Ambling Toward Autumn

We have officially made it to fall.  Less than three weeks ago we were still soaking up the sun and heat at Disney World, and today was a blah day of work and school where it barely hit 60.  It's been in the 70s for the most part since we got past that cool spell when we got home, but right on schedule, today marked a major downswing and I don't think there's a 70 in the extended forecast at all.  I'm back to feeling burned out at work.  School is well underway.  Activities are ramping up.  There's no denying it--summer is over and fall is starting its inevitable arrival, first according to the calendar, and soon nature will fully follow suit.  Part of me is relieved and eager for the cozy parts of fall, and part of me can't believe summer is over already.  

I put out the decorations last weekend, at least a few days earlier than usual.  Usually I hold off until almost exactly the first day of fall, but this year I didn't mind jumping in early.  Maybe I got my fill of summer weather in Florida, or maybe the cold weather right when we got back signaled to my brain it was time to start transitioning.  I feel like I'm not fighting it as hard as usual, which I guess is good.  Fall is lovely apart from what comes after it, but I always try to remind myself that even once it arrives we have the better part of a month and a half where it's still pretty tolerable.  Colder, yes.  But the outdoors are still an option, the leaves are lovely, and who doesn't enjoy a solid dose of cider and pumpkin everything for a couple months?  Even Halloween brings up some good memories, but usually that's about where the warm fuzzies end and the hard part of fall really starts for me.  It's cold, snow becomes a real possibility, and those last few weeks before Thanksgiving and the Christmas rush are always a mental challenge for me. 

Oddly, getting through September this year feels a little like getting through November.  All eyes are on a busy weekend coming up at the end of the month--I will be working late Friday and all day Saturday, then hopefully going to the Hilton Apple Fest for the first time since COVID on Sunday.  The boys will be in Boston!  I wish I could go (for the inevitable Wahlburger's trip alone), but my work weekend is mandatory.  Hopefully we'll get to go back there sometime anyway with more time to do the historical, touristy stuff, so maybe they can scout things out a bit!  After that we have a couple weekends off followed by three straight weeks of travel--Syracuse, Albany, and then East-Central PA.  There's a family Oktoberfest in Buffalo one of those off weekends, and hopefully later in November I can make another trip to Binghamton to celebrate my godson's belated birthday and his mother's early birthday.  Add in a pumpkin patch trip somewhere in those home weekends and it's going to be a busy fall!  

This past weekend wasn't very interesting--Jacob's intensive basketball practice schedule dominates a bit right now, along with everyone's need for rest!--but I did do a lot of random stuff at home.  It actually started earlier in the week because Carter needed photos ordered for a school project.  While we were at it, I figured I'd order new pictures for my office desk and for our living room photo collage (both for the first time in probably 3-4 years), and also keep a promise to Carter to print some Florida pictures for his room since he didn't really get a Disney souvenir.  I knew we had an empty four-photo frame at home that he could use, so we printed those pictures as well.  Once I got those pictures into the frame, that brought me to another project I had wanted to do--a gallery wall in Carter's room.  He's had a couple pieces of his artwork sitting on his dresser for over a year (I long ago put them in extra frames I had, just for fun, and leaned them against the wall on his dresser), and I was waiting for some other inspiration to prompt me to put them up.  Carter brought home a bunch of art at the end of the school year, and one was super colorful and fun.  Then he had some texture rubbings from camp, one of which was cool and colorful as well, so I bought one frame and scrounged up another from my leftovers to make those presentable.  He also had a clay wall hanging with an octopus that he did at school that needed a home.  I gave it a shot placing them, and this was the result.

Not bad considering I am usually a symmetry girl.

The clay piece is to the left--hard to see but there's a few sea creatures on it.  To the right is a picture that was colored mostly via tissue paper transfer.  It's a mountain and sun with trees and houses.  I just love the colors.

The one on the left was done at a family picnic with a spray bottle.  Notice that it's his name!  The one on the right was a bunch of texture rubbings in various colors.  I just liked it despite its odd shape and put some construction paper behind it.

The top is another spray painting from the family picnic.  I always really liked that one and the matting really classes it up!  At the bottom is his Disney collage - Expedition Everest, the boys in front of the Millennium Falcon, the EPCOT ball at the moment it wowed Carter, and the water slide at the resort pool.  We stuck a Mickey sticker in the annoying, empty, black middle section of the frame.

While I was buying the frame for Carter's artwork, I took advantage of a deal to get another one for this awkwardly sized photo of Jacob that came from the combine he went to in the spring.  I actually bought it for his team picture from that event which had been sitting on our dining room table, but I forgot this one was hiding behind it!  Obviously this one had to go in the frame instead!

It felt good to get that stuff done and clean off the dining room table a bit.  I also sorted through a bunch of other stuff that piled up from the first couple weeks of school, coupled with a very busy work week for me last week.  I was in-person three straight days with two of those involving events, and it left me more behind than usual at home.  I still have more to do, but I made some progress prior to adding a viola rental to my list the other night after the instrument meeting at Carter's school.  I also managed to do some dusting as I put out the fall decor, but still have more cleaning to do, too.  I finally fit in a workout (and rendered myself nearly unable to walk), did some grocery shopping and a Target run, picked up a few useful things at the dollar store, and placed an Amazon order with a couple things I'd been trying to decide on (Apple Watch bands and a new scale) and one impulse buy (a new ATM-style bank for Carter).  I was just all about solving problems and organizing my life.  Probably compensating for something, or trying to make an uninteresting weekend worthwhile, or just trying to generally fill time before weekends get crazy, but it felt good to get through some of that stuff.  But the cleaning will haunt me until I get up the energy to finish it!

