Well, it would be hard to imagine how I could be having more fun this summer, all told. Even with a rash that's curtailing 80% of my activities, I'm still having a riot. Consider today's schedule, for example:

7:30 - Jump from bed, itching all over, miserably failing to resist the urge to scratch. Start coffee brewing. Shower.

7:45-8:30 - Drink coffee, read email.

8:30-1:00 - Turn on Tour de France television coverage. Sit on couch with laptop and knitting, alternately knitting socks, following the race online, and researching areas of the French countryside while planning a fantasy European vacation next summer (there's that bike trip down the Danube, among other things) that includes a stop in the Alps to watch the Tour pass by . . . Intersperse these activities with frequent trips to the back deck to check on the vegetable garden:










or to discuss the shape of the emerging Baumansee . . .




. . . with the gardener. (Look at his shirt. He has big plans for this pond.)




1:00-2:00 - Lunch. Read novels.

2:00-4:00 - Make work-related phone calls, send work email, hassle with incompetent bank software. Set up next week's lunch dates. Digitize some more memorabilia:









4:00-5:00 - Gab on the phone. Read novels.

5:00-6:00 - Dinner.

Evening trip to MSU library to pick up book on German cinema, and copy of Emil and the Detectives (English only, alas; I had to recall the German version).

Watch a couple of episodes of The 4400 and knit.

It's a tough schedule, but someone's got to stick to it.

I'm finding it all a little bit odd, though, because this lifestyle is some sort of weird riff on Emil's parents' life for most of the years I knew them (during which time I thought that if I ever had to live like they did, I'd go nuts, because it seemed to me that all they ever did was stay at home sitting in chairs). But if you look at the above schedule, move the trip to the MSU library from after dinner to the morning, and instead of "trip to MSU library," call it "trip to discount/grocery store," you'd have a reasonable facsimile of a day in the life of the elder Baumans . . .

And the rash has prompted me to levels of sartorial insouciance that are a stretch even for me. I've decided I need to be really careful to keep my feet clean, which, along with my desire to avoid waistbands at all costs, has resulted in some outfits that make me look a lot like my mother or Aunt Betty:



Notice the cauldron? And check out my feet:



But, really, seriously. I mean, I may be itchy, we may be so broke we're collecting returnable pop bottles, perhaps we're taking a real estate bath, and I'm dressing like hell . . . But does it get any better than this? I suppose once the rash goes away and I can once again actually do things like swim and ride my bike, there'll be no putting up with me . . . This is turning out to be an astonishingly wonderful summer.

Hope everyone else is having some fun, too . . .