School's Out for the Summer

School's out for the summer.  School's out forever. 

Cover of the 1972 US single, from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School's_Out_%28song%29

Anyone knowing me can probably guess I am not much of an Alice Cooper fan.  Truth be known, I did not even know who had done that song until I looked it up.  In any case, that song has been the earworm attacking me recently as I have been cleaning out my office of 35 years of all kinds of accumulated stuff junk.  Although I have filled multiple recycling bins, given away several hundred books, and lugged home many boxes of books, papers and other miscellaneous stuff, I still have more sorting to do. 

The good news is that my office is essentially finished and very little if anything more will be coming home.  Even better news is that I have found space in the book shelves at home for the books I am keeping.  The bad news is that we need to make space in the storage unit for quite a few boxes and then make the multiple trips to get them there.  Until we can do that, those boxes are stacked in the hall and in the dining room. 

Since I still have all of these tasks hanging over my head, the finality of it has not yet sunken in.  That will probably happen this fall.  Except for two years in the mid-70's, this will be the first time in 59 years that I will not be starting school in the fall.  (For those two years between undergrad and grad school I was working and not in school.  However, since I was living two blocks off of the OSU campus, I was very attuned to school and school activities.  I even remember some of those school activities:  I attended at least one of the home OSU football games and remember seeing Archie Griffin playing.  On a different occasion I walked to the stadium from my apartment after a victory over "that school up north" to see what was left of the goal posts as they made their way out of the stadium.)

No school does not mean no learning.  I am still reading a lot and taking online courses.  However, the biggest new learning experience will be learning to do vegetable gardening in Texas.  Gardening in Texas really is a totally different undertaking than gardening as I thought of it growing up.  Since it is too hot for most plants to grow here during the summer, the growing seasons are spring and fall (plus even winter for some things).

Most of our gardening adventures will need to be the subject of separate posts, but I can report that the raised bed was installed yesterday by Liberty Urban Agriculture.  Stay tuned.