for friends to visit next weekend.

I am still working to get my iTunes back up and running, though last night I made some progress with rebuilding playlists and stripping out the loads and loads of duplicates that are weighing everything down.  I keep having trouble with podcasts.  I like the way that my iPhone lets me know how far I’ve listened in a podcast, while my old iPod doesn’t, but my iPhone is hard to pause if I have it set to unlock only with a passcode, which is annoying.  I guess I don’t really need a passcode, really, but I prefer it that way.

It’s supposed to be a good weekend, door painting and all.  Hanging with friends tonight and probably family Wii-playing tomorrow, and I’m driving up to my old hometown in northern Missouri to do baby photos for an old friend of the family on Sunday.  It will be hot all weekend, and I’m hoping to get to go swimming tomorrow.  I’d also like to stop by the Tastee Treat ice cream stand in Brookfield on the way home on Sunday.  (I hope they’re open on Sundays!)  It will be nice to be up there in late summer- I’ve always loved that area in late summer.  The chicory and Queen Anne’s lace are blooming, though I’m not sure I’ll be there at the best time for good light if it’s sunny, and it’s supposed to be sunny.

Well, big news!  Tracy is almost definitely moving to Portland, Oregon, at the beginning of September, where she will be fully, gainfully employed after many years of schooling.  I am excited for her, and I’m being taken up on my offer to help her move the cats there.  Over Labor Day, I will get to take the big trip westward through states like Utah and Idaho.  I actually don’t know which I’m more excited about- adding more western states to my been-there list or the fact that I will have a reason to visit Portland more often in the future.  Both and either and everything.  Maybe not so much the actual trip of 20+ hours with screaming cats in the car, but everything else.  Lots of big road tripping this summer!  But it’s nothing in comparison with a cross-country move.  I am more than a little envious, but I have nothing but best wishes for her there and hope to live vicariously through her adventures!

The photo above is from western Nebraska on my big Out West trip.  This blog often looks too plain for me.  I need to liven it up with more pictures.

I am trying to fill up the rest of the summer weekends with different summery things to do.  I have planned a float trip, summer concerts, movies, little road trips, big road trips, and even a movie night at my house that will require lots of cleaning and organizing for non-family members to be allowed in my house.

I got a big start on this yesterday when my adorable sister-in-law came over to my house to help me clean out my office.  The office has looked like a pit of hell since last summer.  You may remember that it has been the focus of multiple failed Quarterly Resolutions since then.  It has been a stagnant mess, though.  The other room is the one where I continually dump things, so it has grown and continued to fester as a mess throughout the year.  After we’d made significant progress on the office, I did enter and start some work on the other room (the-room- with-the-red-couch, as I refer to it; it’s basically a den without a TV or any kind of stimuli other than a reading lamp, but it’s the only furniture in the house that the dog is allowed on).  Anyway, the office is now CLEAN, which is amazing.  My brother put up shelves and I rearranged pictures on the walls, and it looks totally different and so much larger.

I have quite a lot of other projects that need doing as well, and I’m going to try to spend a lot of time this week and next week getting some stuff done that I wouldn’t otherwise do.  Not that the movie night people will even care or notice, but there’s something about having a deadline that works for me.  A similar event (inviting people to my house is an event- it never happens) motivated me to get a ton of stuff done around the house a couple of years ago.  I mean, landscaping was involved.  This is the way I work.

In other news, I spent a big part of the weekend watching Rome and working on photos while maybe perhaps spending too much time playing Sid Meier’s Railroads (which required a lot of patience on my part because the game crashes every few minutes after I’ve reached a certain level.  I think it’s to do with my 64 bit machine.)  I got caught up to the beginning of July on the 365 photos, which is very good.  I put up part one of them on the photo blog here and I will post the rest of them later today.

In Photoshop news, the expensive jump to Photoshop CS5 does seem to have solved my problem, but has also created a host of new ones by not being compatible with some of the plugins that I bought.  So yay for that, too.

