Friday Five - Dog Days of Summer

Over at RevGalBlogPals, Singing Owl waxes poetic about the anticipation of spring, the blessings of summer, and these (for her in Wisconsin) final days of summer known as dog days. She asks the following questions.

1. What's the weather like where you live? In a word, HOT! We are expecting a bit of a cool down next week when the highs will be 98 and 99 instead of 105-106. Yesterday marked 13 days of triple digits.

2. Share one thing you love about this time of year. The anticipation of a new school year. Since I was little, I have looked forward to this particular new beginning.

I was a teacher for 20 years so from age 6 until I finished seminary, my life revolved around the school calendar. Then I spent a couple of years in the conference office and really missed that sense of new beginnings. This year, I'm in a local church and we are celebrating back to school with a blessing of the backpacks on August 22. We are also in the process of kicking off some fall classes and small groups, so there is definitely a sense of new beginnings.

My late August birthday gets all wrapped up in that sense of new beginnings as well. There have been others, but I know I started 5th grade, college, and my first year of teaching on my birthday. I preached one of my first sermons (they were few and far between back then) on my birthday and organized a potluck for the same day. The whole church sang Happy Birthday. It seemed like I had just planned a big ole party for myself!

3. Share one thing you do NOT love about this time of year. Getting in and out of a hot car to go from place to place. It just zaps me and saps my energy. I do as many errands as I can early in the morning. Also, sweat.

4. How will you spend your remaining days leading up to autumn? Well that's quite a number of days here. When I was teaching, I used to joke that teachers had to be prepared to teach the season of fall on the day it happens. Planning your Halloween costume is a gamble here. It could be 35 or it could be 90. So autumn or fall here is more a matter of what's happening than how the weather feels. Besides the start of school, the biggest sign of "fall" is the beginning of the football season both professional and high school.

As for what I'll be doing, Manboy is starting his senior year in high school next week, so we have college visits on the calendar along with senior pictures and all the rituals that accompany this beginning that leads to an ending that leads to a beginning. It's hard to imagine that this time next year we'll be sending him off to ??????

5. Share a good summer memory. Swim lessons - both my own when I was little and Manboy's when he was little. Swimming was one of the few physical activities I could do moderately well.
I love being in the water and I'm thinking it's just silly that I let something like how I look in a swimsuit keep me from enjoying that more often.

The Manboy memory involves they day he learned to dive. He was sooo excited and proud of himself. Later, he sat at our kitchen table and said, "Mom, when you dive in the water, you get more speed." I asked if that was a good thing. A look of glazed ecstasy came over his face, his little hands raised as in praise and he said, "Speeeed is gooooooood!" I swore then he wasn't driving till he was 40. It's a miracle that he has his own wheels now.

Bonus: What food says summer to you? Watermelon. The taste. The color. The juice running down your chin.