Day 172 (10 days to go until halfway)

This is how I feel about my day today.

The first day of vacation.
6.00am - Drag myself out of bed, after 5 hours of hot sleep.
6.10am - wake Matthew, make coffee for him, make packed lunches for Matthew and Tim 
7.15am - take Matt to school to write his last exam.
7.30am - take Molly for walk, pick dandelion leaves, clover and soft grass for piggie.
7.50am - feed piggie, birds. (black dog-bird gets two peanuts too)
8.30am - take all textbooks that I've rounded up to school, because if they don't have them the boys won't get their results, won't be able to apply for colleges, their lives will be ruined.
8.36am - write check for $90 for Matthew's Maths textbook!  He negotiates $60 payment to me.
8.37am - drive Matthew to Tufts Tissue Laboratory in Medford, a distance of about 27 miles.
9.30am - go to see car for possible acquisition, in Malden, owned by the friend of a Chinese man who seems very suspicious of me, although I should be suspicious of him!
10.30am - another car in Medford, slightly better, a possibility.
10.55am - start driving to Ipswich Country Club to pick up Nick, about 30 miles.  On the way I have to stop at a store so that I can go to the toilet, because by now I am fairly desperate!  The desperation which causes eyes to water once you finally get to sit down.'
12.05pm - drive into the setting for The Stepford Wives, alias the Ipswich Country Club, to fetch Nick, turn the wrong way down the parking lot and my old hippie Odyssey, full of bumper-stickers lauding peace and goodwill and calling on people to Make ART, not WAR, almost has a head-on collision with a brassy little strumpet-like sports car, a blonde woman driving (the correct way) and giving me snooty looks.
12.10pm - Nick gets into the car and we drive off.  He tells me about his morning's work as a lifeguard and swim-coach, how he noticed a dear little girl sitting in the shallow end on the step with her mother who was not paying any attention to her, and how she was just laughing with the delight of the water, just loving it spilling over her legs, her hands, just living in the pleasure-filled moment.  

Somehow we get on to the subject of growing up, of women's lives, and I mention how I am not so fond of summer anymore, because of the hot flushes attendant to menopause, which seem to be brought on by heat itself.  I just get nice and cozy in bed and suddenly I want to strip off every layer of clothing or sheet or duvet otherwise I will surely die of heat!  Or now, in summer, being hot makes me hotter, it is extremely irritating!  Nick sympathizes but is very happy to be a male, although he points out that every single man will have problems with his prostate after 60.  It seems a fairly small thing to deal with compared to the legion of suffering women must go through.   And I pontificate on this, how we must menstruate, sometimes with a lot of pain involved, then we get pregnant, then we must give birth, painful, laborious, arduous birth!  Then as we get older we get to lose our looks, quicker than men because of having children, and then to crown it all, we go through menopause, and it's all downhilll from there!
12.40pm - arrive home, finally, to fetch Nick's checks and drive him back to the bank to deposit them, then to Magnolia Beach.
1.30pm - home, grab a bite to eat, a cup of tea.  Sit and watch the birds.
2.20pm - phone Jess on skype.
2.45pm - phone Emma on her new landline.
3.10pm - have conversation with mother of son's friend who is sitting in her car in our driveway waiting for said son.
3.25pm - drive down to Medford again to fetch Matthew. Have long and interesting conversation about tissue engineering utilising silk as a scaffold for manufacturing blood vessels from stem cells.  Have another interesting conversation about Shwayze, another pathetic male rapper with no respect for women.  (How can they like this music?)  Matthew backs down from my passionate outpourings.  He has heard me many times before.  He knows me.
5.30pm - stop in at Market Basket to get meat for Molly and milk and lettuce, and a few other things that one always seems to notice a need for.
6.00pm - arrive home, unpack groceries, boys phone friends.
6.10pm - back in car taking boys to friends' houses (different friends, different houses).
6.33pm - home, put Molly's meat on to cook.
7.05pm - go for 5km run in the very great heat. Molly gives up after one km.
7.45pm - running down the hill at the end of the run, nearly at home, I have a spectacular fall worthy of a World Cup Soccer match, as I land on hands, then hip, then knee, and then flip over on to my back and slide, hurtling on the sled of pine needles until I come to a stop with my head a few inches from a large pine trunk.
7.46pm - get up gingerly, dust myself off, congratulate all my bones for not breaking, and go in to shower.
7.55pm - Tim comes home, we eat, I feed the dog, I feed the cat, we watch an episode of "Life" which is amazing cinematographically, but with a very irritating anthropomorphising narration voiced by Oprah Winfrey.
And now I am going to bed!  Roll on, boys' licenses!

This is a portrait I did at a course last June at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston.  I am doing another course next week, where I get to become a student again, painting from 9 - 6 every day for a whole week!  I can't wait!