Hope

Blargh. Yup. Made it home. Functioning on very little sleep, due to small puppy thing asshole who doesn’t know how to let things move around at night without barking his head off. Kitten finally came down off Batting Mountain because her mommy was home. She whacked the crap out of her substitute parent while I was gone. Ahhh, calicoes. They are the devil incarnate sometimes.

The boychild has officially graduated. He is no longer a student. Now he is an unemployed wayward adult child (he really isn’t the wayward one) who hopefully will solve all his transportation problems today (the state of New York is truly anal about its car registration process), pack up all his shit, clean his apartment because all his roomies have left, and eventually head out to see his sister and maybe even come home. I don’t expect him soon, which is good, because I need to clean up all the quilts on his bed. I’m really proud of him for getting through 4 years at Cornell and hope he eventually figures out what to do with his life, although I have never been the best role model for that, for sure. Save the world! Cure cancer! You promised when you were 10 to build me a robot that would clean the house…WHY HAVEN’T YOU DONE THAT YET???

Girlchild is back in WALTHAM…she doesn’t live IN Boston, just near it…she has a few summer jobs, the major one starting on Monday. She’ll be busy, for sure. She’ll be home for a week in August…long time away, but we saw her this weekend. She was the main cook, which was nice.

I have early stuff at school every day this week. I have a quilt that’s at the photographer for a show I’m entering later this week. I have another quilt that probably can’t get done in time…but I’m going to try. I also tried grading all those kid videos, but had absolutely shit WiFi in Syracuse Airport and on the plane this time, so I was unable to get any work done all that time…which is frustrating, because really right now, it’s either work on school stuff or the quilt, and I obviously couldn’t trace Wonder Under on the plane. So there we are. I’ll get through whatever I get through…as always.

So here was our dinner and post-dinner gathering every night, which explains each one of the 40 or so mosquito bites I have…although most of them seem to be ankle biters…

Here in San Diego, our mosquitoes bite all over…so I find that intriguing.

Yet another of the awesome waterfalls we saw around Ithaca…this is Taugannock Falls.

We didn’t have time to hike down, unfortunately. We had to be out of our rental place and people were slow-moving, so we went back and saw this tree fungus for the first time (it had obviously been there all weekend)…

And then we separated. My ex went home to the Boston area with the girlchild (some worry about the car, we suspect, although he claims one-on-one time with her…also a plus), boychild went back to his apartment to figure all the packing and cleaning out, and I drove the parentals back to Syracuse, where we sat in an airport for a while…

Wishing I could get work done. It was an efficient trip back…just enough time in Philly to grab food and get on another plane, where I couldn’t work even more, so I read a lot. Which is fine…

As we started to land in San Diego…

I did one drawing on the plane, but it’s way over THERE and I don’t feel like getting up and photographing it right now.

Damn, my right eyelid is twitching like crazy today. I basically got home and had a glass of wine to shut my brain up and tried to go to sleep…about 17 times. Ugh. I’m tired. But happy for the kid. I’m sure NOW WHAT is looming large in his brain…hell, it looms large in my brain on a regular basis. I hope he has a cool and mostly trouble-free drive home, and gets to see lots of interesting stuff. I hope I survive the last three weeks of school and grades and finish that quilt. I hope the girlchild finally gets to move into the house where she’s living for the next year and she likes her new job and being able to eat something besides rice. I guess that’s the theme of today then…hope.