Hazy Days of Summer...

It ended up being gloomy for most of the day yesterday. The gloominess became accompanied by humidity which meant the evening resulted in a sticky, sultry heat. Today is already starting to feel a little oppressive with its thick air and if the weatherman is right, tomorrow will be worse.

Of course, that's if the weatherman is right. Which he rarely is. This means I shall just have to wait and see, as is usually the case.

I'm looking forward to the weekend, humidity or not. My parents are coming down to see my house which I'm both excited and terrified about. I want them to see my new home and approve of it which is where the fear comes in. I have this horrible worry that my dad will walk around with his engineering-type hat on and start finding things wrong that sound dooming. While that would be helpful, I'm already a bit skittish about owning my own place.

They're also the first ones to actually see the house besides my realtor and me. I wish it could be perfect for them but the best I could do was to finish painting last night. There's no way that those mounds of boxes are going to get unpacked before they arrive tomorrow.

The hard part is that I have to at least clean the house a little from my painting attempts AND I have to clean my apartment which currently looks a bit like a bomb hit it due to the fact that I barely spend any time there at all and, when I do, it's either to eat, sleep or pack.

Still, I know they'll be ok with whatever I'm able to do. That's the nice part about parents. I need to mow my lawn again because it's already long. I know my dad will notice that. Part of me wants to leave it and, if he mentions it, happily show him my new mower and suggest he try it out. However, I know that won't really happen so I'm going to try to squeeze another mowing in tonight.

I keep reminding myself that a week from today is the last day I'll be commuting to work from my current apartment. The thought is a little alarming just because it made me realize I'll have to get up earlier to make the longer drive. I'll actually have to change my morning routine until, at least, the office moves and my commute is shorter again.

The thing about the office moving is that the date keeps getting pushed back. This is fine but...it's Ohio. We've been told September now. I'm hoping it's not much later than that just because this is Ohio and not too long after September comes winter and bad weather. The last thing I want to do is have to navigate the rural highways to get to work when it's snowing. I'll keep my fingers crossed though that we move before the winter. Though the people in our office who will be then doing the commute from here won't be too happy about that.

Ironically, as much as I love snow, I don't want to think about that at the moment. I know I've said that I'm not so fond of summer as I am the other seasons but it doesn't mean I'm quite ready to move on yet. Despite the sticky humidity out there, summer does boast some lovely treasures. There's nothing better than fresh summer vegetables and fruits on a nice day, of being able to walk outside, cold beer in hand and just enjoy the sounds of the summer around you. The flowers are in bloom, buzzing with bees and butterflies, growing slower and lazier as the heat increases.

In some ways, I'd give anything to have the days of summer back that we had when we were kids: Long, lazy days where you don't have to get up for school or work, in which you can get up when the heat is already in full swing in mid-morning. Days which were spent at the swimming pool, reading on a sunbed until the sun got too hot and then cooling off in the chlorine-acrid water only to climb out, laze your way over to the concession stand for ice-cream and then start the routine over again. Though those days were during my awkward teenage phase and they seemed hard back then, now I can look back and see how nice it was where the hardest decision for the day was ice-cream sandwich or frozen pizza slice?

This morning as I drove to work, I saw a man cleaning out the fire hydrant. Water was blasting out of the hydrant and forming an ocean-sized puddle on the street around it. I thought for a second how great it would be to pull over, strip off my shoes and play in the water letting it wash away the cloying humidity from around me.

Then reality set in and I realized that going to the office dripping like a drowned rat was probably not the best way to start the day. Yet for one brief liberating moment, I mentally let the water soak me and I was taken back to the days of my youth where my siblings and I would soak ourselves with the hose in the back yard on the hot, sticky summer days.

Yet, though it's hard to quite recapture the freedom of my youth where it was completely acceptable to spend the day at the pool or getting wet in the backyard, there are some advantages to being an adult and looking at that past through the rose coloured glasses that are a little foggy from the heat. The simple pleasure of getting home from work, grabbing a cold beer from the fridge and relaxing on my own patio is hard to replace. Having my very own hose that could be used for summer cool-downs or to water the garden I can plant exactly as I like is a pretty nice thing to have, indeed. And if spending the day in my office instead of listlessly trying to find something to do on a hot day without air-conditioning is the way to get those things, then I say bring on the hazy days of summer.

Happy Friday.