Thank you to all of you who contacted me to say I'm not a lousy waste of bandwidth.  I love that I have a wealth of "pick up where we left off" friends.  They're the best kind and, quite frankly, the only kind that I believe survive the many phases of life.  I hope we'll all one day take a cheesy "later-in-life" women's cruise together, wear ridiculous hats, watch oily Jersey Shore Rejects put on a low-rent Chippendales show, and get tacky tattoos.  Oh yes, there will also be umbrella drinks... lots and lots of umbrella drinks.

But enough about my sad old lady fantasies.

Yesterday was a great day.  I had my scary (but strangely delicious) juice with my mom and dad after I got the kids off to school, came home, and worked at pretty much a dead run (which, anyone who has ever run with me knows is actually more of a jog) from 10 am to 4:30 pm getting ready for a tie dye party for the kids' swim team's end-of-season celebration.  I haven't done anything for 6 1/2 hours straight in a long time except sleep or watch Downton Abbey, so it felt good.  The party was a success and I lived to tell about it.

I also got messages from my recently blown-off boss and my closest co-worker and they were both very understanding about my decision to leave and, get this... hoped I would reconsider at some point and come back to work with them?!? So apparently I'm not the professional pariah I thought I might be.  They're good scientists and (this is the more remarkable part) good people, too.  Those two characteristics don't always exist together so I feel very lucky.

I'm making plans to tackle the clutter and grime that is taking over the house one room at a time and I've issued an alert to all things left laying on the floor or spilling out of partially-closed cabinets... your day is coming and it's not going to be pretty.  Don't make me call Jeff Lewis to come in here, call me an insane hoarder, throw everything away, and somehow turn our much-loved 60's split level into a super-stylish Architectural Digest Quality home... (Oh pretty please? With sugar on top?)

Who am I kidding... I've got no need for Architectural Digest or for anything super stylish... I just want to be able to find matching socks or you know... the bedroom floor.

So it's going to be a steady return to good old fashioned hard work to get my world (house, body, schedule) back in order.  There will be baby steps but there will be many of them and sooner or later this baby is going to get things together.

Lesson of the (last 3) year(s) - Overcommitment = inertia

Next time:  pictures of the garden that has, through all of my lack of productivity, continued to bloom beautifully and remind me that a summer of much hard work can have lasting benefits.