I made red velvet cupcakes for the picnic the other night.  I was not impressed, but I am not a fan of chocolate desserts.  I want my chocolate to be actual chocolate, not adulterated with flour and baking powder.  Brownies are at the edge of my preferred chocolate dessert continuum, and even then you can end up with fairly dull brownies.  The problem is that people use just enough cocoa to turn the batter brown, but not enough to give you a real chocolate flavor.  I need it to taste right.  Anyway, red velvet boxed cake mix doesn’t go far enough for me.  Also, I was a little appalled at the fact that the batter looked like ketchup.  No more red velvet for me.  But tomorrow I am supposed to attend an ironic Twilight-movie party (we are watching the second one with the Rifftrax) and I am considering making some kind of Twilight-themed dessert.  I guess red velvet would make the most sense, though I am not sure I want to relive the ketchup batter.

I am so far behind on my 365 project right now.  Even with a week off spent entirely post-processing, I am not sure I could catch up.  Okay, that would probably be enough time, actually, but I don’t have a week off and I’m not going to take that kind of time.  I have been pretty unmotivated to take decent photos in the past couple of weeks as well.  Usually I managed to set up some off-camera lighting if I put off taking a photo until late at night, but all this month I have not managed to do much more than slap a speedlight and diffuser on the camera itself and snap away at something random.  I guess that my photo-obsessed month of June and the fact that I have thousands and thousands of untouched photos sitting on my laptop right now, well, it doesn’t really put me in the frame of mind to run out and take a bunch more if I won’t even get to them until September, if I’m lucky.  Maybe I’ll make some progress this weekend.

This Sunday is the Really Really Free Market in Columbia.  The idea is that you take all your stuff down there and set it out and people take what they want.  I am considering this, not as someone who wants stuff, but as someone who has stuff I could probably do without.  Quite a lot of it, actually.  My friend mentioned participating in it a few months ago, and it sounded intruiging.  I guess I will see how motivated I am!

But it has been a pretty good summer so far, all told.  Maybe I haven’t seen the ocean this year, but I’ve had plenty of other fun experiences.  There have been parties and dog parks and road trips and live music and ice cream.  But not enough ice cream, honestly.  I need to up my consumption of ice cream.

This weekend was the Modest Mouse concert that I had been looking forward to since April.  At the time, my friend was supposed to go, but he is still in South Dakota on a field assignment that has taken (at last count) about eight weeks longer than he expected.  I was supposed to go with a crowd, but ended up going alone, which was just fine.  I sold his tickets for him on Craigslist and had a good time by myself.  The show was at the Pageant in St. Louis, and I didn’t have a seat, but I had a pretty good view directly behind two shorter girls.  I was interested in how the venue ghetto-ized the under-21s from the 21-and-over (aged) people.  The 21-and-overs had much more space, better view.  The under-21s were packed into the sides of the bar.  I could see that it would suck.  But I didn’t have to care much.  Anyway, the under-21s weren’t dodging broken beer bottles while wearing flip-flops.  The show itself was pretty good.  I love Modest Mouse and they played a lot of my favorite songs.

I elected to stay over in St. Louis and got an airport-adjacent hotel room (though I should have gotten a deal online- I paid too much), which was nice.  I didn’t have to make the drive back to Columbia after the show, even though we were out early enough (before 11:30pm).  I was hoping for pretty weather on Sunday morning to take some photos of the Arch, but I woke up to clouds.  Bummer.  Even more of a bummer- there must have been a big storm system that I didn’t even hear because my car has a lot of new hail dings all over it.  I was sorry to see that, but it shouldn’t make much of a difference because I intend to keep this car for at least another seven years.  Maybe longer.  The goal was 10 years and it’s been nearly 3.5!  I am almost done with the car payments on my 4-year note.  That is exciting.

