Empty-Nester Thoughts & End of Summer Odds & Ends

We aren't technically empty-nesters, you know. David lives with us, and even though he is often gone all day and into the evening or even house-sitting somewhere for 10 days (just done), it is fun to have him to talk to and watch "The Office" with (I didn't watch the w-h-o-l-e thing). However, this is the quietest it's been here in...oh...say the 15 years we've lived here as of November 7 or so.
So, there are some things I like so far about it:

1. No one to yell at 3, 4, 6 times to get out of bed in the morning.
   
2. Only my own lunch to get in the morning (always leftover salad, if I bothered to make dinner the night before).
3. No pressure to rush home and get supper on by _____ because someone has to go there and someone else has to go there and we only have this 20 minutes to eat together if we want to preserve the family meal. (Dad/Steve is very flexible on meal times or even if we have a "meal;" however, David is less so.)
4. Significantly less things laying around in odd places where people walk in and drop them.

Things it's harder to like or adjust to:

1. Fewer people to say, "Good-bye. I love you." to in the morning.
2. No way to find out what's happening with the kids' friends.
3. When I hear the marching band, I know that my kids aren't there and that I am not planning to go there to see the game.
4. Not seeing the lights under the kids' doors or hear their muffled voices on cell phones.

Well, you get the picture. Speaking of which, here is a portrait of a lonely dog.


If Dad/Steve and David are both gone at supper time, as tonight, I sometimes get to treat myself to a supper of homemade tapioca.


And here is an odd story: We took our vacuum in for servicing because it started smoking (Thanks, Annie). Steve asked if he could have a loaner because how could we survive 3 weeks without vacuuming! The answer was no. So out of an honest heart, he asked if it would be okay to buy a reconditioned vacuum and then return it when we got ours back. The answer was NO. However, the woman working then thought about it and said Steve could take the vacuum below--period. Take it for keeps. Someone had returned it evidently without asking for a refund, and they didn't have anything to do with it. So, we have another vacuum while we wait for ours. It's actually quite nice, other than being purple.

Here are some pictures from our deck one day when the sun was bright and the flowers still pretty. Soon they will begin to get leggy and unwieldy
as October lengthens into real fall weather.

Dad/Steve enjoying the deck he worked so hard on. . . and it is a tranquil place.

And more of the deck and yard. Couldn't resist cause they're so pretty.