Summer Break begins today! Yesterday was yours portly’s last official day of the school year. Indeed, it was my last official day as a teacher. Of course, I’ll always be a teacher, but that particular position has ended formally. I’ll be returning to my little school on a very-part-time basis as its chaplain.

But I don’t have to answer to anyone other than Dr. Wife and God Almighty until sometime in August. I’ll run my annual Minecraft Camp next week for four mornings and I’ll teach some lessons, but I’m taking the month of July off completely. The goal then is to get the house unpacked and organized, which I can’t really do in earnest until Dr. Wife is down here for good at the end of June.

This week consists of more errands. Murphy is currently at the veterinarian getting a bath, a nail trim, and a bunch of shots and vaccinations. The old girl turns thirteen on 15 June 2026, which is ninety-one in dog years. She’s essentially my maternal grandmother’s age (who turns ninety in June). These may be the last vaccinations the old girl (Muprhy, not my grandmother) ever receives, although she shows no sign of keeling over yet. She’s slowed down a good bit, spending most of her time asleep in her bed, but when she needs to get up and go, she can still move with some briskness.

The yard man (my pastor!) and the pest control guy are coming tomorrow to cut and spray and such. I’ll also teach my first lesson of the summer at the house, with one of my recently-graduated students coming up for a piano lesson. I’m going to try it on my maternal grandmother’s old piano, although it has a few “dead” keys and desperately needs a tuning. That’s a note to me to schedule the piano tuner to come give the piano some much-needed attention.

Then Dr. Wife will be back for another weekend, during which we’ll likely do some more unpacking and organizing. She is tantalizingly close to finishing residency, and we are both counting down the days to her graduation in late June. She’s been working exceptionally hard.

Naturally, I’ll keep the blog going. I’m also going to resume scanning images for my next book Offensive Poems: With Pictures. It’s wild that I’ve been thinking about this book for three years. I’ve finally worked out a solid workflow and scanning method. My plan is to have the full-color version, which will be (sadly) fairly pricey to offset all the Amazon Direct Publishing fees and printing costs. However, I’ve figured out how to get high-quality greyscale images, so I’ll release a black-and-white/greyscale edition as well, which should retain some of the shading of the drawings while retaining the image quality of the scans.

Finally, Koi Dance, my next album, is essentially done. At this point, I need to get all of the tracks and their related assets, as well as the PDF scores, uploaded to Bandcamp and to my digital distributor, CD Baby. I’m going to shoot for a late June release or, barring that, postponing the full release to September. July and August just don’t feel like great times to release music. I may do a staggered release, releasing to Bandcamp in June and releasing to other digital distributors later in the year. We shall see!

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! What fun summertime plans do you have on the horizon? What books are you reading? What projects are on your docket? Let me know in the comments.

—TPP