the past few weeks

Recently I have taken the time to cherish my unemployment. I have a very open schedule this summer, perhaps for the last time ever, and I have been making the most of it. For one, I have been working out like nobody's business in preparation for volleyball this fall. Every morning I'm up and running or jumping or doing drills. Sometimes I do all three. At the same time. I've also taken plenty of time to read some fabulous novels. Recently I've been savoring works of fiction that are, rather ironically, filled with truths that are truer than life itself. I've finished my rereading of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and am currently enjoying the Chronicles of Narnia. Of course, I've also spent a good portion of time doing household chores like... washing dishes (who knew my family used so many dishes?!), yardwork, housecleaning, and (for the first time) cooking. That has been an incredible adventure. My dad calls me the mad chef. Enough said. In addition to all this, I've also found more than enough time to build up and enjoy some close friendships. I'm having an awesome summer.

Now it's time for some stories. I'll start with this morning.

I find incredible humor in the person whose mind takes a while to wake up. Fortunately, I am one of those people, so I am continually entertained. This morning, shortly after 3am, I was awakened from a sound sleep by some strange noises. As I was waking, I could think of only two concepts. They were "octogenarian" and "dodecahedron." I have no idea where those words came from. They are certainly not ones that I have used recently, if ever. I shuffled across my bedroom, amused at the misfirings between my ears. When I pulled up the blinds, I found neither octogenarians nor dodecahedrons. In fact, I found not one, not two, but three raccoons waddling around inside my window well. I sighed. This is the second time in two weeks that those critters have stumbled into my window well at 3am. I looked up and saw, profiled against the beautiful starry sky, three more raccoons. I had six confused rodents on my hands. One was digging its way out (the sound that had awakened me), another was trying to climb up my window screen, and another had its paw up on the window and was looking at me intently. I thought of lowering a two by four so that they could climb up, but frankly I was put out with them and didn't want to give them any help. That, and I didn't want to try to find a board in the dark and then chance getting attacked by six nervous coons. So I went back to bed. I hoped the crazy things were stuck until morning. As long as they didn't start their chirruping, I didn't mind them there. Raccoons are incredible little animals, though, and they were gone shortly. All six of them. =P

And now for yesterday...

Yesterday afternoon I felt remarkably caged in. I was stuck in the valley. The mountains were so tantalizingly close, and they had been calling me for several days, and yet I wasn't in them! It had been a full week since I had been up in the mountains, and I was going stir crazy. And so my mother and I packed some sandwiches for dinner and headed up into the mountains to do a little hiking. We drove up the most ridiculous road I have ever driven in my life. Of course it was narrow, not wide enough for two cars to pass. When we met a car, I pulled off near the edge of a ravine and they pulled off next to a bluff and we held our breaths as we inched past each other. But wait, it only gets better! After a while, we hit a truly awful old logging road. All the dirt had long since been washed away by the spring runoff, and the road was nothing more than a car-sized track of uneven and enormous rocks. We rattled along at 5-10mph until we finally reached the trailhead. The trail was pretty easy,


the wildflowers were breathtakingly beautiful,

and the temperature was perfect. We hiked back to some lakes and ate our dinner, then headed out. But of course, no hike is complete without sustaining some sort of injury. At least, that is how my hikes always seem to go. You would think I would start carrying bandaids, but no. This time, my doom came when I jumped out of a tree I had been climbing. A broken branch was sticking sneakily out of a bush, and as I neared the ground, my shin scraped nicely against the jagged end. I did some hollering, then we continued our hike. I don't know about you, but for me there is something immensely satisfying about emerging from the woods with a branch sticking out of your leg and sporting a tasteful amount of blood. Of course, after the branch has been discarded and the scrape washed up, you never feel quite so intrepid.

And that has been some of my summer. =)