long time no blog

To all the die hards who are still occasionally checking to see if I am ever going to blog again, I thank you. I have contemplated just taking the blog down, since I can't seem to get to the blogging lately. Really since last fall. It is harder to blog at work, and when I get home from a nine hour day, I can't get myself moving to do anything productive besides load the dishwasher. But I have decided that I don't want to quit, and I'm going to try to make more of an effort to blog once a week.

There hasn't been much to report lately. We're working on a multitude of home projects, from my parents landscaping to major bathroom renovations as Bumpalot, to the getting spruced up of the Homestead so we can sell it, which seems to be taking forever. But it leaves us with precious little free time. Our house (the only one not currently under renovation, strangely enough) is currently a pit in which you must wade through the junk mail, dirty dishes and even yet still half packed bags from the previous weekend. The summer seems to be stretching out before us as a series of weekends away from home, and weeks that seem temporary and cadged together in between. Our cooking has suffered. I have a beautiful new mixer that I sadly have not been able to use more than twice. The most we get done in any given week is a couple of walks, a dinner with the Bumps, maybe an hour or two of recorded television.

For some reason our summers seem to slip away so quickly, between trips to the mountains and trips to Loveland, we're going going gone. And I love every minute of gone--it feels wonderful to curl up on a couch and read, occasionally watching the hummingbirds flit up for a sip in the feed in front of the sliding glass door at Bumpalot. Even taking a sledgehammer to the awwwfull tile in the bathroom at Bumpalot felt good. But coming home to what is amounting to our temporary landing site doesn't feel good. It feels like when you eat something you love but know it doesn't love you (like, say, donuts) and you know you're going to be sick but you do it anyway. And then you're sick and you wonder why you keep doing that, when you know it makes you sick. It's sort of like that.

Meanwhile, our trip to Iceland is looming large in the foreground, approximately a month away (!!!). I bought a new camera for the trip last night, which was very exciting. I haven't owned a camera since college, really. It has an alarming amount of buttons and features, but I feel with Mr. Bump's help, I'll figure it out. With that and my raincoat, I think I'm ready to go. It will be interesting to compare the pictures that Mr. Bump takes with the ones I take. We are very different in what we think is worth capturing. I'll try to get some of my tentative snaps up here or on flickr.

I promise the next blog will actually resemble something interesting and narrative-based rather than a list of "look what I bought."