I guess it will be okay to get the children back from camp pretty soon. There was quite a bit of anticipation and nodding, pressure-filled talk about what “all that time” was going to be like for me, and I’m nervous I didn’t use it advantageously, but a couple of days from now it’s all over either way so I suppose it’s time for an accounting.

I got the garage door fixed. Well, it’s not fixed yet, but I have ordered a replacement for the one I backed my car into, also while they were away.

I began the process of getting my rear bumper fixed–not from backing into the garage door, but from backing out of the broken garage two mornings later into my parents’ Prius, which was parked in the driveway. My parents were kind of apologetic about parking in the trajectory of my car—one or the other of them has Canadian ancestry. My car beeps nonstop when I am pulling into or out of the garage, to let me know I am near a bike, recycling can, or anything structural–except, apparently, for the huge cedar door–so I can imagine I might have ignored the stupid beeping. And I guess I also ignored the camera. A Prius crushes pretty quietly, but it provided enough resistance to wake me up.

Anyway, I don’t have the kind of job that requires me to account for my time in increments of seven minutes, so I’m often unable to report at the end of a day—let alone at the end of an interval as long as a camp session—the specifics of my productivity, but I bet I did a lot of non garage- and car-repair-related stuff too while the children were away. For one thing, our freezer is full of new kinds of homemade desserts. Also, all the light bulbs in the basement are working. Well, probably not by now, but there was a moment.