I also finally ordered a custom-sized mat for the diamond painting I did at the beginning of the pandemic.  I inadvertently started it a week or so before the world shut down and it was my "zen" activity for those first few months when we were stuck at home.  I even slowed myself down to make it last a little longer!  It's an odd size, so getting a frame and figuring out the process of ordering the mat took much longer...and then I just got lazy.  But I got that ordered when I bought the other frames, got it back earlier this week and framed it the next morning.  It looks great, but then I had to figure out where to hang it, and now I need to figure out how to hang it without a stud.  It needs to be seen from afar to be most effective given the "pixelated" style of the art, so hanging it over the bed works well since you walk in the room at the foot of the bed and always have a solid three feet or more everywhere in the room except on the bed--and even then, when do you need to look toward the headboard?  We will finally get something over our bed (that's not a window) for the first time ever!  Now to find the right accents...sigh.  But the stud is off center so I think I need to get a monkey hook so I don't have to drill into the wall.  The good news is that once it's hung, I can start on the other diamond painting I ordered over two years ago that I told myself I couldn't start until the other one was framed and hung!

One of the other highlights of my week so far (sad as it may be) is the return of Munich's Oktoberfest for the first time since 2019.  I think I've mentioned here before how much I enjoy watching the webcams and listening to the audio from the Hofbrau tent.  I missed it so much these last couple years.  I can't quite put my finger on why it's so fascinating to me, a person who barely drinks beer and only has a fleeting connection to her German heritage, but it just looks like so much fun and such an adventure.  Singing along in the tents, eating fun foods, riding rides--I mean, in theory it's nothing a good, solid state or county fair couldn't do, but the tradition and the historical and cultural aspects are obviously special, and it just looks so magical to me.  It's definitely on my bucket list (my parents went for a couple hours six years ago today when their European tour passed through Munich), though the thought of actually going, picking a tent (they're all different!), and getting reservations overwhelms me.  The language barrier, the long flight, the endless logistics...ugh.  I need to make it happen, though.  I watch the cameras periodically throughout the day and it's so enjoyable despite this unmistakable tinge of desperate desire to actually be there.  I wonder what it would actually feel like to be there, to take my own pictures, to ride the rides, to eat a giant pretzel, to raise my own glass and sing along.  It seems impossible (and still a little icky in the COVID era), but it just looks so amazing.  I caught these views the other day, at that perfect time of day where the sun is setting, there's still enough daylight to see detail, but the lights are starting to come on.  It's just so beautiful. 

Carter and I also enjoy watching the rides on the streaming cameras.  There are some really interesting ones that I've never seen before, and of course the drop towers and tall swings must have amazing views.  

Another highlight of the week was Carter's back to school bash.  Last year the event really struck me as amazing to see all the kids together and able to play for the first time in a year and a half, and this year it just felt mostly normal.  Unfortunately, Carter's teacher apparently couldn't make it, so meeting her will have to wait a few more weeks until open house.  But he loved seeing his friends, we enjoyed our pizza, and he gave the fun run a solid effort.  For the second year in a row, he and a couple of his friends played until everyone else was gone and it was getting dark!

Lining up for the 4th grade fun run

And they're off...

Crossing the finish line--but not the finish he wanted :(

 

Enjoying his pizza after the race--one of our favorites, Perri's!

As a whole, we're muddling through these early weeks.  Carter is doing well with homework despite the weekly packet making him a bit more disorganized than one day of work at a time did last year.  I think he liked the exactness of it then, so managing timing and tracking of a week's worth is a bit of a learning experience for him.  Our next challenge will be when he starts an instrument and needs to practice daily, but he's been good about daily reading on his own, so we'll see.  Jacob is a bit of a mess right now.  Balancing basketball and school is challenging, especially since he has subjects every day instead of every other day like he did previously.  Math is a struggle once again (probably in part because his last teacher was terrible), and just getting him to buckle down and do his work without distractions is a daily battle.  Add in the usual bedtime and wake-up challenges, and he's still a major work in progress two weeks in (good lord, it's really only been two weeks?!).  We're trying to impart the importance of taking evening medicine because it will help him focus and listen to reason when we remind him to finish his work.  I think it's going to take a while to get him in a groove, but then school basketball will probably start and blast our success to smithereens again.  He's motivated to do well for basketball recruitment purposes, but when it comes time to do the work, his oppositional-defiant, ADHD brain tends to take over.  It's going to be a constant effort to teach him how to be aware of that and fight it off.  The teen years are such a struggle, and this is just the beginning.

Anyway, hopefully we can spice up this weekend a little and try to make the most of our home time before busy season begins.  It's been quite the downshift since Disney--if not in activity, then definitely in fun--so I'm eager to start making some memories again soon.