End of summer

So here we are, Labor Day weekend, about to move into the busiest part of the year, and I'm tired. It was a lovely summer, in so many ways. Lots of important milestones.

Graham had the most transformative summer. The biking trip in Italy with granny plus three weeks at Duke TIP really have opened him up to the world in a lot of ways, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

Natalie's own trip to Italy and then Spain was lovely for her, but really a more incremental step forward since we already knew she could handle herself wherever she was perfectly well. But she had fun and made friends and learned a lot, so it was all good. I think her internship with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in which she spent a lot of time driving around rural NC, going to county law enforcement offices and asking them for data (and understanding why they couldn't just snap their fingers and get it), probably showed her just as much of the world as going to Europe. Just seeing a lot of rural America and walking in the buildings taught her a lot about where she lives and what she has.

Mary and I, we went to Boulder for a week and stayed in Leslie and Walter's house, which was lovely. Then there was work. Then we went to Larchmont and helped pack up Mary's mom's house. Not quite enough vacation. Oh well.

I would try to chill out over the weekend, but I have to prep for my lecture on Eugene Onegin at NC State in a couple of weeks. How the heck did I let myself get talked into that?