I went to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods before another storm system came through, and ended up driving home through the storm, but I was home before noon.  Not a bad little mini-break.  I spent the afternoon hanging out with family, playing my sister’s Wii while I messed about trying to clean up my iTunes.  The Wii has been a big social activity for all of us in the past few weeks.  I don’t usually like video games- they lose my interest fast, but I have had a lot of fun with the Wii.

I am syncing my iPod with my iTunes right now.  This has been a big pile of wack since I had to rebuild the computer a few weeks ago.   I am frustrated that I lost all my playlists after rebuilding my iTunes library.  And this just a few months after building that same iTunes library!  It’s so frustrating.  I do not like how picky iTunes is about this stuff.  I am tired of wrangling iTunes, to be honest.  But I can recommend that if you’re having similar problems, a few third-party programs do things that iTunes should do (like fixing all the broken orphaned files after your system needs to be rebuilt; otherwise you have to go through and correct them by hand, which takes hours).

Meanwhile, I am also frustrated with Adobe.  I use Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, and I know my versions are fairly old (I am using CS3; the current version is CS5), but Adobe won’t support anything later than its current version.  Not even one version back, which I think should be standard (especially since Photoshop is so expensive).  I hate this.  Adobe Bridge is a clunky program, but I use it all the time.  Since I rebuilt my computer last month, it has been nothing but problematic and there are no updates to fix [what I believe are] stupid easy-to-fix problems.  Today I will go to buy the new version of Photoshop.  This seems like going to buy a new car because my old car is having a minor issue, but the dealership just refuses to fix it because they think I should buy a new car instead.  It is irritating.  It will be more irritating if it doesn’t actually fix the problem.  I guess at least I will have CS5, which does have a lot of new bells and whistles.

These are mostly minor annoyances.  I have a lot of them right now, little wiggly anxieties that float in the back of my mind and sometimes jump to the forefront and cause me frustration.  I still haven’t fixed the driver’s side window in my car, for instance, but it doesn’t really bother me until I pull up to the drive-thru without thinking.  I’m avoiding the weed-eater even though my dad swears it’s working now.  The dog is starting to get very nervous about thunderstorms, even more nervous than she used to.  I don’t know why.  I have a Netflix that’s been sitting on the TV for a month.  It’s all small stuff like this.  I am very lucky.

This week should be easy.  My photo club is having a barbecue tomorrow in lieu of a meeting, which is fun and unexpected.  I will go home and decide if I am making something in addition to bringing veggie brats, even though this is a decidedly non-veggie crowd.  Maybe I will bake something.  I think I have options.  Then I do trivia on Wednesday and then it’s already Thursday!  On Thursdays I get frustrated that the weeks go by so quickly, which seems kind of strange now that I think about it.  I don’t mind the work week all that much, but I do mind that time just passes by and it never seems like I get all that much accomplished.  Maybe I should make a specific effort to feel like I have earned this coming weekend.  What do you think?

I spent the entire month of June avoiding the gym, so the Wii has actually made my shoulder and tricep a little sore.  I put on a few pounds, which I did anticipate after eating my weight in vegetarian food while in DC, and I am determined to rectify this by returning to the gym regularly and eating well, starting yesterday.  Good for me.

I am pleased to tell you that I have not bought new clothes (none, zero, nada) in several months, which may sound unsurprising to you unless you are a female member of my family.  We are not very materialistic people, but we do like buying new clothes.  But I was trying to save money, I have plenty of clothes already, and I would like to lose weight.  Not just the amount that I gained in June, but more besides.  It doesn’t make much sense to buy clothes if you end up losing weight and needing new clothes.  But, still, it counts as a victory in my book that I’ve managed to not buy anything new, even though spring and summer clothes were tempting.

As far as activity that does not burn any calories, I am processing photos and having a nice time at it.  Check out my progress here.  My coworker has been lending me season 3 of Ugly Betty, which is fun.  And I’m behind at least one or two seasons on Rescue Me, which is not so fun.  That is a crazy show.  I must like it on some level because I have returned to it, though I am pretty sure I already watched the season that I’m watching at present.  But I’m not totally certain.  Some of it rings a bell.  So, yeah, it’s not that great of a show.  Eventually I will start renting Breaking Bad, because everyone loves that show now and I am glad to have something good on the horizon.

