Home for the Weekend!

Our entire family is home with no immediate plans for out-of-town travel, and I gotta tell you, it’s pretty exciting for me.

This is sort of the calm before the back-to-school storm. The girls’ fall sports start a week from Monday, which effectively becomes the end of summer for them, with M’s schedule including plenty of two-a-day practices and both of them scheduled to play in games before school officially begins. But even though sports will mean the girls are busy, we’re fortunately very low-stress about try out season this year. Unlike the past several years (like last year, the year before, and the year before) the girls know which team they’ll be playing on. They’ve got a few friends who may or may not make the team that they’d like, but overall, it’s pretty chill at our house. And yes, J will be moving from the middle school to the high school, but for now she is mostly just excited about it. I expect we can coast for about three more weeks before the jitters kick in with that.

So what are we doing with this free weekend? Are we sucking the marrow out of summertime? Well, not really. M’s been a social butterfly, but J was mostly busy with dog-sitting duties, Cute W tackled some yard work and organized the garage, and I’ve mostly been decluttering.

There’s the usual clearing of the desk and fixing putting away laundry, but I also set aside time for some digital decluttering. I am pretty terrible about allowing my digital life to get cluttered. I use those fake Post It notes on both my desktop and my laptop computers, I am terrible about deleting emails (I’ll mark them read, sure, but deleting is tougher for me), heck, I even save links on Facebook to look at them later.

Another bit of clutter? Half-written blog posts, or even posts that I thought that I would write and gave myself a little note or a link to remind me to write. This works well enough when I’m writing regularly, but I’ve been so sporadic that I have a huge backlog. An example: some link to an article by a mom with the three things that she absolutely insists her daughter must do for college. Except that site no longer goes anywhere. It must have made some sort of impression on me, but now I have absolutely zero recollection of what exactly her strong feelings were, so you’re all going to live without learning about my hearty approval of or righteous outrageous against her views. But I fully intend to Marie Kondo the crap out of these old drafts of posts. They’ll be sorted into trash (bringing no one joy), a personal archive (brought me joy to write them but most likely would outrage my kids), and the stuff I’ll actually share, which is whatever’s been waiting in the hopper that I still care about enough to write about. So look for some random-y randomness coming soon.