While I was watching TV last week, commercials for a community fair reminded me of the county fairs I grew up with. The county fair is a pretty big deal in my hometown. Everyone goes. As a kid, going to the county fair was the highlight of the fall.

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If you're a regular blog reader, you know how much I love teachers. Usually, when I meet someone new, I can tell within a few minutes whether the person is a teacher. Teachers are just special like nobody else I know. What can I say? Who else can appreciate a teacher's job the way teachers do?

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Do you tweet? Do you post? Can't stop taking those crazy quizzes on Facebook? I know I answered yes to all the above. I must say, within the last year, I've become hooked on Facebook and have recently spread my addiction to Twitter.

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This is a photo of my cat, Newton. She is my baby. (She would like you folks to know that the camera adds ten pounds and the photo was taken at an unflattering angle.) For the years when teaching was my profession, I would leave school and come home to Newton. In other words, my home life was pretty mellow. (I was working on my goal of becoming a crazy cat lady.)

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It’s hard to believe that an entire month of the summer season has come and gone. Each year I make a mental list of the projects I hope to accomplish during summer. This year’s list includes painting the living room, purging both the attic and my closet, giving my car a thorough cleaning, and tackling the tool shed once and for all. I’m quite certain there were additional items on the list, but that’s an important benefit of a mental list for summer—it’s flexible!

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Summers are getting shorter. At least that’s the impression I got during recent trips to discount stores. While getting ready for a beach trip, I went shopping for swimming supplies. What I found was that the outdoor-living area, which had overflowed into several aisles in May, was reduced to one aisle. In its place was—you guessed it—every kind of back-to-school supply imaginable! This was early in July! I felt like summer was being snatched away from me.

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A few weeks ago, we had a potluck here at work. I made one of my favorite go-to snacks, green chile pinwheels. It was also the last week of school, so I made an extra batch of pinwheels and sent them with my husband, Mark, to school. (Mark teaches seventh-grade math.) At the end of the day, he brought home the empty plate and two requests for the recipe.

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From my experience, teachers generally have a love of reading. I know one of my favorite activities is to curl up with a good book, and there’s no better time to read than during the summer months! Magazines abound with recommended summer reading lists and best books for the beach. So I thought we would try our own little teacher-approved recommended reading list on The Mailbox® Blog.

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My husband is a golfer. My young nieces don’t completely understand what that means, but they know they love their uncle, and just recently, they discovered that they also love to play miniature golf. Of course, it was only a matter of time before their two loves got together.

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For a teacher, there’s nothing quite like the end of the school year. It’s busy, tiring, fun, gratifying; the list goes on and on. For me, it was a time of conflicting emotions. I found it hard to say goodbye to my students, but I also looked forward to having time off. I longed to spend lazy mornings at my favorite summertime destination, Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. It’s such an incredibly peaceful spot! But a funny thing always happened soon after vacation started: I would start getting excited about the next school year.

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