Today was hot, hot, hot. And yet opted to head into the stifling city today, when I could have been reclining on my screened porch sipping iced tea under the ceiling fan. There�s no explaining some people.

AJ had his first day of summer camp at his preschool before we left, and enjoyed some blissful silence as a result. He was happy to have three kids from his preschool class joining him, along with ten brand new kids to play with. It�s clear that the parents are already freaking out about summer, as we got asked about two different playgroups before we left the building. This is good, as I am woefully unproductive in the preschool department.

I picked him up after school and was regaled with tales of fighting over toy cars and painting dominoes (?!) while we drove to the train station. Apparently AJ had been talking about our trip all morning. His teacher came up to talk to us as we were leaving and said AJ had told her all about how he was going to have lunch on the train and go down a big escalator and take a taxi to my school.

The impetus for this trip was twofold: to turn in my grades (hooray!) and to join the rest of the department for our annual year-end picnic. AJ had a great adventure. He narrated the full journey, held up my ticket to be punched on the train, ate every scrap of lunch, told the taxi driver where we needed to go, and spent the duration of the picnic tearing around the quad in an energetic game of tag with the children of several professors and one other fellow student. I spent most of the afternoon wondering who were all these people I didn�t know. I did, though, get the chance to have a beer with one of my students, who had been part of a singing group that performed at the event. I remember when he joined this group at the beginning of the term. He had seen the poster in the building asking for singers to audition for an early music group � we�d been studying the music of the Renaissance at the time. He came up to me excitedly after the first rehearsal to show me the music, mostly by composers we�d talked about in class. So it was nice to hear them sing and also nice to be able to talk in a less formal setting than a classroom.

I�m feeling a little blue about the end of the course, though. I�m going to miss it. I need to get back out there again soon. I need to get my application in to the local college pronto.

AJ was a saint. He met so many new people today, missed his nap altogether, spent a fair amount of time waiting for assorted forms of transportation, but he kept his sense of humor throughout, even in the heat, which was making me feel rather crabby.

And now, it�s time to collapse for a while and think about what�s next.

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