The shortened summer break has me in a mental scramble to do something constructive with the time I've got left. I finally gave in - bought and started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and I have no cool Nick Hornby-esque excuses for this. Mine are more along the lines of my gfriend and I spotted a 3 for 2 table at Borders, I found two books, and there it was, in its red-covered, upside-down poodled glory, The Curious Incident. Please don't take this opportunity to remind me that I should be working out my library card and not my credit card - it just happened.

Anyway, so far I like it.

(So unconstructive has this summer been, so far, that the last statement may have to count as July's Booky Goodness.)

If there's one thing I've done compulsively since the beginning of summer, it's contemplate the passage of time. This extended family used to be at Chuck E. Cheese all the time - birthdays, you know? I think they got sick of us monkeying around at the salad bar and breaking the Skee-Ball lanes once a month - and now it's high school graduations. College graduations will be followed by weddings, and then the whole cycle of Chuck E. Cheese birthday parties will start up again. Funerals, of course, are sprinkled throughout. I think I've had Pali Punch and donuts at Borthwick as many times as I've played Frogger at Chuck E. Cheese.

This August my parents will have been married for 30 years. The last anniversary they celebrated on this scale was their 10th, where I was commissioned to say grace and was promised the sugar bells off the cake. My much-edited and well-delivered prayer was missing from the video but there are of course embarrassing shots of me with mouthfuls of cake and sugar bells. This year we're celebrating the passage of time between then and now, as much as we're celebrating the couple themselves. Twenty years of family dinners, travel, spells of joy, health and sickness, injuries that are amusing years down the line, an odd assortment of pets. Twenty years, give or take, of loving each other in our own little ways.

Like it or not.

The moving is going well. The bedroom went from empty to bursting at the seams. Well, the queen-sized inflatable mattress had a lot to do with that, but still and all, I have the same sh*tload of stuff I had when I lived at home. It all got transferred in a frenzy that skipped the "throw out what you haven't seen in years and will never use again" step. But a nice discovery: I can now watch DVDs from inside the shower!

More than you wanted to know?