The End of Summer

You can spin the light to gold.

Summer goes out with neither a bang nor a whimper. The week is sizing up to be rain free. The days are starting out in the mid-fifties, and climbing to eighty or so. The trees are showing various amounts of color. The walnuts are always the last to arrive and the first to leave, and are already starting to show a lot of yellow. There’s patches of red in the maples. The oaks are refraining from any colorful comment at this time. I love this time of year.

Kitten went to the vet for boosters on Sunday. I’d intended to take her to a friend who has a small animal practice a few miles from here, but with the prospect of a move comes the prospect of again being quite close to my old vet. This vet has seen me through dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs and assorted what-nots for nearly forty years, and I am loathe to change unless I must. So kitten and I went the distance on Sunday, and visited the usual vet, in hopes that by the next visit there will be a five minute trip instead of a forty minute one.

I visited Borders over the weekend, and Coconuts. I found a used copy of Shrek at Coconuts and snapped it up. Borders saw me purchasing Air’s “Talkie Walkie” and Orbital’s latest and last, The Blue Album. I was also suprised to find that Ursula LeGuin had a new book out, “The Gift”. I snapped that up as well. I’ve enough new entertainment to keep me happy for a bit now.

Work has just realized that my review is six months late. I explained that I wasn’t sure when my next review was supposed to be, since I’d missed so much time, but it has a lot of people upset with me. Part of the review process is being judged on objectives you set for yourself at the last review. Nobody can find my objectives. I’m not about to supply them with a copy, since I’d made the objectives under protest to begin with. Nobody at work can tell me what they expect of me, what direction they want my job to take. Without that kind of input, it is impossible to set objectives for myself. Ah well, so be it. I won’t get judged on last year’s objectives, but I have been told I need to set new objectives this year. I told the under-Bossling that I’d be glad to do so once we sat down and discussed what exactly they wanted me to be doing. She got a panicked look on her face and admitted that she had no idea what expectations for me were, but that we’d sit down and talk things over as soon as she could free up some time. This should be interesting.

The Big Audit is coming up on Friday. I’ve spent the last month in a frenzy, trying to prepare for it. I have feelings of guarded optimism regarding the audit at the moment. I know our weak points, but I also know that the auditor is unlikely to dig into most of them. Much of the audit is simply going to hinge on good timing. I can only hope that everything goes smoothly with operations on Friday. Until then, I’m going to be tense. And I’ve stopped getting good nights’ sleep weeks ago over worring about this thing. I just look forward to all this being over with after Friday.

Saturday through Monday Dr. Nineteen Cats and I will be spending time in Cape May, taking in the early autumn at the shore and celebrating her fifth decade on this earth (actual birthdate will be Monday). I’ll need to seriously blow off some steam by the weekend, so the timing couldn’t be better.

I got a really nice little travel kite at a kite store next to the motel we were staying in when we were visiting the Mohave this summer. I think I’ll take that and my portable parafoil kite with us to the shore. I haven’t flown a kite forever.