My weekend finally ended last evening. I took a couple of days off to support a couple of commitments and to maybe, sort of, get a little bit of rest here in the early spring. That last bit didn’t quite work, but I got stuff done.

The big event was the trip to Sweet Briar College for accepted students’ weekend on Sunday/Monday. This was really all about the firstborn’s experience, though I’d never been to the campus before, so it was a good experience for me. The kid loves it, and I can see why; it’s a gorgeous campus, not dissimilar to where I spent my undergrad years – lots of old brick, green grass, and fat squirrels running around. Being a very small college in the best of years, and especially after recovering from the recent hiccup, the only weird thing about it was walking around Monday (after spending Sunday in seminars, academic fairs, and campus tours) while classes were in session (the incoming accepted students got to audit a couple of classes), was that it felt kind of empty. I would have expected, on a warm spring day, to see kids in groups in the public areas, or sitting against a tree reading, or you know, milling around. Of course, the whole student body was in class somewhere; and those class sizes were pretty much all smaller than a dozen students, which, if you’re looking for an academic environment that would work for my kid, is pretty much perfect. Still, I kind of missed the blanket of student life just out and about; all the signs of it happening were there, I think I just missed it due to timing and the logical application of a small student population. In any case, the faculty, staff and students I talked to were uniformly pretty great, and I was very impressed with the place as a parent of one of next year’s First Years.

I kind of crashed Monday afternoon; it’s been a busy and stressful couple of weeks, and it pretty much wrecked me. Tuesday I had a medical appointment, which even though I’m in generally okay shape, is always a little stressful. I got some new stuff to try to sort out some of the rough edges; we’ll see how that goes. After that, I took care of grocery shopping I went on a nice bike ride along the river with the youngest (did I mention that? spring break), took a little time to read, and then got dragged out to the local, somewhat anachronistic skating rink for two-dollar-tuesdays, again with the youngest, as the middle one was hours deep into an Overwatch orgy and the eldest was out at the beach for the day with “the squad”.

I hadn’t been on roller skates in a few years, but I got my rink legs back pretty quickly. As I’ve probably said before in the more than a decade of musings archived in this space, roller rinks always perk up my nostalgia circuits, since I *lived* in roller rinks from elementary through mid-high school, because that was a thing we used to do. Things honestly haven’t changed much since then; I’m always amazed that stepping into a roller rink is like stepping back to 1988 or so. Same decorations, same carpet, same old brown and orange rental skates, same tables and crappy pizza in the snack bar. Half the music was from the period as well – “It Takes Two” from Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock? Salt-n-Peppa? Yep. Only thing missing was a couples’ skate set to Atlantic Starr’s “Always” or “Almost Paradise” by Ann Wilson and Mike Reno.

I had thought that my rental size 11s seemed a little “off”, though I wrote it off to them being rentals until about 90 minutes into the session, I tossed a wheel going around a turn (while executing a pretty nice crossover maneuver) and I dropped myself gracefully to the rink surface in the opposite direction of the wheel. Oh yeah. I bet there are still the remnants of badly packed bearings somewhere. That was about it for me (it was a two-hour skate). Still, I had a decent time on a day when I was dealing with a bit of anxiety.

Rest of the week (other than the Spring Break stuff) is pretty standard for me; I’m going to try to get some more biking in (I need to get my mileage back up), do some band practice later this week, and just try to get through all of this…life.