Stilettos, Stoli & Scribbles ~ Served With A Twist

Good afternoon and Happy Monday! I’m late again. I’m becoming a broken record. I also feel like the March Hare running to meet The Mad Hatter.

Here’s a question: When did we decide that those sacred, magical three months between the end of the old school year and the beginning of the new needed to be shortened to about six weeks?  Don’t kids deserve to be kids? Don’t teachers deserve a break? (Seriously, how many of you either decided to become teachers – or at least thought about it – because you’d have summers off? This new normal must seem something of a gyp. I’d have to rethink my career plans.) I suspect the shortening of the “in-between time” has a lot to do with harried parents running out of ways to keep their little cherubs busy. There aren’t a lot of places left where it’s still safe to turn them loose from sunup to sundown.

It’s the last day of July and yet it seems as if everyone has given up on the summer.  Television, newspapers, the internet (and my email box) are all chock full of ads for sales on everything that can even remotely be connect to “back-to-school”.   Did the transition always begin this early?

If you live in Atlanta, I guess they’re pretty on point. I just read that there are school districts in some Atlanta suburbs that opened today. TO-DAY. What the hell?

Most schools in this country, including high school and elementary, start anywhere from the middle to the end of August. I don’t have any school-age children that I will have to drag to the bus stop, but my life still operates on a semester to semester schedule. Colleges used to have the decency to wait until after Labor Day, but even Boston College adopted an early opening a couple of years ago. Instead of the Tuesday after the holiday, we now open a week before, throwing the whole system into chaos. (While the scuttlebutt surrounding the plan’s implementation used to be that it was designed to anticipate a phenomenon known as “snow days”, which is something we should absolutely not be concerned with during the dog days of summer, apparently a cabal of professors got together to complain about Monday holidays. I’m not kidding. But I digress.)

So while the calendar still reads July, and there are some departments here at the university that may still be enjoying days like those described by Nat King Cole in the above video, taking leisurely long lunches, frolicking on the campus green in their bare feet, yada  yada, here in my office, we’re already in full-on September mode. We’re working on Parents Weekend and football games, planning club meetings and socials and career fairs. I just had someone call me who wanted to discuss their office Christmas party.

(thank you Kristine)

“Wantin’ ain’t gettin’” as they say. I’ve finally stopped laughing long enough to finish this post. I don’t want to know that there are only 147 days until Christmas.  There’s still nearly two months of actual summer left! Let’s get out there and enjoy it!