If you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I would have told you there was no way I could have crammed as much living as I did into the scarce but gorgeous last weeks of the summer of 2012. 

I'll admit, I complained loud and long about the busy-ness of being Out And Doing Things, but I didn't really mean it. 

Went camping again in August, this time at Rasar State Park on the Skagit River with Joe and Jenna, and I think the three of us spent more time sleeping than awake, but that's okay when you can open your eyes to blue skies, gentle breezes and the sounds of the river and fifty corgis playing in the distance.

I ran Jenna in my very first agility trial a month ago; her one-year-anniversary of competing in fact. It was ridiculously hot, which was what borked our first run I'm sure. A couple of trips to the kiddie pool with the hose perked her right up (well, once she figured out why I was throwing water on her) and we went on to win a handful of ribbons, including her CPE level 2 Handler Games title. 

We've just signed up for a truffle-hunting nose work class for the fall, which I'm really excited about. I'm trying to keep my expectations of actually finding truffles low; they are fairly prolific here in the Northwest but I've heard stories that their locations are guarded more jealously than outdoor marijuana grow sites (and with many of the same legendary deterrents law enforcement likes to talk about--razor wire, snares and pellet guns for those foolish enough to disregard the Keep Out signs). But nose work is nose work, and I imagine it won't be too hard to train her on something like chanterelles once we have the fundamentals down.

Let's see, what else did we get done this summer? We attended the wonderful content-overload that was the Penny Arcade Expo. I leveled my gardening skills to merely "abysmal." And I've been reading A TON. I'm burning through the Kindle e-book fantasy bestseller list like a level 20 Fireball. I'm actually running out of things to read (I even caved at one point and burned through The Hunger Games in about two days, then went to TVTropes.org to see if the other two books were interesting enough to me to warrant reading more than the synopses. They weren't.) But the ones I did get through?

Terry Pratchett: The entire Tiffany Aching series and a couple of the Lancre Witch stories
Neal Stephenson, et al: The first book in The Mongoliad (and as it turns out, Neal's a lot easier to read when he's got two or three other authors editing his Walls of Text down to Snow Crash-length minimums)
Charles de Lint: Widdershins, Spirits In the Wires (his short stories are not so interesting to me, probably due to the insane rate that I'm going through books these days)
Debora Geary: The first four books in A Modern Witch series, before I got tired of all the babycentric drivel
Storm Constantine: Ghosts of Blood and Innocence, Wraiths of Will and Pleasure, Shades of Time and Memory, and The Heinama. Yes, I'm not ashamed to admit that post-apocalyptic "hermaphrodite" (yaoi, let's call a spade a spade) porn is a genre I enjoy.
Neil Gaiman: Stardust, American Gods, Coraline
Cory Doctorow: Content, Makers, Eastern Standard Tribe, and  Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (the WEIRDEST story I've ever read, hands down--I mean, how do you deal with "my father is a mountain, my mother is a washing machine, and my brothers are an island, a precog, an undead monster, and a trio of nesting dolls with a shared digestive tract?" How do you deal? It's a good book, albeit incredibly disturbing in parts...) 

 I've made the unfortunate mistake of going back through all of my old LJ entries, tagging and reminiscing. I'm currently about halfway through the year 2002. I learned a few things about my 2002 self:

I hated my job, even though I insisted several times that I didn't.
I was more than a little bit obnoxious to certain people online.
I should never, ever delete journal entries.
My grammar has improved greatly in the last ten years.

Additionally I found some story threads that work perfectly with a setting I've been developing in my head to form a reasonably complex ecosystem.

I'm trying to write more here. Maybe I will succeed this time.