Thursday Ten: OH NO! It’s Almost Summer Edition

1. The school year is winding to a close. Tuesday was Pumpkin’s preschool graduation, today is her last day. Today was an awards ceremony at The Princess’s school – her last day is in a week and a half. And then… summer. Oy. Y’all remember, it takes me a few weeks to find my routine and my groove in the summer. Except moderate amounts of griping about the chaos in coming weeks. It’ll be (mostly) painless (for you).

2. Tomorrow The Princess turns 8. I’ve been trying to get away with calling her birthday my “mommiversary” in hopes that there are presents and cake for ME, as well. So far, it doesn’t appear to be catching on.

3. Editing and processing photos is a time-consuming thing. How much so, I hadn’t realized. I am told that processes and routines help – if you are a photographer or photo-junkie, what do YOU do with your pictures to process? And also: PhotoShop or Lightroom?

4. The American Idol finale last night. WHOA. That was two hours of crap for two minutes of reward. I wish they wouldn’t stretch it out like that. It’s miserable. But, I’m happy with the winner… so there’s that.

5. In guitar class, we started a different song – Anna Nalick’s “Breathe”. One of my favorites.

6. In addition to “Breathe”, we went back to “Shallow Days” and Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman, blah blah blah”. It’s funny – the weeks I don’t get much time to practice, I often manage to pull off a good lesson. It’s funny that way – I tend to overthink and get frustrated when I’m not accomplishing something, so sometimes it’s good to walk away from what I’m learning for a moment. Somehow, I usually manage to make progress. Sorta.

7. After February, I decided to not color my hair anymore. It was never about extreme color changes – when you have hair as dark as mine, you can’t really go extreme without a kajillion step process to lighten first… and frankly, I don’t have the patience for that. I was doing semi-permanent colors occasionally, just to cover the gray — but stopped when I decided that I really like my natural hair color better than I liked any of the colors I was finding on a shelf. Fortunately, the gray hairs seemed to slow right around then, so it wasn’t even a huge deal. BUT. I found two of those suckers this morning and they have GOT TO GO. Vanity sucks.

8. My afternoon involves making cupcakes for The Princess’s second grade class. If I learned anything last year it’s that I need to keep the air conditioning cranked until I get the cupcakes out of the house so the frosting doesn’t melt off.

9. Any one have any big Memorial Day weekend plans? Looks like we’re celebrating a birthday ALL WEEKEND. (Seriously, like three days of cake).

10. With the end of the school year coming, my days are getting more and more chaotic with activities at the kids’ schools and all the other nitpicky things like field trips, field days, and la la la. Because of this, I’ve had to juggle life around to get everything done – which means that this morning I woke up before six a.m. Why? To do the Jillian Michaels’ SHRED. Before 6 a.m. Oy.