Where did the time go???

Summer is my all time, all around favorite season EVER. And for all intensive purposes, my summer officially ended at 11:00am yesterday :-(

Summer 2010 started on June 21, and I spent the first three "official" weeks of summer in Ecuador, where it is actually winter. Wet, rainy, cold winter.
I came back to the states just in time for a brief heat wave (several beautiful, sunny summer days with temperatures WELL above 80 or 90 degrees. However, I spent most of those days in an air-conditioned veterinary hospital - and subsequently (due to the nastiest of re-filtered air-conditioned air) was sick for several of those days too. And just as the earth and the seasons seem to be living in extremes these days (it doesn't rain - it hurricanes; it doesn't snow, it blizzards; it's not hot, it's scorching heat waves; earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes oh my!!) so too was my level of illness at these points.

At the risk of spending the rest of 2010 sick as a dog, let me just reiterate the following. In 2010, I ...

... got bit not once but TWICE by spider monkeys in Nicaragua. Got a nasty bruise, but didn't get sick.

... slept on the ground in Haiti (and slept through an earthquake after-shock) and ate food from Haitian street vendors. Drank a LOT of battery-acid-cholera-killing Coke and used 100% straight DEET, but didn't get sick.

... brushed my teeth with Ecuadorian well-water and drove around really fast at 9,000 ft altitude, but didn't get sick.

... came home from all of these places to my lovely home and air-conditioned jobs, and got attacked by the global-warming induced allergy pollen count in south western Connecticut, and was flat-on-my-*ss-sick-as-a-dog.

After a week of stress and low-level malaise, I spent my last summer night in bed by 10pm. Today, I slept in, was back to work by 11am, and started my 3rd semester of grad school. For all intensive purposes, my summer is over. Unless they have wifi at the beach, or my job wants to pay me for not going to work, I'll be spending the rest of summer (30 days until the official start of autumn) at work, the library, Starbucks, or passed out in bed.

Part of being a grown up I guess.

Duty calls here, but Wish I Was Some Where Outdoors with WiFi....