I am sort of surprised at my satisfaction with normal life, because I usually feel some element of wanderlust, but I think the length and breadth of my traveling in June will keep that at bay for some time.

So, yes, I’ve started making blog posts out of my tweets from Twitter, which is currently automatically creating tweets every time I post something new on my other two blogs.  I’m also trying to figure out a way to post here whenever I upload new images to Flickr.  It might all seem like a big mess after awhile, so who knows if I will let it stick around.  But it would be cool if you could just come here and see what I’m up to in other forms besides long-winded paragraphs of all the chores I did around the house last weekend.  Or it would be, if I can get it to work out.

This weekend!  It’s graduation at Mizzou, which means A) I won’t be able to get a table at a decent restaurant anywhere in town all weekend because all the students’ parents will be around and they will want to go out for every meal, and B) the students are starting to leave town, so Columbia will be a lovely empty playground for the locals starting in just a few days.  Columbia in the summertime!  It’s wonderful.  I always look forward to it.  I always crow about it on my blog.  I know.  But I really, really look forward to the university breaks and then I am disappointed when they come flooding back at the end.  This town is nice without the students.  But it wouldn’t exist except for the students.  So there’s that.

I am leaving for vacation in just over two weeks!  I can’t believe how the time flies by.  I am trying to make myself start working out every day before I leave, but the effort just seems gargantuan.  I do not like to exercise.  It just seems like a huge block of time in my day.  My sister and I stopped going together in the mornings at the beginning of this semester.  I will pretend it was mostly due to her schedule, but I was pretty pleased with it (embarrassingly, I will admit that I like it mostly because it works with my hair care routine.  If I go to the gym in the morning, I either end up going to work afterwards with uncooperative, sweaty gym hair or very damp, unstyled hair).  I did manage to make it to the gym almost more regularly than when we were going in the mornings.  I didn’t skip as often.  But I have gained some weight at the same time, so I think that going in the morning makes me less likely to consume junk food during the rest of the day.  Since my sister is now done with her semester, we made the plan to try to start back to a morning routine this week, but it was very, very painful to get up so early after so many weeks of sleeping later and having nice hair at work.  So the other option is fitting in an hour at the gym in the evenings when it is busier there and I often have other stuff going on.  But, honestly, I need to feel like I am in better shape before I head off to try to lug photo equipment up trails in the mountains.  I am not in terrible shape, but a couple of weeks’ worth of solid effort would be useful preparation.

When I return from my trip west, I will have less than twenty-four hours before I am due in north Missouri for a weekend family reunion.  I expect to have just enough time to make backups of my photos and do a minimal amount of laundry between the two events.  But we are staying at a state park, so I will not be required to be ready for prime-time.  They will have to put up with a slightly dirty, sunburnt me, desperate for conversation after two weeks more or less alone.

What else is going on?  Well, my brother and sister-in-law, who currently reside in northeast Kansas City, have decided to pick up and move to Columbia.  I thought they were being offhand when they mentioned it as a possibility in early March, but no.  Just a few weeks later and they have a contract on a house here, a contract on their house there (passed inspection last week, more or less), closing dates right after the family reunion, and they’re working on transferring jobs.  It is crazy, but it will be really cool to have them in town.  I have not lived within 100 miles of my brother since I graduated from high school fourteen years ago.  Same with my sister until I moved back to Columbia in 2006, and the proximity there has made us very close.  So this will be new and interesting and all kinds of fun.

It is already Thursday!  I have a number of things I need to get done this weekend, but most of it is the usual: laundry, house-cleaning, lawn-mowing, picture-processing.  A couple of other events.  Next weekend I will be in Kansas City for a chunk of time, so this is really my last full weekend to get stuff done before the trip, though there isn’t that much to do.  If I have anything I need to get, this is the weekend to do it!