(Sunday Paper, Volume III, Issue 31)

I kind of suspected after the craziness of Framingham Comedy Weekend I'd need another week off from writing the Sunday Paper.

So back in North Carolina I asked my friend Danielle how she'd feel about taking over a week.

You know, Danielle...or Zoey's mom.

She was agreeable enough. (Read: I didn't have to beg too much.)

So this week, we hand the Sunday Paper over to Danielle.

Summer is a glorious time to be a teacher. I wake up when I want, read books that aren’t required reading, and drink my coffee while it’s still hot. I also get out of town as much as I can. I live in Columbia, South Carolina, where the city slogan used to be “Famously Hot,” aka “so-hot-you-can-feel-your-insides-melting.” I’ve lived in Phoenix AND in central Florida, and Columbia may be the worst of the three.

This summer, we ended up visiting North Carolina three separate times. First, we went to Wilmington to celebrate Kevin’s grandfather’s 102nd birthday. That man may outlive us all. Then, we took our pup Zoey to Asheville for a hiking weekend. This was her first real vacation with us, and she behaved better than we expected. I guess she loves hanging out with hipsters on brewery patios! We climbed to the summit of Mt. Mitchell where she promptly peed in front of the sign.

But by far, the best vacation of the summer was the week we spent in the Outer Banks with Kevin’s best friends and their families. It was here that I bonded with John’s girls over Magical Unicorn ice cream, Happy Burger games, and three-marshmallow s’mores.

~~Writing~~ Reading

I’m not much for writing; however, I LOVE to read! Good books, terrible books, pretty much everything is fair game for me. My Goodreads reading challenge for the year is 200 books, and I’ve read 29 novels this summer. Most of them are YA (young adult), but I also enjoy literary fiction, mysteries, and narrative nonfiction. Here are some recommendations because I’m an English teacher and I can’t help myself:

Young Adult: Neal Shusterman’s works, but especially the Arc of a Scythe series

Nonfiction: Erik Larson’s books, especially The Devil in the White City; Simon Winchester

Mystery/Crime fiction: Louise Penny’s Three Pines series; Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series; Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series

Poetry: Mary Oliver

Comedy

We’ve been rewatching Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee this summer. While his comedic style grates on me at times, I love watching him talk to other comedians about the profession. His episode with John Mulaney is comedy gold, in my opinion. I recently had the chance to ride in a car with John (Sucich, not Mulaney), so I guess we could start our own series called Riding in a Car with a Comedian to Get Ice Cream.

Notes

*Magical Unicorn ice cream, according to Hershey’s website, is “enchanted purple and white sweet cream ice cream, swirled with sweet-and-sour-cherry and blue-raspberry rainbows, bedazzled with star-colored lemon candy flakes.” Since our vacation, Kevin has been diligently trying to track down a local store that serves it. We’ve tried three different places so far with no luck. I’ve gained two pounds — for science.