Saturday, May 18, 2013

Three!

 May has been quite a full month.  It begins with the anniversary of FryDaddy and me having the common sense to say, in front of God and witnesses, "Yep.  This one.  Done and done."  The traditional third anniversary gift is leather - FryDaddy gave me a gorgeous, vaguely-steampunked, leather-and-rivet-bound copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which is a re-telling of Kipling's The Jungle Book that I greatly enjoy.  I gave him tickets to an open-air Bob Dylan concert.  (While Dylan may look a little leathery, I'll admit the gift was a bit outside the traditional bounds.)  FryDaddy will probably don sackcloth and ashes when Dylan goes to his eternal reward, whereas I'd never seen him in concert before and was very much the noob.  (Although I did know "Tangled Up in Blue.") However, I had a great, GREAT time and would gladly see him again.  I hadn't been to a concert in quite a while and the open-air venue (a little rain, but not much) made for terrific people-watching.  Everyone from two groovy-girls to a couple of white-haired gentlemen still in business suits - and everyone seemed to be having a good time.  It made for a wonderful anniversary celebration.

May is also the end of the spring semester and it was the usual rushrush of suddenly-frantic students.  However, the tumult is over and I even managed to clear out a filing cabinet in my quest to go closer to paperless.  (My lawyer training pretty much guarantees that I'll never completely make the jump.  As a species, attorneys just like paper too darn much.)

My summer herbs and vegetables are going in the ground later today - when it's been dry enough to plant, I've been grading or writing (I just finished copyedits on the Breaking Bad book today), but I need to get that done, because . . .

Chair for one, please!
. . . I head to the beach tomorrow!  Just me and just for a few days, but I'm so looking forward to it, even if I also have just a touch of guilt about wanting a few days away.  I love FryDaddy and the Furs (now there's a name for a garage band!) and our house and our life together - but it's been a rough ride lately!  Too many commitments, too many deadlines, and a few too many demands.  Time to take the phone off the hook for a couple of 24-hours and flip through magazines, finally finish Season 6 of Supernatural and dig my toes into the sand.

I understand that, to many, the idea of vacationing alone (especially when I'm in a commuter marriage where we don't see each other that much) seems odd and maybe even peculiar.  And it's true that I'll miss being at home.  But sometimes, you need to be gone to appreciate what's there.