Can you believe it’s September already??

Personally, I cannot.

Here’s something else I can’t believe — for the next 7 days, I have no appointments on my schedule.

I get to do whatever I want to do. (Including, I hope, have lunch with one of my girlfriends.)

I’m not sure I know how to handle that — all that free/me time.

The appointment with the Medicare Insurance Nurse yesterday was very interesting. We seemed to have a lot of opinions in common about things like vaxxes and pharmaceuticals vs. supplements, etc.

We chatted about a lot of things, there at my kitchen table. She was here for half an hour, even though her actual “work” was completed in about 10 minutes.

Anyway.

That’s done for another year!

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Even though Summer doesn’t officially end for 3 more weeks, everyone in the village seems to think that since school is back in session, the Summer is over and we should be putting all of our Fall decorations out…

WTF??!!

I feel like I’m the only one left who has “Summer” all over her front porch.

So, sadly, I’m going to at least take the Summer stuff off the front porch today. Move all the flowers to the kitchen porch, and try to conform to everybody else’s calendar…

But I refuse to put out my actual Fall decor until the last week of September. (Here’s hoping I don’t incur some sort of fine for that — you know, the Sherriff showing up on my kitchen porch, saying, “You’re neighbors have been complaining that this porch here still looks a little Summery…”)

I’m actually feeling kind of sad about all this — time racing away. But on we go.

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Okay.

As far as having a little window of free time to get some of my own writing done…

That feels really strange, too! My own writing?

We’ll see how that goes. It’s all about focusing and detaching from whatever is going on in the world around me. It’s been a while since I’ve allowed myself to really do that, without feeling sort of guilty about it.

That’s leftover from the caregiving.

But I’m working on moving those feelings out. Last evening, I suddenly decided to delete all the texts on my phone that I was still hanging onto from clients of mine who have since died.

I deleted any texts relating to caregiving at all. It felt like the right thing to do, because my heart needs to move on and I need to get fully back into my own life, while I’m still alive in it.

I hope to make some true progress with all of that this week.

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All righty!

Here’s this!

Keith, on a boat on the water! Getting plenty of “Keith” time!

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And here’s this!

From the last show of the Bad Seeds tour — Nick Cave in Paris!

And Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand File today, responding to an inquiry about his favorite painting. He actually got to see his favorite painting while in a museum in Germany recently. He said, in part:

“… I had heard that they had the Lochner (painting), but once inside I couldn’t find it amongst the museum’s unbelievably beautiful collection of sacred art. In my mind, the painting had become so monumental that I guess I expected it to be huge, to have its own wall, or something.

“As I was leaving, disappointed not to see it, I walked into a small, annexed room and in the far corner, in the half-light, was the Lochner, only twelve inches tall, and rendered with such tender restraint and humility that I found myself overwhelmed….”

You can read it in full HERE.

And here is the painting: