Is there something magical about the first of September? Past couple of weeks for me have been a little … uhm … Parisian August? (does that say “absolutely nothing happening” to you? Like everyone but me is out of town, and anything worth happening is 500 miles away? Like the social highlight of the month was a f**cking power outage?) But all of a sudden, I wake up, I decide to dump 4 months’ backlog of mail and filing onto the living room floor and so that I can’t go to bed until I deal with it (of course I could have just pulled the sofa bed out on top of the mess, but whoopee for me that I didn’t); I took a shopping break from the de-cluttering (tax free back-to-school shopping week: I bought a whole bunch of stuff I really wanted anyway), and now I feel like I’m ready to get back to work again. Kinda like I had had a vacation but didn’t know it ... took a mental holiday but didn’t know that I could enjoy it while it was happening. I didn’t buy a new notebook or pencils or a protractor, but I feel like I did. Today was chilly and rainy, and I have a couple of new outfits and a new raincoat. So I think I’m ready and excited to start the 8th grade. Except I’m a middle-aged grown up. But cool. Know what I mean?