The busy and the tired

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I put the boat in the water at the start of July I toyed with the notion of keeping her there for two months instead of one. It would have been nice to have been able to take her out at a moment’s notice throughout the whole of summer.

Wisely (as it turned out) I deferred making the decision regarding a second month until near the end of July. My concern was that August might turn out to be a sufficiently frantic month that getting away to sit contemplatively upon the waters could turn out to be merely a pipe-dream – and the good ship ‘Dignity’ might simply bob about, sadly neglected, in her slip in Portside Marina for a month.

My fears proved to have been well grounded – with August slowly building up a powerful head of steam as it unfolded.

The latter part of the month is these days (as previously reported) given over to the Victoria Fringe. The Girl and I will have seen half a dozen shows by the end of the festival (upon which I will report in a subsequent post) but in my Intrepid Theatre BoD ‘Fringe Ambassador’ role I will have ‘schmoozed the queues’ for a dozen shows, spent an evening selling 50/50 raffle tickets at the ‘Fringe Preview‘ night and given a Saturday afternoon over to manning the Cardboard Castle at the ‘Fringe Kids‘ event.

I also have another term contract for post-secondary IT Literacy teaching for the fall term. This term starts in the first week in September, so preparation – including a fair round of meetings, INSET sessions and lengthy email exchanges – has been underway for a while now.

Finally – we are helping a dear friend move into a new house – in addition to hosting (this coming weekend) a birthday BBQ for her, since she is not really in a position to do so herself at the moment. To do this is, of course, both a privilege and a pleasure, but it does entail trying to knock the garden back into some sort of shape at just the time of year that it has decided that it can now relax, kick back and chill a bit.

This being retired lark is a total picnic!