It was a beautiful summer, one of the best in my recent memory. Some streaks of hot weather, a couple severe storms…but even those were moderate compared to previous years. And our lawn looked spectacular.

How did you spend your summer? As I look back:

1. Watching the Cubs-Cardinals game on Facebook Live, the 160th game of their regular season, I realize I haven’t watched an entire Cubs game all summer. How does that happen? (They just won BTW…but not before giving the Cards two cheap runs back on the board.)
2. I’ve used the grill a lot…with just the two of us in the house all summer, it’s the easiest way to knock out dinner with little fuss and clean up. Plus, since we fully migrated from marinades to rubs, the food is just damn tasty. Got a couple of rubbed up steaks in the fridge now, as a matter of fact. And…I am kind of awesome at grilled steaks and chops.
3. However…a quick check of the Activity iOS app confirms I did a shit job of sticking to my regular bike rides this season with only 150 miles logged.
4. We put the house on the market on May 2, after a bit of a spring campaign getting it ready to sell. Fortunately, we did a ton of work a couple years ago with the same plan in mind, but the very weekend we were going to list the house in 2016, I started a new job and we decided to wait. Unfortunately, it did not sell and we pulled it back off the MLS until next spring. But a lot of our summer was vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, Windexing, polishing, mowing, fertilizing–and then waiting in the car with Lucy dog–for those coveted (yet rare) showings.
5. And there was playing at the park or in the pool with the grandbabies, bingeing on Netflix series, lunch and walking photography expeditions with dad, mornings on the front porch with a Monster energy drink and iPhone games while Lucy napped in the sun, joining the wife a couple times a week to the stable so she can work her horse while I get in the way.

All told, not a bad summer…but summer is done. It’s cold and rainy today; actually turned on the heat in the house. The forecast for the next seven days suggests next Wednesday will be the only 70+ day. Time to start digging out different decorations: pumpkins and witches, turkeys and gourds, santas and angels.

It’s been a little over two years since I bought the minorirrelevancies.com domain. In my first 30 days, I posted 24 times. In the 12 months since? Once. A post on July 17 LAST summer in which I acknowledged the huge gap in posts, then offered “I’ll do better, now.” Such a Lying McLiarface. So what am I doing here–an entire summer with plenty of free time, and this is the best I can do?

Well, I’m a packrat. Not a “Hoarders” -style packrat, thankfully, but I have a hard time letting things go. I may need it someday, right? That’s kind of why minorirrelevancies.com is still around. All the ideas I had two years ago when I started are still floating around in my head. I think maybe I’ll pull the trigger on one or two of them eventually. It’s easy to let a dozen excuses stand in front of getting “a thing” done…there’s always tomorrow, right? But as the sun sets on my 48th summer…

Eh. I’ll worry about that tomorrow.