We finally have a house under contract in Santa Fe. If all continues to go well, we should be out of this house and into that one around the middle of July. We have a million things to get done on the way but we’re all pretty excited.

I also got new glasses. A couple years ago I started wearing bifocals because my eyes were getting old, and the close up parts have needed updating for a while. New glasses are expensive so I tend to put these things off, but getting back into cross stitch got me motivated. When those tiny little stitches are easier to see without my glasses than with, I know it’s time for a new prescription. Eyeglass world was running a ‘buy one, get one free’ sale which included the actual lenses so I got two pairs.

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Summer has officially started and kids have been out of school, so most of my time is taken with chauffering them around with their friends or moving concerns, but I’ve still carved out some time to start a sort of reading journal. When I was a kid I was heavily encouraged to journal as a religious thing–we were supposed to chronicle our lives for posterity, and as I got older I realized we were supposed to be chronicling God’s miracles or the end times or something. The idea that my grandkids would be reading my journals and judging my faith struggles kind of gave me writer’s block. I’ve always loved to write and loved the idea of doing some kind of journaling, but even after I left behind my old church and its odd idea about posterity, I couldn’t really stick with a journal. I found that if I just wrote about daily life or my concerns, I ended up bored or worse, ruminating on negative details and depressing myself. But I could never decide what else to journal about.

All this Dark Academia stuff made it really obvious–I should be keeping a reading journal. I’m always reading, and little thoughts and connections pop into my head, interesting quotes pop out at me, ideas for further reading present themselves, and if these thoughts get written down at all they end up in a million scattered places. Of course I should put them all in one place. That’s the kind of journal I’d like to look back on one day.

I sometimes get excited about ideas and then lose interest after a while (don’t most of us?) so I didn’t spend a lot of money on this. I just grabbed a decent basic lined journal and a pen to keep with it. I started a couple of weeks ago and I love it so far. Every day or two I make some time to be alone with my thoughts and my books and it feels so peaceful. So far it’s thoughts on what I’m reading combined with some thoughts about life and about the journaling process itself. I’m toying with the idea of sharing parts of it online because sometimes it’s interesting to see peoples’ thoughts take shape as they’re reading a book instead of just a summary of their final views, but I don’t know. I’ll have to mull that over for a while before I decide. In the meantime, reading and writing are really helping me find some calm in all this chaos of summer and moving.