Saturday, August 31, 2013

Summer Is Over.

Summer is over.

I can tell because I am at our traditional end of summer celebration - a Girl Scout recruitment event held at our local water park just before it closes.

Really, summer ended a couple of weeks ago with the official first day of school, but so far the girls are enjoying school, so the magic spell of summer has lingered.

It has been a busy summer, and my blog list is littered with barely-started posts that have been accumulating all summer. For instance, I spent two weeks at camp this year. I wanted to post about how different youth camp was from kids camp - and how old I felt as a sponsor. And invisible. It is good training, I suppose, for when I all the sudden become incredibly stupid and invisible to my own budding teenagers.

I started a post about the new ropes course at kids camp, and how cool the new zip line is, complete with video I had taken as I zipped down the line. Yes, that would have been an amazing post, if I hadn't accidentally hit the stop button on the video camera as pushed off the tower.

Pretty soon the inertia of not posting takes over, and it just gets harder to start one, much less finish it. Was anything significant enough this summer to go back and describe? When I think about how busy our summer was, it seems like there should be a lot to talk about, and yet my thoughts, just like this summer,  are fleeting, and now poof. . .

They are gone.

If I ever manage to catch one, I'll let you know.  In the meantime, it's back to school!

The End of The Road

It's been a long road.

It started in October of 1999, and ended today.

It lasted 163,469 miles.

I sold my van today.

Actually, I sold it twice yesterday.  But today it's gone.

Jerry and I had been thinking about replacing the van (named "Fern" by my children) for some time, because, quite frankly, she had been getting on our nerves.  The motors on the rear windows went out some time ago - a $1200 fix that we weren't keen to make, so we just kept them shut.  Then the motor on the automatic door stopped closing the door, another $3200 annoyance that it just didn't make sense to repair on a van that old.  Still, the van kept on going, and so did we.  I had the van appraised for a trade-in, and it came in at only $1500, so I decided that I would just keep on going until Maggie got her driver's license.

But then. . .

I got in tangle with a truck.  On Gracie's birthday.  By the grace of God, we didn't leave the roadway, and none of us were hurt, but the doors on the driver's side were a bit crunched.  Not so crunched that the van was totaled, or the doors weren't functional, but crunched none-the-less.


So, rather than repair Fern, with all her "quirks", we took the repair money and I found a new vehicle.  We didn't trade in the van, because after the accident, her trade-in value plummeted to $250.  I found a website that would buy cars for scrap, and so yesterday, I arranged for them to come and pick up the van.  Jerry and I went and had the title notarized to get ready.  Before they could get there though, my ex-yard-guy rang the doorbell and asked if he could buy the van.  I went and pointed out all the little annoyances that might change his mind, but he was still interested, so I cancelled the pickup from the auction house, and we sold it to him instead.  He and his family came and got her this afternoon.

So today, I got to wave goodbye to Fern, knowing she was destined to carry gear for picnics and bike rides for another family, and would not (immediately) be crushed and melted.

So here's to Fern, and to a good ride!