Summertime

Ocean Isle Beach from the Pier, 20AUG16

That song that says "the living's easy" in summer certainly hasn't applied to me this year! This has been the busiest, most intense summer I've had in a very long time. I haven't taken any time off work (because in my new company, you have to earn it before you can take it). I'm loving the new job, but I've never in my life worked so hard for so many hours. This has been a summer of work, eat, and sleep and not much else, but I'm not complaining.

The biggest 'distraction' of my summer has been Postcrossing. It's a web site where you can register to send postcards around the world, and in return you get postcards from other users. So far I've sent 38 cards and received 26. The top three countries I've received from are Russia, Japan, and Germany and the top ones I've sent to are Germany, Netherlands, and Russia. It's a pretty cool hobby and it only takes a few minutes to write a postcard.

I have two pen pals. You know, as in old-fashioned letter writing. I got one of my pen pals through the Letter Writers Alliance and the other one I "met" on Twitter. One lives in a small town in Oklahoma, the other in a city in Wisconsin. We write each other about once a week. So another hobby of late has been to find pretty stationery, which isn't nearly as easy as it used to be.

These are hobbies I can pursue at home in the evenings that don't take too long and yet the reward is thrilling. I love getting snail mail! It makes my day to get a letter or postcard. 

In other news, my parents recently celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary. (Hard to imagine that two people could stand each other for that long, LOL!) On my visit to The Farm last weekend, I told them I wanted to take them out to dinner to celebrate and asked where they wanted to go. I was thinking they'd probably want to go to the local steak house or Italian place, but they said they wanted go to Calabash. (Calabash is a small town on the southern North Carolina coast that's known for seafood restaurants and "Calabash-style" -- um, deep fried -- seafood.)

I hadn't taken them on a road trip in a while, so wasn't expecting this request, but I'm always ready to go somewhere. So we piled into the car and made the 90-minute drive. After our meal, we decided to go to one of the beaches. We ended up at Ocean Isle Beach and took a walk on the pier. I could have sat on the pier for hours -- it was so relaxing.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, Northern Hemisphere peeps. For those of you South of the Equator, summer's on it's way! Cheers!

mm
:)