In another week, there will be so many ripe blueberries on the bushes that picking them will start to feel like an exhausting, never-ending chore. But I have basically missed them. Yesterday, my brother and I picked one small leftover container’s worth of the first ripe berries, just before a nicely torrential thunderstorm hit. Today, I’m headed off. I’m trying to remind myself of all the things that I’m looking forward to in the next week — family, friends, a birthday celebration, a state that I’ve never visited before. I know once I’m on the road, I’ll feel more excited. But it’s hard to say good-bye. It’s been a lovely few weeks in PA, perfect weather, great company.

Random memories that will make me smile:

Last night, we all played Exploding Kittens. Each of us, upon going out, made some sort of melodramatic sound of despair/explosion noise, and when my SIL lost, leaving my brother as the winner, she said to him, “I hope you’re happy, sitting there all covered in cat guts.”

One night last week, at the dinner table, we somehow wound up in a discussion of bears, and my brother told my niece that if she was ever trapped in a corner with baby bears and the mom bear was charging her, she should just pick up the baby bear and throw it. Just remembering the look she gave him — half serious consideration, half “what??” — makes me want to laugh. I don’t think she was worried about the impossibility of picking up a real baby bear, I think she thought throwing an animal would be cruel. But hey, she’s got a plan in the event she’s ever hanging out with some random baby bears and their mom gets upset.

My nephew invited me to play a video game and said he’d watch. It was a game about droids and Detroit and within the first twenty minutes, it had me cleaning a bathroom. I only lasted a few more minutes before saying, “yeah, no, I can do this in real life if I want to,” and went back to playing a game that let me shoot kobolds in a sewer instead.

In other news, not as much progress on Grace as I wanted to make. But! On a day when I was writing myself notes that included such constructive criticism as “abysmal,” instead of starting major revisions, I walked away. In some sense, I think I can call that progress. I actually wound up reverting to the previous day’s version that day (minus mean notes, therefore) before leaving it alone for a couple of days. But today I am going to try to get at least a few hundred words written before I start driving. I hope they won’t be words that I later label “abysmal.”