another hop festival...

it's sunday night and the hop festival is over for another year, heralding the imminent advance of autumn and the roller-coaster into christmas and beyond. hard to believe.

it's been a great weekend. our friend s stayed - we were out on the town on friday, and most of yesterday too. the weather has been great and we've drunk rather a lot of very very good beer and heard some truely fantastic music. this morning we popped up to whitstable to visit some more mutual friends of both of us, and, after breakfast, sat on the beach all together and watched kite surfers swirling and leaping in the waves. back in faversham, i went for a run and s biked with me, then we headed off into town again as the brass band was playing. n had a proper gig (in folkestone! on hop festival weekend! madness!!) so it's just been s and i and we've had a lovely afternoon. she's off back to the big smoke now and i am flopped on the sofa with a glass of cold wine and a vague sense that i probably ought to be tidying up or making lunch for tomorrow or something but - well, it will wait.

it feels like liminal space this evening - the pause - the moment before all the action takes off again and we either leap or are dragged into the maelstrom. the ikea delivery is tuesday whereupon the house becomes a kitchen factory. the actual ripping out will commence next monday. a lot needs to happen before that!! but one thing at a time. my biggest concern now is what we find when we start ripping out, but i can't do much about that so we'll just have to see what happens. it is what it is. (it's funny - a few years ago, at work, when we were going crazy trying to get the exec to make decisions on time and not delay the construction of the new building, they kept saying "we are where we are" and it was SO infuriating. but in a lot of north american books and tv shows they say "it is what it is". there's a real difference between those two phrases even though they sound like they are the same. it's like one is more temporal, more fluid. i wonder if it's a cultural thing. i have probably overthought this.)

anyways.

this evening, the house is calm. there are no stacks of boxes and half-built cabinets. it is still summer (despite the encroaching darkness of the evenings). i am going to bask in this as i have a feeling in my bones it may be sometime until it returns...