Sydney Weather

Rhode Island Weather

The Online Diary History Project

Check it out... A history of online diaries and journals. m in it (see, I told ya I was old!)

Where did summer go? -- 08/29/00

One of the columnists for the Binghamton (NY) newspaper used to run the same column every year around this time... where he described how summer had been taken away by a big yellow school bus...

There are signs everywhere that summer is over -- no matter that the calendar still reads August

all month stores have been having Back to School sales
there are School's Open signs being put up
my wife has faculty meetings this week on Thursday and Friday
dawn is coming later and sunset is earlier every day
ragweed pollen fills the air

This morning Jennifer said she had been chatting with Sean last night. He was in a cybercafe in Sydney. His sojourn in Sydney, like summer, is drawing to a close... he'll be flying back to the U.S. on Saturday. I remember the pain of that flight... at least it is an hour or two shorter than the flight to Australia... I left Sydney around two or three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and we flew and flew and it got dark out and became night and we flew and flew and it got light and we landed in Los Angeles on Saturday morning (but wait! I already had a Saturday morning...) and after a flight to Chicago and then a flight to Providence that finally got me to Providence around eight or nine p.m. Saturday night... hmmm, gee, does that mean it only took six hours to get here from Sydney? *grin* I talked with him by phone earlier this week... he'd seen a major rugby (championship?) match at Olympic stadium and was very impressed at the heavy drinking exhibited by a significant percentage of the 94,000 fans.

So both kids are back to school next week. Classes start at Jennifer's college on Wednesday, but she has no Wednesday classes in her schedule. And school starts on Wednesday for freshman at Sean's high school, but he's a sophomore this year so he doesn't start until the next day. That's good because they are both going to a concert in Providence on Tuesday night (Less than Jake is going to be a Lupo's) so they will probably be out fairly late.

To Jim's Journal page

To Jim's Home page