Catch up

No, I haven't forgotten about my journaling duties, but Calvin and I (and many other hard working volunteers) spent every day for the past week and a half in the basement of our library, preparing for, running, and then cleaning up after our biggest used book sale of the year. Carting around heavy boxes and doing heavy decision making left me too spent to blog at night. I also took a lot fewer pictures, and blogging without pictures gets down right dull. But now we're about to take off on our final summer trip, and that means an explosion of photo ops and journaling ideas.

So how about a run-down of the past almost two weeks first.

Calvin discovered and devoured James Howes's series of stories about Harold, Chester, Howie, and Bunnicula. It's a cute series that was a favorite in our house when Curtis and I were younger. Totally silly with a little mystery/suspense thrown in from a dog's point of view.

Olympics and books. We actually watched TV almost every night for two weeks. It was fun, but now that it has been quiet in the house for a whole week I'm feeling quite glad it's over. And August must be used book sale month—the month when all the local library sale groups cut prices even farther (Ann Arbor even had one weekend when you could have anything that was left for free). We hit up the Ann Arbor bag sale, then spent the next week preparing for our own big sale, which turned out to be a great success.

Dexter Daze was back, our little local fun fair in the center of town. Good local charities selling food, local artists setting up tents, the train ride, the bounce house, all the good stuff. And corn. And our biggest used book sale of the year. Did I mention that we had record breaking sales? I'm quite excited.

Of course, it has barely rained a quarter inch all summer, but when the festival weekend rolls around, full of outdoor activities all over the village, it gets cool and threatens storms and drizzles all weekend long. Don't get me wrong, we needed the water, but couldn't it have picked a better weekend?

And it did clear long enough for us to go outside and take advantage of the cooler weather and wetter ground to roast some s'mores.

And an Opabinia in the driveway. Because...why not, I guess?