I’m sitting on one of the porches of my parents’ new house in Thompson’s Station, Tennessee. We are in the middle of a week-plus-long road trip from Toronto to Lexington,Virginia to Thompson’s Station back to Lexington, Virginia and then home. It’s before 9am, and I’m fighting with my new(ish) laptop while I toss a goopy, slobbery tennis ball over and over and over to two really eager Golden Retrievers, Gracee and Savannah Rose — I assure you, they are not quite the southern ladies that they sound like.

I pick up the slobbery ball and toss it over these girls’ heads and watch them never tire of this game.

I say ish when it comes to this laptop because a funny thing happens when you lose your job. You get this really awesome piece of paperwork telling you that you can keep your company-provided electronics, which for me felt like a blessing, since they had provided me with an iPhone, a macbook air, an iPad, and a pc laptop, which made sense at the time, since my job was about how our site looked on different screens. This was all well and good in theory, until you go to switch the plan on your phone and both Bell and Rogers are like NOPE. And this was all well and good until the company lost the pc laptop (and by lost I mean an IT person came by my desk in mid-june and thought that I had already left so he just scooped it up. And this was all well and good until they held my macbook for ransom  kept my macbook for over a month so they could wipe it to factory settings. (Sigh, I will miss you, Microsoft Word) Well, now I have it back and I’m staring at a screen asking for a password for which there’s none.

*toss*

All I wanted to do was send three emails this morning.

*toss*

I’m working on this new thing, not sweating the small stuff, but a laptop is kind of an important thing. I mean, I may not have a full-time job these days, but I am participating in a pretty exciting Olympics campaign with Canadian Tire and I’m an extremely lucky to be extremely busy photographer, and emails need to be answered and galleries need to be sent to clients.

Hey, you know what’s awesome? Not having a job in the summer.

This may be the first time this has ever happened to me, and I’m really enjoying every single second of it. I know how lucky I am (thanks severance package) and I know this’ll probably be the only time this happens.

It’s pretty rare and special to be able to take your kids and your brother’s kids to an indoor extreme air sports place and not have to answer a single email. My phone did exactly one thing the entire night — capture blurs of children.

Yesterday we went to the pool for the whole day and I didn’t do anything but stick my feet in the water and take photos. (Later in the day I forced myself to go to Target and buy a bathing suit. YOLO, right?) Today we are going to Columbia to take all of these girls on a hike (and Josh) and see a man about some pie. (It’s a store! That sells only pie! SIGN ME UP please) I’ll likely take pictures with my phone.

I’m doing nothing but summering this week.

And throwing this here tennis ball.

(What laptop?)