Yesterday marked the start of summer, and I’m just so ready. We’ve never gone on a summer vacation before summer actually starts, but we planned our California trip early so that we could miss the summer crowds at many of the places we were visiting. There was something sort of exciting about wrapping up school and hopping directly onto a plane. But it meant the pace of May was even more frenetic than normal – and when we returned we were already in the middle of June, and it took several days just to wrap our heads around that concept.
The girls have a slightly calmer summer schedule this year. They are getting older, and are more self-sufficient, and camps get so expensive and require a lot of shuttling. So June is a pretty quiet month before they both do a few favorite summer camps in July. They’ve refused to get back on any sort of regular sleep schedule post-vacation. They continue to operate on Pacific Standard Time – and a late version of PST at that.
If we’re Instagram friends, then you know that I brought home a nice allergic reaction to Pacific Coastal Red Oak – and I’m almost through two weeks of oral steroids to deal with it. It made for a few uncomfortably itchy days, but the weirdest side effect for me was the inability to sleep while on the steroids. I slept less than fifteen hours total the first week I was on them, but as I’ve tapered down, the sleep is returning. The upside was that they made me very productive and focused at work, which was certainly helpful after being out of the office for two weeks. If given the choice between the pros and cons, I’ll take good sleep any day.
I finished sorting through all of our vacation photos last night, and I have a few mini-photo projects still to work on. So instead of posting more trip photos, I thought I’d post these recent garden photos of poppies. We saw so many poppies in California, and they are really one of my favorite flowers. Seeing these photos in my files when I returned brought back a little of that vacation feeling. I’m holding onto as much of it as possible.
We’ve had so much rain, and the rivers are so high and flooding. Even in the gray, drippy mornings, these flowers seem to sing. When I see them, it feels like taking a deep breath, re-centering once again, a pause to watch in wonder at the structure of each bloom.
They’ve been just what I’ve needed in these weeks with a high-running motor, and the missing of long outdoor vacation days stretching ahead of me. They’ve reminded me that I can fit in walking and hiking and running into any day at all, anywhere that I happen to be.
