Interlude

I was chided today for not following up like I promised.

Things not to do: Promise a blog post tomorrow(ish) right at the beginning of the busiest 2-1/2 weeks of the entire summer.

I hate to disappoint, but this is a filler post. Tomorrow(ish) is probably going to be later-this-month(ish). I wrote my last post while at the Mazda dealership at the beginning of what turned into a two-day-long and many-several-hundred-dollar car repair ordeal. I didn't anticipate this. It also coincided with work meetings, visits from family, and a YW hike in the rain.* Then there was a family reunion all weekend, which kept me busy playing with newish babies (3 of them), ungraciously defeating an 11-year-old in a game of checkers (but I felt like I would be doing him a disservice if I just let him win), hula-hooping, participating in wild games of house-rules Uno, and learning to how to curl (Canadian-style, at the Olympic Oval). And then I ran a (very tiring) half marathon on Monday and rescued my dog from the neighborhood kids who had been keeping an eye on him for the weekend and ate American hamburgers and Mexican chips at my sister's house for the 4th of July and played Boom Blox and put together fans from Target so that my dog wouldn't die from the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment. None of this has left much time for any kind of thoughtful blogging.

Now this coming week is devoted to a smattering of work, and something much bigger than a smattering** of Girls Camp preparation. I'll be back to normal in approximately two weeks when camp is over. In the meantime, do any female blog readers have any camp memories you're willing to share, good, bad, or ugly, from when you were in Young Women?

(Also, for the past several days I was trying to figure out why I couldn't remember what I'd done on the 4th of July last year. This morning I finally realized that it was because I forewent fireworks over the lake to sit in a vacation trailer by myself running through my dissertation presentation.  Which means happy one-year successful-dissertation-defense anniversary to me!)


* The leaders seemed more enamored of this than the girls, but I counted it as a success that by the end I had my 12-year-old hiking companion brainwashed into thinking that she loved being cold and wet. "I love this weather!" she announced enthusiastically to a 16-year-old who walked next to us on the return trip. "Sister Jeppsen and I go outside in December in shorts and flip-flops just so we can feel the cold!" This was a line I'd fed her twenty minutes beforehand and, as you know if you know me at all, a blatant lie. Because I decided that if I had to choose between "don't lie" and "don't complain about a few drops of rain" in my particular church calling, "don't lie" was a better sacrifice for the sake of five happy days in the mountains.

** Is there a good word for that?