Life at 3 miles an Hour

Some of you will be annoyed as you read that I’m enjoying a nice cool start to the day here at my seat by the beach. The marine layer, known as fog in other parts of the world, is in which only promises another blue sky, sunny and 80 degree day. We have settled into the weather pattern that is the reason I won’t leave Seattle in the Summer. It is, in a word, fabulous. Anyway….enough of the taunting. While the weather on the outside has been fabulous, inside it’s been a fairly turbulent season. This week represents, I think, the eye of the storm. It is peaceful. It is clear. Best of all, it’s quiet,

I’m entering the calm before the storm. The grand event takes place 16 days from now. I think that plans are going well, but what do I know…I’m only Father of the Bride. What I do know is that hundreds of people are about to descend upon my house for a week in 11 more days. Ok, so it’s more like dozens…. Well maybe only about 1 dozen, but for a recluse like me it’ll seem like more. I’m kind of looking forward to it though. 10 years of west coast living has seemed to mellow me out a bit. In preparation for the event, I have just completed the third installment of our new DIY reality show called “What the Hell Were You Thinking?”. This last installment involved painting the entire exterior of the house myself. If nothing else, these projects have firmly and not so lovingly established my advancing years and recently recognized mortality. This episode involved toying around with heat exhaustion, but at least I didn’t fall from a ladder. I will tell you that at one point, I was ...

The beach is the place to be today. The sun is out, the skies are blue, and for the first time in 9 months the thermometer is going to surge past 80 degrees. The retired contingent has decided to place themselves nearly in my lap as they compare today's forecast with their months in Arizona. Even though I’d rather not focus on things like weather, I’ll have to admit that this has been a very poor excuse for a Summer. Actually Spring wasn’t much to write home about either. The Fourth of July has come and gone and we’ve not been out on our deck yet. Who’d have thought that my late June DIY pergola project would not disrupt our outside activities at all. So Sunday it was like 65 degrees and tomorrow we will reach into the 90’s. I thought that I had left behind this kind of thing when I moved out of the Northeast to a more reasonable climate here, apparently not this year. Anyway, with my wife in Florida this week experiencing what a real 90 plus degree Summer feels like, I hav...