What, August already? Rosie and I were looking forward to getting back into the swing of our weekly hikes, but somehow half the summer is gone and I’ve barely gone on any. Part of the issue was that we went almost straight from my son’s high school graduation to an amazing two-week trip to Iceland, where we rented a car and drove almost all of Route 1, what they also call the “Ring Road,” circling the island and staying in thirteen different hotels in fifteen days. I was originally skeptical there would be enough to justify a two-week trip, but boy was I wrong. Bathing in natural hot springs, seeing puffins at the Látrabjarg cliffs, touring caves inside the Katla glacier, beholding the awesome power of Dynjandi and many, many other waterfalls … Once you get outside Reykjavik (which is a great little cosmopolitan city), this is a land of awesome yet primitive beauty.
We were there over the summer solstice, and as close as Iceland is to the Arctic Circle, we never experienced any true darkness. There’s only a few hours of technical darkness, but even then it’s sort of a grainy twilight. It certainly gave us more time to be outdoors! Of course, in the winter it’s pretty much the opposite.
Here are just a few pictures:
Barely a week after we returned, we hopped back in the car to celebrate my in-law’s 50th anniversary, spending a fun few days in the River Meadows/Sunriver area in central Oregon, bicycling, river rafting, and just hanging out. Now that our kids are both adults, I know these times when all four of us are together are going to get increasingly rare, so I treasure them. Not long after, our daughter was moving out of her apartment into a house she’s sharing with two of her friends, so she finally needed much of her furniture here at our house. It’d been a while since I’d rented a U-Haul. I forgot how exhausting moving can be.
And here we are. For those of you who missed it, I have a new Garrison Gage book out. I’m pleased to say A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow has been well-received. In fact, some of my readers have been calling it the best Gage book yet. Is it true? Well, those are subjective judgments, of course, but I’d rather hear more of that than the opposite. What really drives me, whether it’s as a writer or as a cartoonist, is the drive to keep getting better. That’s what I find most rewarding about the arts.
In addition to continuing to publish two Run of the House cartoons a week, I’ve been working on a shorter standalone novel and some short stories. I’m in the process of putting together a new short story collection that I’m pretty happy with. Hopefully get that one out soon. Productivity has only been so-so this summer, partly because of all the life-related happenings I mentioned above, and partly due to allowing myself to get a bit too obsessed about the political turmoil here in the United States, but such is life. Yet even as I slowly get back up to speed, there never seems enough time to do everything.
Then again, as the comedian Stephen Wright once said: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?“
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