Nature of things

I haven’t written lately because, well, I’ve been busy. And now is supposed to be those lazy days of summer?? Apparently not.

Recent highpoints:

Work has had its ups and downs. On the downside – it’s budget time again and I had to come up with a 10% cut to keep pace with rising paper and ink prices, shrinking circulation, and other things out of our control. Painful, yes, but also a healthy exercise in product evaluation and quality control. On the upside, I was able to preserve the status of my most key personnel; I happily gave a glowing evaluation to a critical staff member; and today we got an RFP from one potential client, a “next steps” request from another, and an important commitment from an existing client. Not bad for a day’s work.

This is a busy period for my wife – a couple of those out-early-home-late performance weeks where she’s juggling back-to-back events, multiple press interviews and media queries, live performance photo shoots, and client visibility. She recently switched to a new web-enabled cell phone (a pocket-sized computer, really) that gives her mobility whole monitoring the several hundred e-mails she gets daily (plus weekends), and it’s already paid for itself in terms of flexibility. Now she can actually drive home from work (15 minutes) and deal with 30 or 40 e-mails before she walks in the front door. Or, if duty calls, she can book a newspaper interview from her beach chair—though she’d prefer to leave the thing at home rather than risk dropping it in the sand. In today’s anytime-anywhere now-now-now mode, that amounts to major progress.

I’m looking forward to early August, when we decamp to the Cape for two weeks. Nick will be in camp there (his annual infusion of rifle and arrow shootin’ and sailing), and while it’s absolutely not vacation time for either Kathy or me, there is a healthier pace to our life. I get to walk the dog in the early morning (something I don’t even consider at home, even though I get out of bed at the same hour either way). My “desk” is our outdoor dining table on our screened-in porch (Kathy opts for the indoor laptop and the AC). We have wireless Internet, a good printer, cell phones, and FedEx knows where we live. We haven’t figured out how to make this a permanent live/work location, but we’re considering the angles. Anyhow, I get a ton of work done on the porch and I get to hear the birds chirp – a win-win.

In non-work life, I have poison ivy for the second time since Memorial Day. Serves me right for trying to improve our view at the Cape. I don’t know where the poisonous plant was that I touched, but I’ll tell you this: Those recent reports about rising CO2 levels from global warming causing poison ivy to flourish – I believe them. Pretty soon, I’ll be like that boy in the bubble, never leaving the house without long sleeves and gloves, then stripping down to my skivvies using rubber gloves and tongs, and washing everything with Technu (I wonder if they make it in “fresh” scent?). Then again, when I gaze over the cranberry bog across the road from our house, with its seasonal colors and soft contours, or see the stars and sky through the trees, I guess a little scratching is a small price to pay…

Speaking of nature’s modes of revenge, we have West Nile Virus/EEE mosquitoes in our Brookline neighborhood (everybody out of the pool!!); it’s tick season on the Cape; and the no-see-ums were out in force last weekend on the beach. On top of that, we have deer invading gardens in our neighborhood in Brookline and hordes of ravenous chipmunks devouring our tomatoes and digging holes in the yard on the Cape. And bunnies… lots and lots of rabbits this year. The only thing we haven’t had was the cicadas. This was supposed to be their big year (one in every 17, or something like that) and not a peep, or squeak, or whatever that sound is they make. Did they appear elsewhere and I missed out on the chorus, or are they waiting till there’s a new man in the White House and all’s right with the world?