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Summer's Best Eight Weeks

Sons Coleman and Chris attended a great summer camp one year -- it's title was SB2W, or Summer's Best 2 Weeks. They agreed with the title, and still talk about some of the good times and people there. So it is with our just-ended summer holiday visiting friends and family around the U.S.: An organized family reunion of Barb's maternal relatives, on the Oregon coast. Our planned reunion with families from two different countries who happened to have connections in Duluth. Our 40th high-school reunion in Beavercreek Ohio -- noting that neither Barb nor I actually graduated from there, but we attended those schools for many years and still have dear friends among our classmates [link to photos]. We attended the church that Barb's father founded in Beavercreek, now preparing their own 50th anniversary celebration.
We enjoyed time with son Christopher, more physically fit and mature than ever, working two jobs to gain Texas state residency [link to photos].
Texas is dry dry dry, with drought restrictions clearly evident. We are used to the dry climate, as we are living in Saudi Arabia. But we were continually stunned by the lush greenery in the rest of the U.S., and the profligate use of water (carefully and expensively-treated for drinking, but mostly used for washing and irrigating). We finished up our time with a restful weekend at the cabin [link to photos].

We also took the consumer pulse, in the eight large cities we visited: the house-for-sale signs are not quite as numerous as last year, but people's attitudes about a future economy are bleaker -- few jobs, little hope for improvement, and concern about political polarization. That said, the municipal infrastructure is in better shape than I have ever seen it. Your comments?

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