Summer's arrived here in my house, the kids done with school, and in addition to various trips for 5 days here, 5 days there, my ordinary days at home are very different. One part of me doesn't like having so much company, so many interruptions, do many demands competing for my writing time and sanity, but I know it's all good really: the change and variation, the social contact. If I followed my own inclinations too religiously, I'd be in a cabin deep in the middle of the White Mountains, scribbling nonsense on toilet paper.

So I raise my metaphorical, grateful glass to everything and everyone I will be struggling against until September!!

Cheers dear- time to get up and stretch your legs - M

Pppfffffffftttttt!  If you're trying to tell us we'll see and hear less of you, I'm selfish.  I don't like that.  But who am I?

I'd rather think you'll be writing about all these fun and exciting things you'll be doing, and we'll get to be right there with you.

By the way, I understand perfectly what you mean about being a hermit.  My situation makes it easier for me to be that way, and yep, I do tend to be hermatesse-ish.  BUT, the bad thing about it is when I really do want and need friends and family, they're far away or on a screen which doesn't talk back to me, or touch me, or laugh at my jokes.  Then I curse my hermitese-ness.

I know you know what I mean.

cheryl

Yes. If only everyone would just sit quietly in the living room to be on hand when we want them!

Well, that's not exactly what I meant, although I admit it certainly does sound like.

You sure have a way of making me feel guilty...

                        but I can live with it.


cheryl

heavens, that's me i'm poking at, not you! lol. tom

Yeah.  I think I already felt guilty, then blamed it on you.  Shame on me.  And in order to halt this disorderly chain of events I openly and fully accept all the blame.

(ya think I have too much time on my hands?                    nevermind.)

cheryl

Salads and summer go together like ale and a deckchair.  I think of my early summers when salad ingredients weren't flown in from all over the world.  We only ate them in summer.  Such a musical accompaniment to a tin of salmon:  the trombone of a firm cucumber,  radishes a hot bongo's beats, all on a symphony of lettuce, while I stand in the kitchen conducting with my mayonnaise spoon.  Sometimes my mother would open a tin of Spam instead.  Salad days indeed!  Oh, and the flutes of a queue of spring onions,...

I don't think we ate fresh salad even. something in a can too, vinegay! it it wasn't sealed in a can with Ann Page's imprimatur on it, it was dangerous. lol.