Summer absence

This begins a week of my two oldest boys being gone and out of town. It's gonna be weird, it always is. It's not camp, that's next month. It's FSY out in Amherst Massachusetts, and my wife's friend (who lives in nearby CT) has kids attending the same week. It's unfortunate that neither of them considered meeting up and hanging out in the duration.

I still have my two younger children, and the boy in that part can be a noisy one regardless. Still, half as quiet is still oddly quiet.

One day I'll be an empty nester and have no idea what to do with myself.

Concert

At the age of forty-six years old, I finally attended my first concert. Not for lack of trying, but for lack of desire. I enjoy a lot of music, but never felt the need to go see them live. Any concert I would have really wanted to attend was so far away it was barely worth it, and no local shows had any interest.

And then my wife got me tickets for Christmas. She bought them back in November when they opened sales, and since then I've been wondering what I've been missing. The show was a few days ago, on Friday, and it was Weird Al Yankovich. Without going into any detail whatsoever, I'm attending every one of his shows I can manage.

I'm too old and have too many obligations to follow the tour, but I'm ok with that. Now someone tell me why the t-shirts are so expensive?

Fourth timing

I like celebrating the 4th of July and anyone that doesn't is a soulless killjoy and / or communist.

Now that I got that out of my system...

It was on a Saturday this year. This works because it's a 'stay up late' holiday and you never have the next day off, and I have an early start in the mornings. But it also rained late morning through early afternoon. At least the weather had the decency to let up for the end of the day.

Heat wavey

A full week where the average temperatures are well above "ABSOLUTELY NOT" make me both grateful to live in a nation where air conditioning is a way of life, and miserable that I'm not in the Adirondaks where the average temperature is twenty degrees cooler.

I'm in the wrong part of the state.

Fathers Birth Day

My birthday is on June 14th - dangerously close to Father's Day. But being the 14th, it will never fall on Father's Day. Closest it will get is last year when it was one weekend (Saturday-Sunday), and the furthest it gets is this year, a full week apart.

What it means is that all the cool stuff I like suddenly gets propped up for Father's Day sales.

Birthday hike

For my birthday this year I went to the Adirondacks again. This time I hiked Street and Nye. There is a river crossing, and I wasn't fully aware of what to expect. I brought a camp towel with the expectation that I would put my boots and socks in my bag, walk through, dry off, and continue on.

It was raining the entire day before, and some parts of the river were much, much deeper than it looked. And it was moving pretty fast.

The picture doesn't really show it, but they seldom do.

One of my companions learned the hard way how deep it was, and promptly took a bath. I found a few boulders I could jump to (trepidatiously, seeing that I refused to jump that distance barefoot, and failure meant landing in the water, boots and all). I successfully hopped across most of the river, while using trekking poles to gauge how deep it was the rest of the way.

Then I went up and back down. It was nice.

Getting back across the river, I figured I'd just go back across where I did before. Problem with that was, nobody could quite figure out where that was. My sopping wet companion just walked across while those of us that remained dry attempted to stay that way. I can say that I did just that.

Now as for the time it took... all the trail guides and apps said it took anywhere from 5 to 6 hours. It took us a fair bit longer than that. I'm positive these were written up by 18 year old freshman going for their degree in conservation or some other hippy diploma that can't fathom anyone not running full tilt up and down. Or maybe there was cocaine involved, either way these are not real people.

I had a good birthday.

The wasted month

Here in the state of high taxes and overregulation New York, school ends at the end of June. Like, after the official start of summer. It's a comedic waste of time because nothing of value is being taught at this point. K-8 are going on field trips to amusement parks (Both my youngest son and my daughter went to Seabreeze), having field days and other parties. The high schoolers are taking their useless regents exams.

What are regents exams, you might ask? Think of a ⭐special⭐ final exam that all the high school administrators think is important, but literally no college cares about. Not even NY state colleges care, it's just a final exam to them. They care more about your grades than the fact that you took the ⭐special⭐ exam. 

New York schools have a week off in February called 'mid-winter recess'. More like midwit excuses. There's lore that says it was because heating the schools in the winter was expensive so they cut it for a week in the coldest part of the year, but that's the worst kind of nonsense I've heard in a long time. It's pointless and needs to go. Send them to school and bring up the end of the school year by a week. And ever since "Juneteenth" became a federal holiday, they don't have school that day, either. That just stretches it out another day, so if we bring it up a week we get to skip that entirely. Right now this year the last day of school is 

June 25

Which is a crime as far as I'm concerned. Bringing it up a full five days would have it end on the 17th instead. And while we're at it, end spring break. Yea, I said it. The idea that the kids, and the teachers, need a break is a joke. Out here in the real world you don't get two months off, and the work time peppered with random half days, TWO WEEKS OFF FOR CHRISTMAS, and two other random weeks off.

End the school year earlier. The people whining about child care are already whining about it during February and April, they can whine about it in summer a little bit more instead. 

Stop wasting June in a classroom waiting for the clock to run out.