2020 Life Logs, Day 196: Beginning or Half Over
Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Weather: Cloudy, Clearing Mid-Afternoon, Cooler; High 70, Low 59 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
The question is . . . Is summer just beginning or is it half over? When I took the Goldpebbles home at the end of our day together, Heather and I spent some time talking about school options for the fall. Then when I got home, I did some chores and then Justin called to bring me up-to-date on what is happening in their lives in Puerto Rico. We also talked about school options for Ziggy and Coco this fall. By the time I took Shadow on his evening walk, I noticed that the sun is setting earlier in the evening these days. Yikes, yikes, yikes! In my mind, summer is just beginning. But the earlier sunset and the discussions about school in the fall tell me that summer is quickly slipping away. Where has the time gone since that fateful Friday, March 13th, that was the last day of school as we know it? Actually, it was the last day of life as we know it. It is when most of us started to feel the full impact of living in the days of the coronavirus pandemic. April flew by with the Goldstone’s move from Vidal Avenue to Grasmere Drive. During the month of May I started kidnapping the Goldpebbles on some afternoons to bring them to my house to go kayaking. And we even made a few early trips to the beach. June was filled with many beach afternoons and then when school was officially over for the year, Camp Oma Afternoons began on a daily basis. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but July has been the month skateboarding and scootering. The Falmouth Skatepark has become an almost daily stop for the Goldpebbles and myself. It was not planned. It just evolved. And it has been a great activity for the boys. Even today when it was cool with no humidity, an hour of scootering or skateboarding results in sweaty boys getting a full workout. Late yesterday Ollie’s new helmet arrived. It is a Triple Eight Certified Sweatsaver Helmet and even on this cool summer day, the sweatband was soaked after an hour. But it is still much more comfortable than helmets without the sweatband. So this afternoon, we ordered two more–one for Jonah and one for Sam. When you have to wear a helmet and a face mask, you want both to be comfortable.
Our day together started at 10 am this morning. We headed to the skatepark to get more time there before others start arriving in the early afternoon. We did have the whole park all to ourselves for part of the morning and things were going great until Jonah and Ollie started having difficulty steering their scooters. Their Razor A3’s are just a couple of weeks old. They have had a daily workout, but they shouldn’t be giving us trouble already. Jed is taking a look at them tonight and hopefully he can figure out the problem. We headed to my house for lunch, loaded up two of our spare scooters, and then back to the skatepark. There were more people there this afternoon, but it was still easy enough to keep a distance from others. Late in the afternoon, we headed to Highfield Hall to check out this year’s fairy houses. Unfortunately, we weren’t terribly impressed, but we only saw about half of them. We will return on another day to search out the others and hope we are more impressed than we were today. We ended the day with one more skateboarding and scootering activity. There is a nice down hill run from the Falmouth Academy just down from Highfield. So, I dropped the boys and let them ride down the hill. It was so much fun that they did it twice and can’t wait to go back and do it again. So this unplanned love of skateboarding and scootering is helping keep the boys fit and happy during this very different summer.
