Ready or not, here comes Summer!

   I'm at my kitchen table looking at my to do list of crap I'm fantasizing about pulling off before we leave for the beach for the week. My daughter wraps up fifth grade by mid Thursday this week. She has to survive one week of CCD after vacation and then she is a free birdie for the rest of the summer. This summer will be wierd for me because after having my husband home last year, I will be flying solo this year. This is definitely a good thing but it will take some getting used to. It was incredibly easy to get used to having him home.
   This particular week is a bit rough because I managed to get sick after substitute teaching for a whopping 7 jobs! There's nothing like trying to kill off a to do list when your butt is dragging worse than usual. Just to add to the fun, the germs are spreading. I've refrained from kissing my daughter, much to her relief, because I was trying Not to get her sick. That flopped. We are about to find out if the new insurance works. It's hard for me to figure out what's an allergy versus a bad cold this time of year, too. This is just another episode of guess your face off. I'd rather the doctor's office tell me I'm nuts and send me home when we're this close to vacation.
    Having a memory like a steel sieve is forcing me to make lists of all the crap I want to get done before we leave. My spouse shocked me and actually took an interest in said list. The problem is we don't agree on what's necessary. The husband is notoriously oblivious to mess and dirt, me, not so much. I'm already going to be depressed that I have to come home from the beach at all, I'll be damned if I'm going to have to clean on top of it. He is also regrettably immune to the threat of my Mother coming over while we're gone. I should have enough time to get the inside under control but there's also some outside maintenance I hope to pull off.
    The outside maintenance never gets done often enough, just ask our neighbors.  It was looking like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom out there and I felt I had to do something. The frustrating thing about weeding of course, is that there seems to be no real payoff. I went out there like a good homeowner and ripped out enough crap to feed an elephant. A week later the junk grew back! I don't even get the fun weed in my yard. I get grass from hell, baby trees under my deck and lamb's ear trying to take over like Hitler invading Poland. I've also noticed our bushes are starting to look like Gene Wilder's hair from Young Frankenstein. My next yard will be concrete.