Summer!

PHEW.

Holy massive update, Batman. Sorry for my absence! It's been a whirlwind of activity around here lately. We finished up homeschooling for the year, and Stuart's going to go to public school next year for the first time. I'm a little burned out and in need of a change, so I'm heading back to school myself. I'm very much looking forward to it. We're both a little nervous, but I think we'll be fine.

I've also been doing a little writing. And by little, I mean I wrote 27,000 words between May 13th and June 13th, which is a monthly record for me. I'll need to do a lot of editing to make those words pretty and readable, but hey, you can't edit what you haven't written, right? My story is almost up to 38,000 words right now, so I'm keeping at it, slowly (it feels like that!) but surely. I tend to not read quite as much when I'm writing, and I've been so focused on writing that this blog fell to the wayside a little. Boo on that, but hopefully I'll be able to keep it up a little better now.

What else have I been doing? You've heard me talk about all my books being in the garage, still in boxes from the move. Well, no more! *insert maniacal cackling* My husband went on a business trip last week, and I decided I was going to do a project while he was gone. I'd already bought two ready-to-assemble bookshelves; they were sitting in the garage, just waiting for me to get ready to assemble them. So Stuart and I went out, bought one more, hauled it home, and spent an entire evening assembling all three of them.

First off, OMG OW MY BACK. I have degenerative disc disease, and I have to be really careful as to how I move. Regular bending, such as the bending you need to do to, say, empty the dishwasher, is painful and at times impossible for me; I have a hard time picking stuff up off the floor some days, and I live in terror of falling into the open oven when I take dinner out. Each box of ready-to-assemble shelves weighs 60 pounds. So I shoved 180 pounds of bookshelves out of the garage, through the kitchen, through the dining room, through the living room, up 16 stairs, and into our spare room. Yeah. And then two nights later, I repeated it all with my 30+ boxes of books from the garage.

Yeah. I'm paying for it. Or at least I did yesterday. I had a hard time walking most of yesterday and was plagued by muscle spasms in my lower back, which led to this really bizarre muscle spasm in my foot, where my big toe would start twitching all by itself, apropos of nothing. Freaky!

But I'm feeling better today, movement is mostly back to normal, or at least, what counts as normal for me, and I am so hugely in love with my library (which is how we refer to the spare room). It's GLORIOUS. Three five-shelf bookshelves, all filled, many shelves double-stacked...It's a book-lover's dream. I've borrowed my son's beanbag chair and plopped that down in the middle of the room, and now, when I sit in it and read and write, I feel like I'm in a bookstore. It's fantastic, and that's now my favorite room in the whole house. I'll post pictures someday soon so you can see how awesome it is. I have my own personal library!!!!!

So that's what I've been up to lately. A little bit of reading, a lot of writing, taking my son to the pool (those awful chairs there do NOT help my back), signing up for classes, building bookshelves, and hauling copious amounts of books throughout the house. It's been a busy summer so far!

I'm going to leave you with a video my son and I have watched countless numbers of times. It's at the Tempest Freerunning Academy in Chatsworth, California. The way these people move is nothing short of amazing, check it out!