Speedy Bullets

• "There are a lot of cool things to look forward to right now," says my 15yo. They include a visit from my brother, a two-week backpacking trip with Scouts, a family trip to NYC, and then HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY AAAAACCCKK.
• His list is continuing but I am stuck on the departure from the bosom of the family part.
• Travel arrangements are not my favorite thing to manage, but we are trying to get them sorted out. Frontier offered to take us to NYC via Denver. You don't have to be an ace cartographer to know that Denver is not on the way to NYC from Gladlyville. Next time they will offer to take me to Portland by way of Cuba. Or to LA by way of Iceland.
• I think we are taking the train to NYC, but only if the Amtrak site does not cause my husband to die of untimely apoplexy first.
• The basement has been getting me down. It's like this hideous accretion of stuff that seemed unmanageable and intolerable. But today I asked the boys to spend 20 minutes working on it with me and do you know, it is fully 20% less will-to-live-sapping?
• We have my parents' old dining room table down there and it had been taken over by piles of crap. Sleeping bags were airing out over chairs and Play-Doh jars were scattered across the table along with cups and saucers from a long-abandoned tea party. The comic books live on a basement shelf and they were spread all across the table too. And now? The table is clear.
• Sometimes stuff to be given away gets put on a basement shelf temporarily, and I moved a bunch of it out to the car as well. Unfortunately I couldn't move it all. I keep trying to purge the kids' bookshelves and being stopped by children howling "Nooooo, you can't give away [insert preposterous book title here]! That's the book of my childhood!"
• People have a lot of books of their childhood around here, I'm just saying.
• My husband is trying to determine which accommodations in the NYC area are least likely to have bedbugs. The answer is all of them, right? No bedbugs in any NYC hotels, except perhaps the ones he wouldn't dream of considering? That is the answer I would like to hear, please.
• I can't wait to see Alex in NYC. I miss that boy. He's really happy there. He's coming back to the Midwest in August to finish his last semester of college. He hopes to wind up there on a more permanent basis, which I guess means I will continue to oscillate between pride and panic for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday I'll get used to MY KID living in the city of bedbugs that never sleep.
• It does not feel like 20 years have gone by since he was my fuzzy-headed inscrutable baby.
• If I don't push publish quickly I'm going to start singing Sunrise, Sunset. So in service to the neighbors...