Feral summer

I’m getting a peek at what future summers with teenaged boys will look like. My job is to make sure they get up at some point, brush their teeth twice a day, shower occasionally, have some food, and see sunlight once in a while. Mind you, I’m being especially lax because there’s only a few more days of feral summer before their rec center camp kicks in - there’s no way I’d be like this if it were the whole summer. But still - I don’t know how to entertain kids this age, day after day, without spending a shit ton of money I don’t have. On Friday the cleaning lady came so I spent $100 on a couple of hours at a trampoline park and lunch out; it was a fun day for them, but I sure can’t do that all the time. 

Both kids have reading assignments for school so I did at least acquire all four books and have been making them get off screens for a half hour each day to read. That’s something…right?

This week I continue my old video digitizing (I’m in the process of getting all of my 2002-2010 event videos online, which will take a couple of weeks of constant work) and general event work. While my numbers are still dismal, so far I have not had a flood of refunds, and today is the last day for cheap refund fees so you’d think I’d be getting a lot of requests. I got them mostly in the beginning of the month, apparently. 2028 and 2029 hotel contracts are signed, which means the event will happen through Bobby’s senior year in high school. Crazy! What a different world we’ll be living in by then. Assuming our US institutions hold and biology does its job, Trump will be gone either by being voted out or natural causes. It’s crazy to think about since we’re so in the weeds right now; what a truly awful time. I try to think about the generation who, like my grandmother, survived the Great Depression only to be plunged into WWII - she couldn’t catch a break for about fifteen years. Since we’re going on ten years since that orange turd descended the escalator and blew up our country and the world, we’re right behind those days. 

Right now I’m entertaining myself with low key planning yet another western road trip - preferably a cheap, short one - over Christmas break since we have no plans. I’ve always wanted to go to Nevada’s Valley of Fire state park, and that’s best done not in summer. So I’m trying to arrange some hidden gems around that general area - may dip into St George, UT for a couple of hikes; but I’m also trying to avoid real winter weather, which is tough. I don’t want to be stuck in a snowstorm or driving on icy roads. I wanted to head to some remote places further north in Nevada like Cathedral Gorge state park, but it may be just too cold. Everything outside of Las Vegas, apparently, is very remote and isolated. Which I like, but not in the dead of winter. I’ll figure it out. 

I’m spending the day Friday at the International Cultic Studies Association conference in San Diego, dipping my toe back into that world for a minute. This conference is held in a different country every year, and with it being so close this year, made me think I need to go check it out even if just for the day. I imagine it’ll mostly be pretty clinical and over my head, but hey, it’ll make a nice day trip if nothing else. Then for the 4th our friends are again hosting a “gathering” of like-minded folks who don’t feel like celebrating but want to do something. I cannot believe this is where our country is at on its 250th birthday. It’s so fucking depressing I can hardly stand it.