Remember when you were a kid and August lasted forever?  Long lazy days of heat and fun?  I guess once adulthood shows up August loses its luster.  But for me this particular August has gone on forever.  Let me share why.

I work in a pretty big building; 4 floors, 3 wings.  Several hundred of us work here.  At the beginning of August they began redoing the parking lots and they started with the lot outside our wing.  As you can see it wasn’t just a resurface job.

There are three lots that surround the building, each lot will take about a month.  For the month of August we in our wing are parking offsite about a mile away.  We take shuttle vans back and forth to that lot which sounds worse than it turned out to be.  They have five vans, each seating 10 passengers running nonstop between our building and the lot especially in the morning and evenings, but also at lunch if you want to go to that sort of effort just to run out to eat.

We have watched the progress while trying to block out the constant pounding of heavy machines, the beeping of trucks backing up, the shake of our monitors and the floor under our feet.  In the early stages the noise and vibration was overwhelming.  It seemed like they were moving the dirt from here to there, then back again, and we saw no progress.   But just last week they started paving.  We were excited!

Our lot is finally finished…and I only have two more days of riding the shuttle back and forth.  After a long day it’s difficult to wait in line to catch a ride over to your car.  On the other hand, we’ve gotten to know people we never would have spent time talking to when we could park on site.  And people are actually laughing  and kidding each other on our 10 minute trip.

Heard tonight, from the back of the van:  “We should have sing-a-longs!  (starts singing…the wheels of the bus go round and round…) We could tape it and put it on YouTube!  From the front passenger seat “I have some duct tape in my purse.”  From the back of the bus while still singing she interrupts herself to say…”Tape as in video, not as in duct!”  From the front of the bus…”With your singing duct is more appropriate.”  The entire bus laughs as we unload for the long commute home.

That’s another story – my commute.  It used to be 40 minutes each way if no one made any mistakes that would cause problems.  Now days it’s more likely an hour.  A lot of the time, particularly on my trip home it looks like this.

And nights when there’s a big act at our local outdoor arena?  Forget about it.  Tonight Maroon 5 AND Kelly Clarkson are playing.  I didn’t even try to get home via the freeway.  It’s a big holiday weekend coming up too, and half our state will be on my freeway heading north for a last camping fling before summer winds down.

So my month of August has looked a lot like this: