A little of nothing.

"'Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.' Abraham Lincoln"

Summer is our down time. We literally do very little. I very deliberately schedule nothing & allow long periods of time for watching movies, reading & playing on the computer because once we start most of our minutes are accounted for. Besides normally at this time of the year it is scorching hot, making it impossible to become overly enthusiastic about anything. We have been blessed this year with cooler temps & plenty of rain & I am just now, after close on 6 weeks, starting to feel like a normal person instead of the harried, frazzled, slightly demented being I feel for the better part of the year.

Life still does happen, albeit at a much slower pace. I took Dearest over to the mainland to renew his driver's licence. The motor registry is always packed like the proverbial sardine can meaning huge ques & long waits so it wasn't something either of us were looking forward to. It is always hard to cope with so much *people impact* when in your usual environment everyone gives you plenty of personal space though the *artificial environments* are a close second. Flickering fluros do nothing for either of us & the lack of greenery quickly has us soul hungry for the blue & green spaces of home. We see this in the kids too, even the boys who now live on the mainland. They come home & just sink into the natural spaces breathing deeply of those things not made of man that give respite to the soul.

Then our little home Church is doddering along though very quiet over the Christmas period & we have our regular readings on hold just now. Dearest has chosen some random readings & set me chasing down the Greek for the more difficult & obscure passages ~ which I happily did ~ only to find while I was pontificating away that a new member is a Classics & Literature scholar & his language is ancient Greek! I felt like a prize dork ~ but as he found nothing wrong with my scholarship & was able to clarify one or two points we had a very companionable time indeed. As it is the level of scholarship & teaching I struggle with so often in church it was a delight for me to to indulge in the exchange of ideas & thoughts in the way I was trained with someone who also instinctively thinks that way. Naturally we have read widely in the same areas & found plenty of common ground. To not have to backtrack to explain my sources each time I cross~referenced an argument was a simple pleasure too rarely experienced though I do have good Christian friends I go & rant to when I feel the need to have the old brain cells stimulated a little more than usual.

Then we spent an hour with the Beans because I had promised Little Miss Bean that Ditz & I would paint with her one day. We painted all right. Ditz got her hair painted & her face painted. The garage floor got painted. Beano paddled in the water & flooded the floor. We blew food dye round paper with straws & food dyed the floor. We made butterflies & did dot paintings & made an almighty mess that Mrs Bean is probably still trying to clean up though we did tidy up before we abandoned ship. I hope we get invited back after that.

We exchanged Dino for Theo. Same face, same activities & the fishy smell lingers. Meanwhile Dino rang with a list of crossword questions he was stuck on & rattled them off over the phone fully expecting mother to know all the answers. I'm amazing. Know them I did. I'm surprised he didn't ring his ma. Her vocab is as good as mine but her spelling is heaps better!