Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high:

It's summertime, and the livin' is perhaps not quite as easy as Ira Gershwin made out. But it is full and it is good.

Remember my dreamy Summer to-do list? I've continued to add to it, on various little scraps of paper and other useful internet listmaking devices:

1. read and comment on my friends' blogs on a regular basis
2. write letters!
3. plan a really good daily menu
4. go garage saleing
5. spend some sunsets out on the Point
   
6. read Crossed by Ally Condie
7. continue working through Wreck This Journal
8. start reading Finish this Book
   
9. blog about them both!
10. write an end-of-year-newsletter (it didn't happen last year; boo!)
11. call my niece and nephew on the phone more
12. do chores in the mornings rather than in odd snatches here and there
13. look at Christmas lights!
14. go to a carols evening
15. watch a movie in the middle of the day
16. cook meals for my family
17. go on a photo walk with Staish (not sure if she knows this is happening :D)
18. bake peanut butter brownies and other ridiculously unhealthy things with flour and sugar and (preferably) chocolate
19. get my hands on a copy of Prized by Caragh O'Brien and READ IT
20. re-read the Hunger Games trilogy
21. go see the Look! exhibit at the State Library of Queensland
22. go see Matisse: Drawing Life at GOMA
23. go on an opshop crawl
    

Revisiting the list now, I'm amused by its randomness and the juxtaposition of things I feel are really important (like writing letters to far-off friends) close by things that really don't matter all that much (like watching a movie in the middle of the day, just because). I'm also surprised by how many of those little happy things were actually achieved in amongst all the fun and busyness of Christmas and New Year. Numbers 3, 5, 7, 12, 16, and 20, on the other hand, are all currently mid-process.

Of course, I had a more serious Summer to-do list written in my planner, too. It included words to the effect of WRITE THINGS AND SEND THEM PLACES DANIELLE OR ELSE, and while there has been ample opportunity to spend time with loved ones and accept social invitations and generally do nice things, in the between-times I've really been relishing the chance to apply seat-of-pants to chair and work on editing and polishing and refining and sending. Friends, it is ten million times nicer to return to a piece of work after an absence of a day or two rather than weeks or months. You don't waste all that brain and heart time finding your place in the work once more and stifling the little demon on your shoulder telling you that you're really rubbish at this and shouldn't you just go ahead and clean the microwave instead. Not that I'm not scared, of course; you who know me well know that being scared is one of my exceptional (yet very much unwanted) talents. But it's easier to push past the scared when you're actually getting work done rather than merely wishing you could get to it.

And another thing I'm learning: no matter how many words you've cut from the story, you can always cut more. It's like the loaves and fishes, only in reverse -- a miracle!

What's Summer been teaching you?

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Conversations:

Un -- man definitely won that one... although it's wild that gets the attention so... who knows?

Lauren -- :D