The End of the First Wander Week

Perhaps the universe is teaching me about obstacles.

That's really all I can come up with for this week, which was supposed to be all about the wandering, but ended up being about just about everything but.

1. It rained, more than it has for most of the summer.
2. The truck blew up in a spectacular metaphorical fireball of gimmeallyourmonies.
3.  I got smacked with a migraine, because of course I did.
4.  And finally, now it's heating up to be un-northwesternlylike temperatures yet again, making wandering dangerous for those of us pasty-faced and not good with heat.

Seriously, y'all.  It was like enough already.

That said, there's also been some awesome.

Things like being offered as many tomatoes as we can reasonably eat without actually turning pink.  Finding blackberries in my own back yard.  Starting to read Tristan Gooley's amazing The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs, which I didn't get nearly enough time with.  Fitting in time to make -- and photocopy/assemble -- another couple of wanderzines with which to stock more wanderstations.

And today, I finally got to wander, though it was by car, since I bought a little Subaru to get us through until J's truck gets fixed.  It's an old, grungy thing, with a manual transmission and just the right amount of character.  And I love it with an unreasonable fervor.  We went to Blick together, and picked out a few colors of gouache that made me happy, and drove home through the green foothills along the path of the river, with blue mountains hazy in the distance.

Now we're back in reading week.

I'm still focusing on the physical stacks where I can.  I need more shelf space.  But I've also got some fantastic audiobooks and ebooks that I'm not going to be rigid about this second time around.  In fact, I might even focus on beach reads this week, since the temperatures are going to be so uncharacteristically steamy.  (I have an embarrassing number of cheesy romances on the ol' Kindle, and we all have our guilty pleasures.  So there.)

Here's hoping this week is a little less eventful, and a whole lot more entertaining.