Headlong

Seriously? It is not actually Sunday evening already, is it?!

…seriously?...

This last week went by in a blur. A blur of noise and heat and smoke and laughter and beaches and campfires and seriously, how many people did we THINK we were feeding?! and having to explain why it was that my son thought it was perfectly OK to just grab your kid’s bike and make off with it (he got confused…after all, it was a family reunion and we had six campsites and he didn’t know these people but it was OK to just walk on into their camper, and he didn’t know these people either but it was OK to grab a juice box out of their cooler, and he didn’t know these other kids at all but they were OK with him playing with their toys…so obviously, this whole entire place was just one big Captain’s Personal and Private Family Affair and it was totally OK to go into any tent, trailer, camper, cooler, box or any other thing he found just help himself, no, no!, don’t bother getting up Auntie Whoever You Are, I can get my own beer and bag of chips, thanks…) (oh yeah… “embarrassing” doesn’t begin to express my feelings, kids…especially since it turned out that just about every single time I thought this cousin or that uncle “had him,” uh, they sorta-kinda only partially MAYBE “had him” and he was actually off on his own terrorizing the whole, 200-some-odd-space campsite…) (in related news, we can never go back there again) (or anywhere else from Malibu to Oxnard) (seriously, I think they printed up posters…)

And then we came home and the next three days vanished into a rush of back to school (the Denizens started back to school Wednesday! Wednesday! Excuse me, but is that not, like, right smack in the middle of what should be summer vacation, School District?!) and unpacking and cleaning-cleaning-cleaning and wait-a-second, if I’ve been cleaning for three days straight…

…um…

…question…?

Why does this place look like it has never seen the business end of a broom, mop or vacuum cleaner?!

Well, I can tell you at least partially why: Four quarts of Italian-style tomato sauce and five pints of zesty zucchini relish were canned this weekend. Because I had fourteen pounds of tomatoes and a zucchini the size of my leg growing out there when I got home, that’s why…plus the former site of Lake Chaos is now Lake O’Weeds (there’s a surprise) and part of the fence fell down and I have deep unrest about one of the butternut vines because I think it may have gotten a squash borer and furthermore the yellow-striped heirloom tomato plant looks a bit…yellowish and scrawny…to me, AND the ooze tank for the sunflowers isn’t oozing enough and the poor things were giving me this look that clearly said, “what kind of mother are you?!”, AND PLUS the sweet potatoes are overtaking the unexpectedly reviving artichokes and the Christmas limas are trying to attack the neighbor’s overhanging tree AND!!!!!!!! we have corn that should have been eaten, like, yesterday, but wasn’t and I didn’t get around to it because I was dealing with the Aforementioned Everything but, guess what? All four of my newly planted pumpkin hills have sprouted, and the back bed I was afraid had an actual leak-leak doesn’t (we capped it off at the surface and it is dry as a bone, woo hoo – no subterranean leaks!), and, there are two little tiny baby yellow squash in the front boxes!

…which will be torso-sized monsters in less than 48 hours, I’ll betcha…

I feel as though I am coming out of this vacation the same way I went into it: Unprepared, and headlong.

…and tired…and a little grouchy…and in need of a vacation…

…um, wait…

This is probably going to be another one of them-thar “interesting” weeks, isn’t it.

…buckle up, racing fans, it’s going to be a wild ride…