What I'd like to be doing

Sometimes I feel like I've walked into a restaurant that looks really great from the street, but when I sit down and see the menu, I think....gee, do you have one with better choices? I know I walked in here under my own power, but now that I'm here, nothing looks too appetizing.
Here's what's on my menu:

1. revising an article that's due on 8/15, when I feel pretty sure that the revisions "suggested" by the editor will turn my essay into something much less interesting (to me)
   
2. grading more papers
3. cleaning the house
4. cleaning the house
5. cleaning the house
6. mowing the lawn and weeding

Here's the menu I wish I had:

1. sewing the six pairs of "around the house" shorts I cut out on Monday night
2. finishing the two sets of pillow tops I'm embroidering (a pair of pigs and a pair of camels; I've done the first of each set)
3. sewing a comfortable, belly-positive swimsuit with the Kwik-Sew swimsuits and activewear master pattern book I bought two weeks ago
4. finally finishing my big healthcare collage
5. taking a nap
6. putting together the Broken Dishes and Four-Patch quilt blocks I've finished
7. taking a nap
   
8. going to the pool by myself in the very attractive, belly-positive swimsuit I just finished (see #3)

Tonight when we were at a picnic with the other families from Elliot's baseball team, we heard the cicadas for the first time this summer. Every year I promise myself that I won't get melancholy when I hear them, but it never works, and this time was no exception. Unlike other years, though, I was with a bunch of other women who had the same looks on their faces as I must have. It was nice to know that I'm not the only one who mourns the passing of summer when it's really not quite half over.

Nuclear BAAAA

Today my husband and I had the great pleasure of seeing Elliot's class perform an environmentally-themed play, all in Spanish. The play was called La Oveja Verde (The Green Sheep), and it lasted about 20 minutes. Elliot played "Juan," the younger brother of a boy exposed to nuclear toxins. The production included several sleazy businessmen, two vendors guilty of selling tainted meat to a village, four innocent children, two poisoned sheep (one which became the toxic meat), and a dog who began speaking in Portuguese after his exposure to radiation. My favorite line (besides all of those spoken by Elliot) came from one of the sleazy capitalists, just before he dies and is dragged by an angel to the afterlife his villainy has earned him: "AY! Es el fin!" ("AY! It's the end!") Once the play was over, there were two hip hop dance performances, one by the boys, and one by the girls (both to the same song). Then we got to look closely at each student's environmental poster display (some of which included demonstrations of issues such as the chemistry of flame retardants and the evaporation of Lake Chad in Africa). Elliot's poster was about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. All of the children had worked hard on their presentations and were eager to share what they knew with the parents of their classmates.

Elliot is often tight-lipped about what he's working on in school; we didn't really know just how much research and rehearsing he and his friends had been doing. Needless to say, we were incredibly proud of him, and just plain impressed by the whole group.