THE ONE WHERE IT WAS HOT.

I’m as tired of hearing “it’s so hot!” as I am of hearing, “it’s SUMMER, it’s SUPPOSED to be hot!” And it’s usually ME saying “it’s so hot.”

It’s hot. So the main activity has been Staying Cool.

I’ve sort of stepped away from phone/internet/social media a bit recently, which is good, I guess, but it also has me not even thinking about taking out my phone to take pictures. Which makes for a very boring Week in Review post.

Monday Outfit of the Day

I stayed in and read one evening, I got a slice of pizza and ate it at the little beach by me one evening, I went with a girlfriend to Cocktail Beach one evening (but it was too hot to even have a cocktail), I watched a movie one evening when I was having High Anxiety, and one evening I stayed in and cleaned cuz Katie was coming. There. That’s pretty much my week in one paragraph.

Tuesday Outfit of the Day

I’d say “I’ll just share the highlights,” but this week the highlights were really lowlights 🙁 I mentioned High Anxiety Day. And it’s funny cuz just the evening before, cocktail-less, my girlfriend and I had been talking about the Welbutrin I’ve been taking for six weeks now. When I went to the doctor two weeks ago he asked how that was going, did I feel any better on it? I said that it was hard to tell, I didn’t feel MAGICALLY HAPPY or anything, plus, that first month on it was just an easier month – I had a vacation, the workweek leading UP to a vacation is sometimes easier (and this one was), my anxiety sources were sleeping…so, yeah, I felt better, but…I think I would have felt better that month ANYWAY.

So, the morning after that conversation, something happened to send me into HIGH HIGH anxiety, and it’s the worst it’s been in a pretty long time. All day, even into the evening when I got home (that’s why the movie, in an attempt to distract me from THINKINGTHINKINGTHINKING), even when I was trying to fall asleep that night. So my observation of the drug is this: I think it makes me feel a little better…AS LONG AS NOTHING GOES WRONG.

Friday Outfit of the Day. Didn’t think you were going to get through a summer without seeing THIS again, did you??

The other “low” is that I’ve come to a decision. That even while I feel TOO YOUNG to stop driving at night, I am going to stop driving at night IN THE RAIN. It’s just too hard for me to see, and where I live, and the routes to GET me to where I live, are winding, curving, hilly and poorly lit. This has been coming on for a couple years…but when I lived in Brentwood for those five years, I was close to the expressway, the roads were straighter, etc…I managed. Once I moved up to Northport two years ago, it’s very different topography and I’ve reached the point where it’s challenging to drive at night…and terrifying to drive at night in the rain. So I’m done. If it’s raining, I’m just not going out in the evening. Anyway, the night I went to Cocktail Beach with my friend, about halfway home it started raining just torrentially. And I white-knuckled it the rest of the 45 minutes home. And made the decision, no more. And that’s a little depressing.

Does anyone else struggle with night/rain driving?

I used to sort of laugh at my mother because at a certain point she pretty much refused to drive after dark (she also wouldn’t turn left against traffic, and would make three rights to avoid the one left, but that’s another story). But she was not active in her later life, she didn’t NEED to go out, she didn’t WANT to go out, so it was not a big loss to her to no longer drive after dark.

SORRY, MOMMY. I get it now.

The HIGHLIGHT was KATIE IS HOME. When I say home, I mean, New York. She doesn’t stay with me, she stays at Russell’s (it’s bigger, nicer, more people, more animals, more things going on, a car for her use, a pool). But I picked her up at the airport at the crack of dawn Saturday morning and when we got out here we went out for breakfast before she headed to her father’s to help set-up for a party.

Oh, the reason there was no Friday post was because Thursday was The Bad Day and I just couldn’t get it together.

Anyway. That was pretty much my week.

I read three books (I’m starting to think that books are the devil’s work as reading has been keeping me away from the computer and things I should be doing. People complain that too much time is spent on the internet – but if we/I wasn’t on the internet, what would I be doing with my time? Watching tv? Reading? I probably wouldn’t be curing cancer or achieving world peace (or even washing the dishes), so…where’s the good in swapping one compulsive time-suck for another?).

I’m spending a lot of time on the sofa, reading. I now have a little collection of shoes down there from when I kick them off.

Anyway.

One was silly and unbelievable and ridiculous. It’s by Sophie Kinsella, who wrote “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” You do the math.  It gets no thumbs from me. Oh, yeah, it was called “I’ve Got Your Number.”

But then…literature was redeemed by what I am considering The Best Book I’ve Read This Year…”This is How It Always Is” by Laurie Frankel. It’s the story of a couple who, after four boys, were hoping for a girl. When the fifth child was a son, oh well, whatever. But at a very young age, the last son became aware of identifying as a girl. And the story tells how Claude/Poppy and the whole family dealt with that. This, of course, is a challenging situation, and the parents might have seemed just a little too good to be true, but. I loved them. I loved them all. It was SO beautifully written. At times it was almost lyrical, poetic. I cried, I laughed, it made me feel, it made me think – to me, the signs of a truly wonderful book. 4.85 out of 5. All my thumbs. And my highest recommendation. Please, if you read it, let me know what you thought.

The third book was dark and hard and sad but ultimately beautiful…if you could just hold on through the dark and hard and sad. “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey, about the author’s coming to terms with his really hardcore alcoholism and crack addiction. I’m going to give it two thumbs up…but don’t know many people I would recommend it to just because of the darkness and the subject matter.

I’ve been making good on my promise to myself that This Summer there would NOT BE a sinkful of dirty dishes to look at. EVER.

It’s still No Buy July (will it ever end??) and while I have bought no clothing, I did buy a stainless steel telescoping straw. I don’t know about where you are, but here they are getting more and more strict about plastics and recycling. Some places have already replaced plastic straws with paper and, man, I hate a paper straw! So this comes with a handy little carry tube and cleaning brush and I’ll just keep it in my purse to use instead of paper or plastic straws. This might, in some small way, balance out the fact that I still choose plastic bags at the market, even though they are now a nickel apiece…because I need plastic bags for the kitty litter box!

And, on Amazon Prime Day, I got a new 5 Terabyte external hard drive because I now have 3 external hard drives that all get accessed in different ways (some more of a pain than others). At the end of every year I move all that year’s photos to an external to clear space on my computer. But the externals are all full and it’s only July and the computer is running out of space. So. I believe I will be able to put everything on one unit and it will no longer be a pain in the butt to look for a picture from 2006.

And lastly, I managed to cobble together another What I Wore This Week vlog.

I made a giant breakfast on Sunday with leftovers from breakfast with Katie on Saturday and some fresh eggs I bought at the vegetable stand on my way home Friday. I NEVER make myself breakfast anymore.

So I will hope for a better week ahead. I will hope for COOLER days ahead…cuz IT’S SO HOT 🙂 And I will try to remember to get my phone out more often for pictures.