My perfect ordinary day would, naturally, be a day of summer vacation. As much as I may enjoy my job as a teacher of highly-intelligent, motivated kids, and my
camaraderie with
supportive staff, administration, and parents, summer vacation is still what I live for. I wake up at about six. Tyson is asleep next to me, and he's actually sleeping well. We live in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse in Idaho or Montana. Even though it is June, I need a jacket to go outside and feed all the animals. We have two sheep, two goats, two llamas, and three horses. Then I feed the cats, and saddle up my horse and we go take the dogs for a run. The air is cool and swollen with humidity. There will be thunderstorms later this afternoon. I go back to the house and make coffee, then go to my studio/office to work on my charcoal portrait I am working on. Or my comics. Or my writing. Or maybe I have some
raku pots to fire or something.
At about ten, Tyson has made breakfast: oat-nut pancakes and scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. Nick crawls out of bed when he smells the pancakes. We eat breakfast at a
table in the middle of the kitchen, with sunlight and the morning breeze coming in through the windows. (My kitchen is awesome, by the way. I still haven't decided whether to get the marble
countertops or the custom-finished concrete, but the 6-burner stove has more
BTUs than you can shake a stick at!)
After breakfast, the three of us take our bikes and climbing gear and ride out into the
BLM land that sits at the back of our property. Three miles in, there is a granite/sandstone/basalt canyon with a tiny trout creek in it. I can lead a 5.10 and top-rope a 5.11b. I am wiry and strong, and I don't drop things or run into stationary objects anymore.
We eat apples and sandwiches before heading back to the house. Nick goes off to do teenager stuff with friends (just not sex/drugs/crime, we hope), leaving me and Tyson alone for the night. It's about three in the afternoon, and there's work to be done before it rains later. We spend an hour or so working in the yard, me tending the vegetables while Tyson lays paving stones or builds me a trellis or something manly and shirt-
offy. We want to build an outdoor living area with a fire pit and everything, but right now we just have a cheap resin dining set and a veggie patch.
Inky black clouds blow in by five-thirty, and it pours--complete with lightening and thunder--for about an hour, tops. The sky clears with about an hour of light left before sunset. I bake bread or make something fabulous for dinner (tapas?), when our friends are coming over.
We eat dinner outside on the patio and there are no
mosquitoes, just fireflies (maybe we have to import them from Iowa or something). My food is great, and then we watch movies or play a game in the living room. Maybe if the moon is out we take a moonlight paddle on the lake just down the street.
Our friends go home, and we have loud sex because there's nobody around to hear it, then we take showers in the huge glass-and-tile bathroom (renovated, of course). By then, we're so worn out just from the effort of having such a perfect life that we're just exhausted. We throw ourselves into the 500-count percale sheets and fall asleep.
