Summer anyone?

Yesterday it rained. Again. It was cold and windy and I closed all the windows in the cabin to keep the chill out. HH and I spent the day indoors. It is nearing the end of July and we haven’t had one week that has felt like summer, not a stretch of even three days when the temperature reached 80, or the sun stayed out and the ground stayed dry from dawn through dusk. But yesterday was cold, even when compared to the dismal norm we have become accustomed to this summer. So we stayed inside the entire day and indulged ourselves; we binged on the pleasures we most enjoy yet often deny ourselves, or more accurately, that I ration. HH spent most of the day watching cartoons, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, Superman, Spiderman and Sponge Bob while I sat on the porch reading a crime novel, the most recent installment in a marathon of blood and gore and terror that I’ve subjected myself to this summer.

Over the course of the last 8 weeks, I’ve read about 20 books and all of them, with the exception of one David Sedaris collection of essays and a trio of CIA spook thrillers by David Baldacci, have been about murder and mayhem. This reading material feels oddly suited to the seasonal disguise that summer has adopted, pretending to be early spring or fall. The dark, wet days and cold nights have been the perfect environment for immersing myself in this dismal genre.

HH on the other hand has discovered cartoon Superheroes and, with a little coaxing from me, the slapstick comedy of the middle of the last century. He has also learned to manipulate the keyboard of my laptop. He can now turn it on, enter my password, access the Internet and browse the selection of PD cartoons available on Hulu and YouTube. I will have to change the content filter on my browser. There are some strange variations on Batman and Spiderman out there that have nothing to do with the cartoon characters that inspired them and I don’t want HH to find himself sitting in front of a video featuring fetish Spiderperson – where the webs they weave are more akin to Japanese bondage than crime-fighting spider silk.

Yesterday I read and he watched cartoons. We ate chicken nuggets and donut balls. We took a break in the late afternoon to play our favorite game of Mack and Hop Sing, did some drawing and coloring, and took out the trash, but aside from those brief detours into the realm of active, or constructive activity, the majority of the day was devoted to guilty pleasure. And it was good.

The problem is that this summer we have found ourselves all too often banished to the indoors of our tiny cabin in the woods. After a few weeks of this internment, I exhausted my list of constructive play ideas. Call me lazy, call me a bad parent or - in the words of the late Henny Youngman – Just Call Me!

I hope summer returns this week or next week, or in my lifetime. I want to change my reading list and I need some time to make the internet safe for HH before the cold weather and the habits it has spawned set in for good.