Summer plans

If there's one thing I hate it's when someone doesn't post often on their blog and then when they finally write, they don't reveal anything at all about their lives and what has kept them so busy. So I won't do that.

Megan finished her first year of high school - here, for some reason, that happens during grade eight, not nine - a couple of weeks ago. We were very proud of her for winning a social studies award for her work on a Feng Shui project with two other girls, and socially the year has been a success for her as she appears to have single-handedly transformed the school's anime club. Calum finishes grade two on Thursday, and Lysa's got a temporary job so it's been quite nice having some time alone with my daughter over the past little while. Last Wednesday, we packed up some buckets and picked 22 lbs of strawberries at a farm out in Richmond (link here), stopping for a big bag of hot samosas at an Indian snack shop on the way home. Can you think of anything better for lunch than fresh, spicy vegetable samosas and a big bowl of fresh juicy local strawberries?

When I pick fruit, I always go a little overboard so after canning five large mason jars of jam, freezing hundreds of berries and giving away a fair bit to friends and neighbours, we still had a lot left. I've made a mental note that if I do follow through on my plan to pick raspberries and blueberries this summer, four buckets full are MORE than enough. We'll see if I can stick to that when the next berry-picking opportunity comes along.

I've taken a year off from any serious pursuit of my university degree, after getting pretty burnt out and fed up with all those horrible math courses that are a standard ordeal for every computer science student. I took Japanese this year because I needed to take some class, ANY class in order to maintain my enrollment at the school, but still didn't feel ready to do anything more. After four years of part-time study I am not much closer to figuring out what I want to do with my life and that is pretty discouraging. At any rate, recently I've pulled myself together and started making plans for the fall semester. I want to keep up with studying Japanese, in case our occasional excited family conversations about going back there for a more extended stay in a few years ever come to anything, so I'll sign up for the next level of Japanese classes and I feel ready to resume my extended battle to wrap my brain around the mysteries of integral calculus. My longer-term plans may involve a change of schools but I do hope that within the next, oh, ten years I will be able to write here that I have actually completed my undergraduate degree.

In the meantime, we have a summer stretching before us that is free of big plans and the endless driving of children to and from day camps that has featured in the last two summers. This year I wanted a real break, long lazy days at the beach and a chance for the kids to get bored and do "nothing" for days on end. I did register Calum for a half-day science program at our local elementary school (hey, it was free!) and I'm trying to get him into a set of lessons at an outdoor pool, but otherwise I am encouraging the kids to think of field trips, figure out what parks they want to go to and in Calum's case I am hoping we'll have lots of mother & son bike rides. (Megan declined my offer to buy her a bike too, but that could change, I guess!) My summer plans also include giving a bit more time to writing here, so who knows, if anyone is still reading this you may find another post or two from me before the school routine resumes.