Wow.  Two months since my last post.  All I can say in my defense is that I've been a little busy.  Not in a bad way, just with work and kids and kid sports and with the driving and driving and driving that seems to go along with all of that.  The kind of busy that drives any creative impulses right out of my fuzzy little head.

Most of this extra busy-ness is my own fault.  Usually my work dries up over the summer.  Aside from the loss of income, I don't like to complain about this because it means I get at least a month of summer vacation with my kids.  Not so this year.  I took the initiative to ask my contacts to increase the amount of work they assign me. This was the third or fourth time I had asked for more pages, but the first time that I really got results.  I've been just short of overwhelmed ever since.

 On the up-side, they keep sending me money and we used some of it to put in an above ground pool.  Particularly in this unusually hot, dry summer, the pool has been a big hit and has gone a long way towards making up for last summer when my kids ended the season saying that it never really felt like summer because they didn't go swimming.

On the down-side, I've done a bunch of stuff and haven't bothered to post about it.  I now owe updates on this year's Tour de Fleece (productive, although I didn't quite meet my goals) and the games that are no longer called the Ravelympics (2.789 projects of reasonable size completed), as well as our family vacation to South Carolina (smashing; I would consider doing it again, which is saying something since we tend not to repeat vacation spots).  The vacation thing really bugs me, since I never even posted the best story from last year's vacation, and I haven't even mentioned the garden, which is actually producing food  this year, or the chickens, although they haven't been doing much lately, the lazy things.

All of that will have to wait, however, because I have quite a bit of work to do today and I've been dawdling.

Let us not be pictureless, though.

Here are my souvenirs from the vacation.

With the two measly shells I collected, I am a bitter disappointment to my family, all of whom would have dragged home half the beach if there had been room in the car.  Such is life.

And now, back to work.