These past two weeks have been… chaotic, to say the least.
Two weeks ago, during finals week of my final summer semester at Arapahoe Community College, a wildfire broke out way too close to home. It has since been contained and put out, but during that first week of the fire, I could barely sleep, let alone get my work done. But through sheer stubbornness and willpower, I managed to get through finals week and get both of my (well deserved) A’s.
However, I couldn’t rest just yet.
The day after I got my final grades back, a couple of my Seattle relatives flew into town to hang out with us for a week. For the record, I love all of my family very much, and did have moments of fun with them while they were visiting. At the same time, they left me feeling very… icky, for lack of better words. Not only are we very different in damn near every way possible (which meant I had to endure many uncomfortable situations this past week), my relatives were visiting us because they felt like they needed to get away from the family drama that’s been playing out in Seattle.
While I managed to keep my ears shut to whatever the hell’s been going on back in Seattle, the vibes were still very off while my family was visiting. Not tense, not eerie, just… depressing and kind of gross.
However, I felt obligated to hang out with my relatives every day, because they came out specifically to see me, knowing that I wasn’t willing to fly into Seattle to see them (for many valid reasons). So, I stocked up on Zevia Cola, premade a handful of meals (made of greens, salmon, and fruit) to ensure that I ate healthy, energizing meals while they were here, and did my best to throw together a daily plan that worked for all of us.
Unfortunately, that all fell apart almost instantly when one of my relatives came down with a severe case of altitude sickness that put my aunt Stacy’s altitude sickness to shame. Of course, that wasn’t his fault, but it made spending a day in Breckenridge and a day at the hot springs at Mount Princeton both impossible.
Instead of vacationing in the mountains as planned, my mom’s cousin, Julie, decided she wanted to spend the rest of the trip exploring Denver with us, while her husband stayed home to recover. Long story short, I spent all of last week enduring the chaos of the city surrounded by crowds and traffic, while hardly getting any sleep due to my relatives’ sleep schedules (if you could even call them that).
No wonder I haven’t been able to do much since my relatives returned to Seattle over the weekend!
Indeed, I’ve needed a lot of physical rest since they left, as I haven’t been able to relax since well before finals week. But, now that I’m getting my solid eight hours of sleep every night, and am eating very well, I’m no longer sleepy-tired. Rather, I’m restless-tired. I’m get-me-the-hell-away-from-town-and-put-me-in-a-cabin-tired, which sucks because I can’t just go stay at a remote cabin on a whim, no matter how badly I want to. Especially since classes resume in T-minus seven days. So, what do I do about that kind of tired when I have to stay at home?
Good news is, I have this entire week to myself. The weather’s much cooler (and wetter) than it’s been for a long time, and I’m hopeful that pattern will stay for the rest of the month. Plus, it’s the time of year that school’s starting back up for a lot of people, which means the mountains will be much less crowded than usual during the weekdays. So, guess who’s driving up to Breckenridge with grandma Debbie for a day on Tuesday?
Wednesday, I’m driving to my great uncle Courtney’s house to help teach my little brother how to shoot guns for the first time (AKA show him how it’s done). Hopefully, the weather will behave enough for us to have a little campfire in the firepit with dinner afterwards. I don’t yet have plans for Thursday, but if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll drive myself to Idaho Springs and check out their art galleries without the crowds, after spending another morning on the hogback in the Valley, reveling in the cooler weather.
Soon enough, while I do my best to survive Calculus and Biology Lab, it’ll be cool enough for me to visit the valley daily in a hoodie. The fawns will lose their spots as the bucks lose their velvet in September. Migratory birds of all kinds will pass through the state on the way to their winter ranges. And it will snow, finally relieving us of one of Colorado’s hottest summers on record.