Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Spring Break has flown by, as I guess a week of staycation is wont to do, and now it's Friday and I've no idea what happened. Actually, that's partly because of the fairly epic, last minute neighborhood happy hour that lasted from 4-10 pm last night. What, that's never happened to you? You've never taken a bottle of wine down to the culdesac to chat for a few minutes and then three hours later decided to start throwing frozen pizzas into various ovens and setting them out so the "starving" little yard hobbits will stop whining about being hungry for FIVE MINUTES so you can have one more splash of wine? And then somebody turned on the fire pit, and brought out the marshmallows and various accoutrements, and as I was falling into bed a few hours later I wondered on which porch was my husband still sitting with the daddies, because we're like 14 year olds at a school dance and the moms were all at one house and the dads were all at a different house and the children and dogs ran wild through open gates between the two like some sort of modern Lord of the Flies, only with manicured lawns. And I'm pretty sure they all went to bed dirty. My youngest son is in fact wearing the same clothes he wore on Wednesday. But not hungry! And then around 10:30 pm I heard my oldest son and two other 12 year old boys descend upon my pantry. They were mostly disappointed, I think.

Anyway, that was a good time. And so has been the rest of our Spring Break, except the part where I had Whooping Cough. You know, when my husband came home from his own urgent care visit two weeks ago and said he had Whooping Cough, I told him his doctor is an idiot. But no, after spending my birthday last Sunday on the sofa coughing my brains out, I went to the doctor first thing Monday morning and indeed, I had Whooping Cough. Pertussis, as it's officially called, even though I had a booster five years ago. Thanks very much to the little germ factories at my school, sneezing and coughing on the keyboards in my computer lab.

Sometimes there's just not enough hand sanitizer in the world. And I think the administration might frown upon making them use it as a mouth rinse anyway, so what can you do.

So yeah, I'm 40 now. My tolerance for drinking cheap wine without much dinner (see above re: dirty little yard hobbits ate it all) is not as ingrained as it used to be, as evidenced by my current headache. Or that could be because I slept next to an open window, and my allergies are pissed. Have I mentioned the weather? It went from mid-30's overnight lows to mid-60's, with highs around 80 all week. We really got a spring weather on Spring Break! It's like Florida, with the humidity and everything. We've opened the house up to allow a breeze to move through, and there's a layer of dust and pollen on everything now. Because I've not been cleaning very much this week. I've been busy doing projects like painting doors and lunching with friends and shopping for more projects and standing barefoot in my driveway chatting with neighbors I haven't seen since October. And drinking cheap Chardonnay. Busy, I tell you. And now it is Friday and I guess I better start doing some laundry so we can go back to school next week.

Maybe I'll even try to write again before summer.