shewasavisitor

I wrote this blog a year ago.

It’s of last Summer. So much has happened in a year. The list I made in the first paragraph brings back a lot of memories. One year can be so different from the next.

This Summer has had its fare share of BotS but it has also has brought a lot of joy. I don’t feel the need to namedrop quite as much this year as I did last year (for whatever reason) but if you spent some time with me this Summer and made me laugh, thank you.

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My Summer was top-notch.
I really soaked it up and made sure I took in all of my most favourite things as frequently as I could.

Select shout-outs: Halifax & Cape Breton with the ‘Busters; never-long-enough visits from E; Tobermory with A; flaneuring my way about with C; grinding my teeth at Hatch; Idomeneo and all that SOC with S & N; vegan Bachelorette dinners with A & P; endless bike rides to/from work; IMAX suburban life-shutdown; Pride; FIFA with A & M & K; Beaches Jazz Fest and island visits/RATFest with I; weekly Moonbeans with K; Alaska with the Germans; brunches; E’s work visits; my buds R & P leaving on an exciting Indian odyssey… the list of excellence goes on. Oh, and I started a new job.

If each of these memories were a pearl and I were to make a necklace of them, I’d make sure the string was equally as beautiful. The common theme of my Summer – the string that tied all of these disparate memories together – was the constant of running.
W, L & A, you were the string of my Summer.

***

As the fond memories flourished, naturally there would pop up a few sour moments. C’est la vie, non? So, while relishing the happy, I was also tallying the Bummers of Summer.

Shoelace unties when you’re carrying farmer’s market groc home? Bummer of the Summer. Laptop catches a virus? Bummer of the Summer. Germany loses to Spain? BotS!

***

BotS (more often than not) was a fitting reaction phrase to nearly each of Summer’s misfortunes and woes. It’s a silly exclamation in that, obviously, it’s a bit of a jingle. When my BotS started adding up, I’d look back to the first BotS I’d had, and, over time, I began rating them. Germany losing to Spain would be a bigger BotS than having to set my groceries down, yet the virus BotS would trump these two. BotS big and small would reveal themselves throughout my Summer, and the more they happened, the more of them I had to rate. Graudually, just as silly as the phrase is, so too became the BotS. Even the BIG BotS. What’s left became the tally and rank. How silly it was that a tally and rank of such things even existed!

Now, it’s Fall. The other week, just before the turn of Autumn, A & P and I were trying to come up with an appropriate phrase to be carryed on. It’s officially Gall of Fall.

So far, the GoF count remains pretty low. Last week, my Windows crashed so I had to take ze laptop in for a warranty-covered repair. I lost my Alaska photos and video. But, c’est la vie.

To be continued…