Summer at Last
“Summer afternoon — summer afternoon. To me, those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
~ Henry James
On a cloudy day like today, it’s hard to excitedly pronounce, “It’s summer!” – even if it is. It’s the first full day of it, anyway, yesterday having been the summer solstice. I was listening to the radio with my kids on the way to Jesse’s last baseball game of the season, when they announced that at that minute — 4:59 PM — it was officially the summer solstice … the first day of summer and the longest day of the year.
I actually didn’t need to be told. Yesterday was so warm and muggy — it was torture (to me, anyway — I prefer it to be either hot and dry or just cool).
Jesse’s team finished up their last game of the season yesterday. What made it cool is that it was the final playoff game and that they hadn’t been eliminated before that. They lost the game, though, and came in 2nd in their level. Earlier in the week, Jesse had hit an incredible triple. He really smacked that ball and it flew higher and farther than any other ball I’d ever seen him hit. I was sure it would go over the fence, but it sailed down to land just in front of it. Still, an infield triple ain’t half bad and it was fun to see the other team scrambling for it. It was a great hit. I know he was hoping to repeat it last night, but alas, it was not to be.
He may try out for a team next year, too, and that means that between now and next March, we’ll be frequent visitors to the batting cages in Kent and also getting him some more pitching practice. Lonnie will be buying a catcher’s mitt so he can work with Jesse on pitching, too – Jesse throws so hard, it hurts Lonnie’s hands.
School, for us, is done for the year. SAT tests are this Tuesday and Wednesday, and Jesse gets his braces on later in the week. Good thing we were able to wait on those until after the playoffs.
I’ve been very busy this week working on a couple of telecommuting jobs that I found through Elance (one is repeat business, though, and that’s always good). One job is rewriting the home page of someone’s website, and the other job is simple admin assistant work, just reformatting some forms. Another job I just got will be fun to do, though I don’t think I charged enough — I’ll be coming up with some PowerPoint word sets (each set is 8-10 slides) for someone who has a site that teaches infants and toddlers to read. I’ll also be writing a short story for the site, also with PowerPoint. It’s a great product, and I’m looking forward to trying it soon with Bethany.
That’s about it from here. Till next time!
