The End of Summer

Well, the fourth of July is over and done with. I guess that means summer is pretty much over. That’s usually the way it goes every year. Once the fourth gets here, you know you don’t have very much summer left to enjoy before school/college starts. This year I don’t think will be too much different.

The first half of this summer has been spent doing usual, routine stuff—work, improv, running some races, and getting adjusted to living at home. Now, just as I’m getting used to that form of life, interruptions are going to be coming to confuse me. Come the last week of July, I have our family vacation to go on, which always heralds the ending of summer. Sure, I’ve got a couple of weeks until then, but what am I really going to do that’s all that important until then? Yep, that’s right—work, improv, and read comic books.

Every year we take our family vacation either at the end of August right before school or near the end of July so that all of the field work is mostly finished (which it never seems to be). Having our vacation at the end of summer was always fun because we’d have that to look forward to all summer instead of dreading those days as the last of our summer break. The only bad part was that as soon as you we got back home, we knew within the next couple of days we’d be back in school.

Having our vacation at the end of July is nice. It’s not quite at the end of the summer so you know you’ll have a few weeks left until it’s over, yet it’s not too early in the summer so that it seems like the rest of your summer drags by. It’s placed just perfectly to give you a well deserved break from what you’ve been doing during the summer.

The only bad thing about any vacation, no matter when you take it, is that it always seems so short. Sure, as soon as you get there you know you have so much time there that you can afford to waste some, so you do. Then you realize you’re halfway into your vacation and you have a lot of things you want to do yet, but you don’t want to rush so you still take your time. Then you realize that your vacation is almost over and there is a lot you still want to do so you start to rush. You try to cram as much as you can into those last days, those last hours, but no matter how much you try, you’ll never get everything you want in. Next thing you know you’re back at home unpacking and wondering where the last week went. That’s always such an odd feeling.

I’m looking forward to our vacation this year, especially since I didn’t get to go on our family vacation last year. I really should have went, but I stayed home to work. For a week I had the house to myself. You’d think that since the house was all mine I’d be having people over all the time or going out as much as I wanted, but I didn’t. I can just be so dumb sometimes. Why would anyone pass up a vacation? I really wonder now what I was thinking back then. Whatever I was thinking then, I’m not now because I can’t wait for vacation this year.