Deep Breath...

Southern Man needs to take a deep, deep breath, because a lot is about to happen...

This is the last week of school: lots of final exams and viewing of projects and grading and ending with graduation Friday night in a large convention center downtown. We'll have 1700 or so march across the stage...

Then Saturday morning Southern Man parks at the airport and heads for Spain for two weeks of geocaching. Well, the group he's with has an agenda as well but who cares about what they want. He already has a bag full of "travel bugs" given to him at Saturday's geocaching luncheon to take across the pond.

We're going to Spain, baby!

And there will also be hiking and touring and exploring and eating and not a hint of work for two glorious weeks.

Southern Man touches down Sunday evening, and has an 8:00 AM class on Monday morning. "This is Professor Jet Lag. Here's the syllabus. See you Wednesday." Well, he wishes. At any rate, that kicks off eight weeks of summer school.

And at the same time, and after over a year of wrangling in family court, Southern Man has finally gained primary physical custody of Teen Daughter as of June 1. We've picked out a brand-new apartment in Southern City - so new that the building isn't even finished yet - and we will be moving in over the next several days. Southern Ex (who is as mad as a wet hen) won't send much of anything with her (they're even taking her phone away) so Southern Man will be buying her bedroom furniture and whatever else she needs. And this will be a good time to finally break down and buy a flat-screen TV and Blu-Ray player and new kitchen gadgets and some decent furniture for the living room as well. A new casa deserves new stuff. He's lucky to have three summer classes to pay the bills on that!

Why is it again that I'm paying thousands of dollars in legal fees for the privilege of putting up with your nonsense full-time?

And then at the end of the summer session Teen Daughter flies to New York City on a church trip and Southern Man heads south of the border with a small group of faculty and administrators from his school to visit our sister institution in El Grullo, Mexico.

Do you see any geocaches on that map? Me neither. The closest one is twenty miles away, so Southern Man will almost certainly lose his "streak" of consecutive days of finding at least one geocache, which began two years ago at Thanksgiving and is now in the low 900s. Why, yes, he's a bit CDO when it comes to caching. Why do you ask?

That is quite a summer.

And then Teen Daughter kicks off her first year of high school - well, technically they call it "Ninth Grade Academy" - at one of the top schools in the state. Yes, we chose the location of the new digs quite carefully. She is absolutely thrilled with the prospect of going to just one school for the next four years.

And it's going to be an amazing four years!