HRH left for his three-week basic training course on 1 July, a week and a half ago. How are we doing?

1. I unstuck the basement windows, scraped down the paint and caulking clogging them, and waxed the moving parts so I can open and close them with no trouble.

2. Owlet has started to learn to read, thanks to the magical tutoring of Megan.

3. I took Sparky to Montreal ComicCon, and we had a lot of fun.

4. I’m about to replace our doorbell… once I have support from someone who can help me get the cover for the breaker switchboard off to enable me to turn off the circuit the doorbell’s wired to. (It’s too big for me to maneuver on my own without dropping it onto a bunch of expensive electronic equipment.) (Related: Who keeps smashing and breaking our doorbell?)

5. The cats are waking me up five to ten minutes earlier every morning for what is supposed to be their 5:00 breakfast. I am not amused. This morning it was 4:10; I refused to get up till 5:00. They were unimpressed.

6. It is perhaps not such a coincidence that I accidentally had a two-hour nap yesterday after I brought the kids home from camp. Or that I slept through my alarm this morning.

7. The Canada Day concert went brilliantly.

8. I am washing dishes a heck of a lot.

9. I can use the new vacuum I bought last spring when we thought HRH was going away for basic last summer! It is not a ridiculously heavy monster!

10. I am a few inches too short to use the reel mower properly; I just don’t have the right angle to push it effectively. I hacked at half the backyard despite this, then Jason kindly finished it. (And redid the half I massacred.)

11. The second week of day camp is about to wrap up. I have to figure out a way to see both kids do their guitar/piano things at the same time in different rooms on open house day. My current plan is to hand my mother-in-law an iPhone and teach her how to video one of them.

12. I am into the second season of Brooklyn Nine Nine, which I am watching while I spin at night after the kids are in bed.

That’s about it for now. So far, so good. Another week and a half to go!