I wish

Well, that sure cooked the summer, didn't it?

I always have great hopes for what every summer will bring... the things I'll do, the things I'll fix. I'm not entirely sure what I accomplished.

More of the house is painted and in good condition, and the cars are mostly all happy. I flipped up the hood on my last fast (but disabled) Saab and found two enormous wasp nests, both of which I knocked down. I do want that car to fly again, if only to shove it in the face of all these "born from jets" Saab ads that General Motors is putting out lately. My old 900T16 is the original jet... driving those cars was always like flying a small plane at very low altitude, and while my old red Passat was incredibly fast for a station wagon, my Turbo Saab, particularly if it gets a new cylinder head, still can kick your ass and do it at 30mpg.

Just have to get the bugs out of it.

And not get stung by them.

I still have to put downspouts back up.

I still have to pick apples (though my neighbor, who has free reign to gather apples, says they're terribly sour).

I have things yet to plant, like two long-suffering kiwis and two equally-long-suffering blueberries. And three lilacs who've had it good.

We're getting a new range. Suzanne killed the old one, though it clearly wasn't her fault. We picked out a new GE with the Ceran black-glass cooktop I adore and without the self-clean I never used nor the AccuBake system Nancy seemed to want. As a result, it'll be half the price of the now-crippled Whirlpool, and BestBuy will haul the old one away as part of the delivery charge. Yeah, they said that if we spent $499 on a range, delivery and takeaway was free, but I couldn't see anything in the five-hundred-dollar stoves that we couldn't get in this $349 GE unit.

And this one has an enormous front window you can actually see through, unlike the Whirlpool.

Realistically, the cats destroyed the stove. Cat-whiz is amazingly corrosive.

I intend to catproof the new one. I didn't realize in 1998 that household appliances had to be protected against cats. I figured they were too big to be damaged by a cat urethra the size of a .22 bullet.

I learn things every day.

I have to cut down two enormous wild-grape vines that have taken over the dogwood in the back of the house. It's so large that I can't cut it with clippers... the main stems are almost two inches thick. The dogwood leaves have gone red, so the grape leaves in their green-ness stand out. The top of the dogwood is green. That tells you a lot.

I still have to clear the old red Saab out of the barnyard, where it's been since it ate itself six years ago. I still want its gearbox and other tidbits to retrofit the white 1984 Saab with a five-speed, but increasingly, I think I'll never get around to it.

But I'd like to.

The house itself will last. The cats will be OK. The wabbits will be fine. Everyone will prosper.

I just wish I had the energy to do it all the right way.

And I wish Suzanne could help out a little more.