sweetness follows

It's been a busy week. But thanks to Husband to Be's parents and our fabulous friends, the move went very smoothly and we are slowly but surely getting settled into our wonderful new place. There are still way too many boxes and miscellaneous junk and duplicates of things to deal with but it feels so good to be in our new home together.

I love watching the sunset from our deck, the fact that it looks out onto a hilly cornfield instead of the highway or other buildings, having a decent Mexican restaurant just up the road, and being only a two minute walk away from M and Miss A. And it's just so bright and airy and roomy and quiet and cosy. Just perfect.

And in between pre and post-move chaos, we've been grilling and drinking mojitos at the swanky new tapas place downtown, and making late night runs to the ice cream shop downtown. There's something really sweet about small town USA on a summer night, sitting on slides under the stars and by the splashy fountain and watching undergrads walk by dressed up in their skanky best.

Went to an arts festival that takes over downtown every summer and is filled with some of my favorite things - live music, shiny things, meat on a stick, funnel cakes and some excellent people watching. Bought some pretty earrings and heard some good music - Ben Lee, who was endearingly goofy, opened for Nickel Creek. I had no idea how hard a person can rock out on a mandolin! You haven't lived until you've heard "Toxic" sung by a guy and accompanied by violin, mandolin, guitar, and stand up bass. Priceless.

I really love the arts festival, how the streets fill up with people on a balmy evening and the traffic lights become part of the light show. And soon the free Friday concerts will start and there'll be yet more music and dancing in the streets. I love summers here.

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record with my love of summer, but after a long hard winter, you really appreciate the pleasures of summer. And it's not like life is perfect. I still haven't found someone to sublet my old place and progress on my prospectus is glacially slow, not helped by my advisor's disappearing act. And I'm currently trying not to fall asleep while reading up on social psychology methodology as I make a lesson plan for the class I'm teaching this summer.

But even when I stress out about things, the dominant feeling in my life is gratitude for everything that's going right. Chalk it up to the inexplicable workings of my neural networks, but these days I often get a snippet of a song from the Sound of Music stuck in my head:

somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good