Missing Summer

Summer rocked but, then again, it almost always does. That's just how summer is. When you work on an academic calendar, you never outgrow the feeling of euphoria that is the very essence of summer. There's just so much time! Time to be lazy. Time to be busy. Time to have fun. Time to do house/yard work (yech). Time to visit family. Time to stay home. Yes, yes, this is all starting to sound like a poor imitation of Ecclesiastes.

One of the best things about summer is that there's more time for the random. During the school year, my days are pretty straightforward:

M-F: Get up (earrrrrrrly). Make breakfasts. Iron clothes. Get ready. Go to work. Work. Come home. Make dinner. Collapse in exhaustion on couch and watch mindless tv. Repeat.

Sa: Housework. Laundry. Try to squeeze in something fun.

Su: Church. Football. Get ready for Monday.

But during the summer, there's a lot of random going on. Double feature at the matinee price? Sure! Roach coach tour through L.A. midweek? Uh-huh! Spend the entire day reading a book? Why not! Open the front door to see my dog's doppelganger on the porch? Ok, weird. And random. But true.

Kind of makes me wonder how often the chocolate-lab-across-the-street breaks free and comes over to hang out on our porch during the school year!

I really love the random.

Chirp, chirp, chirp

Wow, there's really nothing happening around here, is there. The entire month of September came and went and, well, nothing here to show for it.

I have got to get a life.

Currently

Wait, haven't I been here before?

If you had told me, twenty-one years ago, that I would find myself on a road trip from Boston to Montreal and back again in a big white van with my primary Sunday School teacher, my children's choir director, my high school PE coach, and my oldest friend (second grade to present), as well as my husband, said-friend's husband, and said-friend's husband's in-laws, I would've told you that you were a crazy person.

And I would've been wrong. Because I was the crazy person and that is precisely how I spent my summer vacation: on a road trip from Boston to Montreal in a big white van with my primary Sunday School teacher, my ... well, you read it above.

Roach Coach Tour

Summer highlight: Sister Days! No boys allowed, just me and my sister.

This summer's big event? A tour of some of the gourmet roach coaches (aka lunch trucks) in the greater LA area.

Don Chow's: Mexican-Chinese fusion. Um, oh, yeah! This stuff was wicked good.

Coolhaus: Outrageous ice cream sandwiches. Mascarpone cheese and fig ice cream? Uh-huh! Salted caramel ice cream between snickerdoodles? Soooo good! Ice cream sandwich heaven.

South Philly Experience: Shared a cheesesteak. Pat's and Geno's have nothing to worry about but the guys in the truck were very sweet. And they had Tastycakes!

We finished up the day shopping at the Santa Monica Promenade and eating Yummy Cupcakes. Yummy Cupcakes makes the best cupcakes in the world. That's right, Sprinkles, you heard me.



I so love doing crazy things with my sis'!

Summer: The Half-Way Point

Mid-July is the half-way point of my summer. School gets out in early-June and starts up again in late-August so mid-July is right in the middle of summer. This is the point at which I have to fight my natural inclination to get depressed because summer is "almost over." Yes, I know it's not really almost over. I still have days and weeks of summer left to enjoy. I still have one big vacation to take. I still have ice cream to eat and books to read and home projects to complete.

But summer is offically waning. Good thing we're making it fun!

I know nothing about baseball. I take that back; I know that you have to hit a ball with a bat and run from base to base while players from the other team try to tag you with the ball to get you out. I don't go to baseball games for the love of the game. I go for the food, the camaraderie, and the cheesy mascots. This time, we took Jen and Dean with us. Dean actually played baseball so he takes it way more seriously than I do.

I loooooove county fairs! We go to the LA County Fair in September, right around my birthday. But lately Jon and I have been going to the San Diego County Fair at the start of summer. It's right by the beach, which is so cool. The only thing that would make it cooler is if they opened a train depot at the fairgrounds. Any excuse to take a train is a good excuse. We got in free this year, thanks to Kim and Danny. They gave us free tickets from Danny's mom and we met them and the kids for a day at the fair. I got to ride the kiddie rides with Caroline (Kim's not a big fan of carnival rides) and Jon got to ride the normal rides with Danny and the boys and then we all saw Switchfoot (a pretty awesome "free" concert). Plus, we all got to eat fair food. Ahhhh, fair food!

San Francisco! I haven't been in years and Jon's never been so this was an especially fun trip. We just spent a few days in the city and our stay at Le Meridien was a graduation from gift from Michael and Becca. Who knew that agreeing to become godparents for an adorable little boy would also net us free hotel stays? Loved San Francisco. While the east coast was sweltering in 100 degree heat, we were buying sweaters and tying on scarves. We ate sourdough at Boudin (and the best stew I've had in my life) and ice cream sundaes at Ghirardelli. We rode every form of public transportation we could find: BART, MUNI, bus, streetcar, cable car. We walked up hills and down the crookedest street in the country. We explored the CA Academy of Science and stepped out on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an excellent trip and I'm ready to go back, right now!

Apparently my longing to return to San Francisco communicated itself to Blogger, which decided to publish my San Francisco page twice. I don't know why and multiple attempts to remove the second page have failed so I'm leavin' it.

The Graduate 6-13-10

Three years to get the degree. And don't be thinking that he was slow, that a master's should only take two years. That is the case for some master's degrees but not this one. In order to even start a master's in speech-language pathology, you have to have one of two things: 1) a B.A. or B.S. in communication disorders--this is the way I did it, praise God--or 2) a B.A. or B.S. in anything else PLUS one full year of most of the undergraduate comm dis classes, which is called the transitional year.

And Jon, who doesn't really do anything the easy way, added all sorts of fun stuff to the prereqs for the master's program. Like his fifth year, because he was a teacher for ten years. Two credentials: 1) single-subject Social Science and 2) multiple-subject. He passed the CSET for the multiple-subject credential and I think he deserves an award for that. It was a killer. CBEST? Please. LSAT? NBD. CSET? Arrrrrgh! But he passed it first try. I would've died. Then his CAD certificate because he didn't want to set foot in a school as an employee ever again. Then the LSAT. What, you thought I was just referencing that for the fun of it? Nope, he took it, rocked it, and got into two law schools. Which was great, until he decided he didn't really want to be a lawyer. And I am sooooo praising God for that because, let's face it, this is not a good economy for lawyers.

So, with all of that out of the way, he gave speech-language pathology a try (as a Teacher On Assignment-Language Intervention) and decided that this was something he could get into.

Now, three years later, here he is. Graduating with a 4.0 GPA. He's got a very sweet contract with Riverside USD. Yep, that's right, he'll be back in the schools as a full-time SLP! Lucky RUSD; he's worked with me in Banning for the past two years and I am really going to miss him. But Banning just couldn't match RUSD's offer. Sigh.



I took a million photos that weekend and the quality of this shot isn't the best but I love it so much. It was taken at baccalaureate and I Photoshopped the heck out of it and even then the developer showed it to me and said, "This is how it came out; I'm sorry." (No, no, photo developer guy, I spent a lot of time to get it to look like that!) There's just something about this photo that shows the peace and anticipation that I felt from Jon all weekend long.

Jonathan D. Pilgrim, M.S., CFY/RPE-SLP.