SUMMER IS COMING!

I can almost taste it, summer is coming! Of course, here in Arizona when you taste summer, be sure to blow on it first so it doesn't burn your tongue. I'm not sure I could ever have the kind of job that doesn't give you summers off--I love the cosmic do-over of the school year; the hope-springs-eternal attitude of what I will do next year with my class that's even better than this year; the whole new group of faces in August. Not that I will likely be teaching full time for a couple of years, due to the severity of cuts in education here in our state. But DON'T get me started on that whole subject. It's a slippery slope. Here are a few things that I have planned for this summer. Now, I'm not going to list the obvious: sleeping in, napping, taking baths in the middle of the day, and catching up on books and movies that I've missed during the year, just some OTHER (less obvious) things that I started listing back a couple of weeks ago when the kids in class started in hot and heavy with SPRING FEVER, and G.W.D. (Generalized Whine Disorder). Here they are, in no particular order:

• recover living room chairs (I scored some fabulous Waverly fabric at a garage sale for a couple bucks--plenty to redo all 6 chairs!)
• re-read and apply the ideas from Stacy Julian's Photo Freedom book to my ever-mounting stacks of photos
• spend some time in here doing the things that I love
• hang our fun, repainted frames here to showcase the kids' artwork and pictures
• try oodles of new recipes that I've found all over blogland from great recipe blogs
• try some simple sewing projects that won't send me to the loony bin, maybe take a class from a sewing friend with my daughter (she's a natural, me--not so much)
  

I'm keeping the list short so that I will hopefully feel a measure of success, instead of that ego-crushing, heart stomping failure come August when I will once again be back to school!