Grand Summer Plans

After a long 180 days (36 weeks) of homeschooling our four young persons, I am always itching to have a grand summer. Even if summer is my least favorite season, the free time has its compensations. I have time to write. Read. Garden. Beach days. Time with friends. Special projects.

I always have grand plans, plans I rarely realize. But without grand plans, nothing at all would happen all summer. I list these knowing that finishing them all will never happen. But what's the saying? "Aim at nothing and you'll be sure to hit it." Or something like that. So here are my Summer 2009 Grand Plans:

1. Write up my Intermediate Writing Class in book form, each lecture becoming
its own chapter. Either work with Brave Writer or set up my own site for
marketing.

2. Work on the family genealogy project I've been puttering with since last fall

3. Take the kids to my parents' beach house at the end of July for a week of inexpensive vacation, as well as assorted beach days and fun trips into San Diego

4. Work on gardening, big time.

5. Read at least two books from my "Want to Read" list on the sidebar.

6. Revise some NaPoWriMo poems and compose some new ones

7. Write more of my NaNoWriMo novel -- complete the entire rough draft

8. Clean out closets in my home for a yard sale

9. Organize my books

10. Comparison-shopping grocery list and financial plans

There. That should keep me quite busy this summer. I will be fortunate to complete half of these, but I do hope to make some real progress on each of these projects. The most important ones are the writing book and catching up on my reading. Writing looks like it will be the major focus this summer which suits me just fine -- it's the perfect thing to do on sultry afternoons when the mere idea of physical exertion is ridiculous. So we shall see how this summer progresses, once I finish grading MLA papers and get my own kids' grades submitted to our school. I may not even truly start "summer" until July, and we usually start back up in mid-August, so I really have only six weeks of vacation in which to work on these goals. We shall see....