Summer!

I think (and I'm scared to say this because I don't want to jinx it) that summer might be here. The weatherman said it could get up to 90 today! I love the heat. I woke up this morning stiff and sore and as soon as I stepped out on to my back porch with my morning cup of coffee I could feel the pain start to leave, like alcohol being cooked off a burgundy sauce. I know that heat isn't the cure for Fibromyalgia, Ross has an aunt with FMS in sunny California and it still effects her plenty, but it helps sooo much.

I'm sitting on the porch right now actually, and listening to our neighbor pack the contents of his garage into a U-haul trailer. There is a rumor going around that he is losing his house, but he hasn't mentioned it and we are scared to ask. He is always friendly toward us, and he is incredibly good to his dog, a sure sign of character, so it sucks to think that he might be losing the house he has lived in for years. I had hoped the rumors weren't true but now, seeing the u-haul, I feel less hopeful.

Times are so hard, we have been without work for 7 months now. We are in no danger of losing our house, thank God, but a weariness has kicked in. We are weary of pinching our pennies, of getting our hopes dashed by opportunities that never fully materialize, of unexpected expenses and the stab of fear they bring, and of the feeling that our future is on a very different course than we imagined when we started out.

I don't mean to sound bleak. I count my blessings! But that part of our life? We are sick and tired of it.

Did I mention before that I bought three bags of books at the thrift store in Elgin recently? My plan was to trade them in for cash at Half Priced Books, try to make a little profit on them, but I set aside a few to read first. They are books that I would probably never have checked out from the library or bought at a bookstore but, since I have them, why not? Right now I'm reading The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg. It's about a woman whose husband dies, so she sells their brownstone in Boston for a fortune and drives West on her own with the improbable but delightful plan to stop in some Midwest town she's never heard of, the first that really strikes her fancy, and make it her new home. She ends up selecting the purely, glaringly, entirely fictional town of Stewart, Il. Just 49 miles outside of Chicago, with the Metra running through it, Stewart is a place where the guy who mans the register at the ice cream shop also hosts a local radio show, a friendly neighborhood boy will mow your lawn for 50 cents, and people say things like Oh, my!, Idn't it? and You betcha!

It's pure fantasy, but it's a lovely one. At one point, Betta, the main character, talks about how she loves to clip out pictures from magazines and paste them into scrapbooks so she can look over them again and again. This book feels like one of those scrapbooks, the pages are peppered with pretty images and pretty thoughts. Well, except for the parts about being a widow, those parts terrify me!

I'm a third of the way into the book right now, and it's just meandering its way pleasantly along. I don't expect anything really exciting to happen (if it does I will let you know) but that's ok. Sometimes what you really need, even if you don't know it, is a slow, sweet book.