The summer of our discontent...

The Obama administration has taken a lot of drubbing from the right of late for it's claims at the beginning of this summer that this would be a "summer of recovery", since the numbers don't exactly show much in the way of recovery. But while I might disagree with their fiscal policies, I can hardly blame them for being overly optimistic about the magic of summer.

I always seem to look forward to summer, and always anticipate that it's going to be awesome and life-changing - I'm going to do all the things I want to do, go all kinds of places, succeed at things I've always failed at, and otherwise have an amazing summer. And I'm always disappointed, yet do the same thing every year, like a gambler convinced that this time that long shot horse will pay off.

There are a couple reasons I tend to look forward to summer. The first is that I hate cold weather - my thin skin gets chapped and bleeds, I hate having to put on shoes and pants and jackets and wait for the heat to come on in my truck and having to scrape ice off the windshield and shovel snow and a hundred other things.

The other big reason is that I work in higher ed, so summers are theoretically slower than the school year - most of the faculty and students are gone, so there are fewer users, and the campus is overall easier to navigate without scores of students hogging all the good parking spaces and the good seats at the cafeteria.

But work hasn't really been that much slower, because we've got a ton of projects we do during the summer, and because with people out on vacation, you are trying to pick up their slack.

This summer, I hoped to accomplish a bunch of stuff - I was hoping to take a vacation, something I don't normally do - I wanted to go to the unclaimed mail auction in Atlanta. I was also hoping to have some success in dating - last summer I actually managed to get some dates via an online dating site, and I was hoping that it was due to the magic of summer.

Alas, it looks like my dates were a fluke, and I never got an actual vacation. My mom had knee replacement surgery this summer, so I ended up in NJ at the parent's house helping them out rather than in the ATL.

That's not to say my summer was a total bust. I did make a few day trips to pick up stuff I won in online auctions, which along with some other auction and yard sale finds made for a fairly lucrative summer, financially. I went to a bunch more hamfests than I normally do. I started doing some strength training, and while I'm never going to be Mr. Universe, I think I've made a little progress.

My mom is probably going to be having her other knee replaced in November, which will require some more trips to NJ, but at least it means hopefully by next summer she'll have two decent knees and maybe I'll actually be able to take a vacation. And I should probably also make more of an effort next year to get all the stuff I've said I'm going to get done around the house done - get the shed fixed, get the grill working, get my broken front stairs replaced, and maybe even get my bathroom brought out of the late 70's.

Still don't know how to fix the whole dating thing, though...