The End of Summer Vacation

I have been retired now for four years.  It has been a period filled with parts of my old job and parts of my new job.  My old job, which I am still doing, is teaching French and to some small extent Spanish at a state university.  My new job seems to be made up of real life things such as pulling weeds and brushing cats.  These last weeks of August, I'm at the computer doing Old Job work.  The computer is taking over my old job.  So I'm writing this blog post as an assignment in a computer class I am taking. But my true purpose is to talk about what now seems to be more real, more related to surviving through eating, breathing, and doing physical work.  It's called Real Life Here and There, because I want to talk about life in the town where I reside as well as parallel lives I seem to carry on at distant intervals in other places, most recently in France, and perhaps in my imagination in Sweden, for example.  I have just attempted to upload a picture of an iris.  It's a beautiful iris, one whose ancestors lived in the garden at the house where I grew up.  How anything survives in my present garden is a great mystery, because my real life does not presently include gardening in my own yard, and I wish it did.