It’s almost my birthday.  I’ll be 23 on Thursday.  I don’t have enough vacation yet to take it off, but I am looking forward to a long weekend.  Here’s what been going on during my last days of feelin’ 22 (I listened exclusively to T Swift for several hours the other day, so I’m freshly indoctrinated).

• Like I said, I didn’t have enough vacay to take my birthday off, but I did take Friday, and we’re going camping.  We bought a new tent and a battery-powered light rope so we can glamp in style.  Plus our site is literally right on the lake.  It’s probably as close as we’ll get to owning a lake house!
• Speaking of houses — we both have the house bug bad.  Browsing Zillow has been a shared hobby for several years, but now we’re taking it up a notch and going to open houses almost every Sunday.  It’s possible we’ll be able to start home shopping next year — we’ll see!
• I’m super excited to be able to buy a home for a ton of reasons, but one is we’ll get to move out of where we are.  I’m not trying to be ungrateful — we were extremely lucky to find a great rental for a great price from a great landlord.  Our current home is an awesome married beginning.  But the way it is built, our kitchen is in the space that would be a basement in any other house, and because of that we battle bugs all.  Summer.  Long.  It’s exhausting.  We found a dead scorpion in our clean laundry the other day.  I love our place, but I’m tired of living in a basement, and it’s almost enough to make me look forward to cooler weather.  But not quite.
• And here’s why — summer may come with bugs, but it also comes with kayaking!  Some lovely members of my family went in together and bought us a kayak last year as a wedding gift.  Last week, we finally built a transport rack for it and took it out on the water.  It took us almost a year to get it out, but it was totally worth it.  Kayaks rock.
• On our way to take our kayak out for the first time, we stopped so I could vote in our local primaries!  I realized most of my Twitter feed lately has been me yelling, “GO VOTE!”  Maybe that’s annoying, but I don’t care.  Voting is arguably the most important thing you can do as a citizen and I will continue to obnoxiously encourage people to do it.  If you’re eligible but not registered, consider this your reminder.  Midterm elections are coming up in November!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlyRWx-FoxC/?taken-by=nerdywordybirdy

• I get most of my political and other news from Twitter (and my new NYT subscription), but I’m starting to burn out on social media.  I love it, but I’m really bad about turning to it in every dull moment.  I’m considering a social media break for awhile.  I don’t want to just go cold turkey for a few days and then go back to it as usual, though.  I’d like to regain some balance in this area of life.  So my thought is to come up with a system and test it over my long weekend and vacation.  Maybe I’ll let you all know how it goes.
• Vacation — there’s a nice word.  We are going to the beach for a few days at the end of August and you better believe I’m counting down the days.  This is the longest I’ve ever worked without some kind of break and it’s been harder to adjust than I expected.  I’m kind of stagnating a bit at work and I definitely need the refresher.
• To help get me through this month, I’m trying the August 30 Days of Yoga Challenge by Yoga with Adrienne.  I know I won’t be able to do every day (in fact I’ve already missed one), but my goal is to have done yoga more days than not by the end of the month.
• We’re continuing to church shop — we thought we had found one but kind of dropped off, and then I discovered another option I wanted to try.  Visiting church services isn’t hard — you find one, you go, the end.  Visiting small groups is a lot more intimidating, so that’s where we’re getting hung up.  Making friends as adults sucks, y’all!
• I’d been stagnating in Bible study, too.  I’m just so out of practice.  It’s been years since I did a regular Bible study and honestly the way I used to do it probably won’t work for me anymore.  It’s been difficult to get back into, especially without a good small group, so I roped my sister into doing an actual Bible study book with me.  The first week has still been a bit frustrating, but doing it with someone is helping.  I’m hoping that seeing this study through will help me get back in the habit.

Here’s to the rest of the warm weather!