Summertime

... and the living's sneezy. Grass is growin' and the pollen is high.

I am super-stoked that summer is here, but sad because I'm sick. Not sure if it's allergies (I don't usually have summer allergies, but anything is possible), I just know I've felt icky the past few days and had to call in sick to work today.

So, here I am blogging - finally. It's been awhile, so let me catch you up.

As school ended, my summer life started taking shape and I couldn't be more excited for the next 2.5 months! I'm not taking any normal classes, but am working as a research assistant and creating an independent research project for credit later in the summer. I'm still working my part-time job, but just one day a week and I'm interning with a local public defender's office full time. I guess listed out like this it looks like a lot, but it certainly doesn't feel like it!

I come home every day at 5:30 and get to enjoy my evenings without the guilt that hangs over me during the normal semester. Not having to read 150 pages a day from a law book is totally and completely a vacation for me!

So far, I've settled into an easy routine. I get up, make coffee and eat breakfast. Then, I walk half a mile to the nearest bus stop and bus the 25 minutes to work, walk another half mile to my office and then spend the day hoofing it around downtown as only interns do. At 4:30, I walk the half mile back to my bus stop and ride home. All in all, though I keep forgetting to wear my pedometer, I'm walking between 2-3 miles a day.  I wear flip flops when walking to or from the bus (unless I'm wearing pants). But as much as I walk around downtown in heels, I'm hoping for some killer calves by August!

I've been working on the front porch a lot lately - pretty much creating an outdoor dining room and kitchen. At least three nights a week we can be found sitting on the porch grilling our dinner. I love that my house is so shady and cool despite the 90-degree temps we've had this past week.  Yay, trees!

Thanks to some hard work, my jungle of a lawn is finally under control and ready for it's weekly cuts. I have a big yard, so I take two days to mow it. The front yard gets cut on Mondays and the back yard on Wednesdays. Usually it takes about 30 mins to mow each side, but thanks to the crazy rain we've had lately, I spent almost two hours on my backyard this week. My Sparkpeople.com app says I burned 500 calories!

That's the thing I love about mowing - it burns a lot more calories than I ever realized. And y'all know me - I love multi-tasking. Burning so many calories while also taking care of a chore is awesome to me.

For the Memorial Day holiday, we bought a badminton set. Sure, most people think badminton is boring and slow, but the way we play (poorly!), it's fun and involves a lot of running after birdies. I'm thinking we can upgrade to a full size volleyball net later in the summer. My neighbors are totally down for some couple against couple action!

And there you have it - be on the lookout for a few blogs in the next few days. I've got a lot of time to make up for and I'm sorry about that.