First and last

The first day of August also signals the last month of summer because although the season technically ends in September, once classes begin the feel of summer is over. This is also the day that I scheduled as the start of getting serious about preparing classes and organizing myself for my semester, which begins in 27 days.

This year has been one of moves: moving from being a seemingly eternal Ph.D. candidate to becoming Dr. G, moving from having a dismembered Monster to successfully putting it all together, moving from our large house in the tiny city to the little apartment in the woods at my small college on the hill, moving from the city to the country, moving from being a near penniless grad student to being a professor with more financial flexibility, moving from being a commuter to being a resident, and so on. That's a lot of moves.

All that moving hasn't been conducive to sitting down and reading, so I never did get to War and Peace, as I'd hoped, but I did start on Cranford and on Laughing Without an Accent, which I may yet finish before it's time to stop pussyfooting around and do school-related work once more. At least, for the first time in 2 years, I won't have to do the schoolwork and have my Monster crouching in a corner, too.

And there may yet be one more move, once we sell the house, which seems like it will never happen, and buy another one in the little pueblito that we now call home. I feel a lot more settled now that I'm living here and visiting the large house occasionally, although I know I won't feel wholly settled until the house is finally in someone else's hands.

But we've managed to adapt pretty well to cutting our living space by what seems like 100%. We even had some friends over for an informal dinner two nights ago and although we had to eat with our plates on our laps (the guests had dinner trays), we had a good time. Geni loved the attention while Rusty barked a little from the bedroom, where I ensconced him, but then quieted down and went to sleep on his rug.

With the two of us plus four furry critters, I really like the fact that the apartment is so easy to clean, and I know the old dogs appreciate that there are no stairs to climb. While Magellan seems to like it here, Darwin isn't as happy with his reduced circumstances. His latest idea of fun is to run in circles around the entire apartment as many times as he can before he exhausts himself. His favorite sleeping place, for some reason we cannot fathom, is among my husband's shoes in his closet. Magellan, meanwhile, likes to disappear under the oversized chair in the living room or under a tableclothed table there, too.

There's one problem about having the dogs and the cats so close to each other that I didn't anticipate, and that's Geni having access to the litter box. Because Geni was a street dog, she has a real taste for other animals' poop, which I guess was a way to get protein when she couldn't get anything else to eat. But that's not her situation anymore, of course. And while you can take the dog out of the street, Geni is living proof that you can't take the street out of the dog.

I had started to worry that the cat's digestion was affected by the move because I hadn't cleared any poop from the litter box in days when I caught Geni enthusiastically sniffing around the boxes. I will leave the rest to your imagination, but I've now gated the litter boxes to prevent her having access to what she perceives as a delicacy. Like my husband likes to say: Dogs are disgusting creatures.

When I'm not dealing with literal comemierdas, I am enjoying taking a bike ride into the pueblito to check the mail, or having access to all kinds of people who do all kinds of things. I had a parka with a broken zipper and found a woman who'll repair it for about $10. She also is going to repair a bed cover my 98-year-old grandmother gave me, which has started unraveling because of age. That's priceless.

And I really like being able to take the bike and meet a student or a colleague-friend at the college's cafe for a chat or to catch up on what's happening with our lives. It's really an idyllic life in so many ways, and I wonder when and whether I'll tire of it.

For now, there's nothing to get tired about, and while August does signal the end to my free time, which hasn't been as free as I would've liked, I'm not complaining. I've had a very good summer and there's still plenty of summer left to enjoy. That's definitely my plan.