In honor of back-to-school re-organizing, I’m de-cluttering the random chaos that tends to take over my brain and leaves me unable to do even the simplest of tasks. (“Sweetie,” husband JP says to me, patiently, “is there some specific reason why you’re burning dinner?”) I mean, the blogosphere here graciously has gifted us with infinite white space to fill up with all my rabid mutterings share thoughtful and meaningful insights, so we should take advantage.

First, as we’ve been doing around here all weekend, let’s check the weather. My Southern state is approaching lockdown with news of Isaac “barreling toward,” “aiming at” or “targeting” — depending on your reporter — our coastal regions and beyond. (Grammar-geek-question-the-day: Can hurricanes actually “aim?” Discuss.) But we’ve got Jim Cantore to pull us through. I adore this guy! I think he personally is responsible for an uptick in Weather Channel viewership when hurricanes threaten. (Overheard in grocery-store line: “I can’t go to lunch with you. I’m headed home to watch the hurricane.”) Cantore’s devotion to giving us the full story while getting blown around by wind and rain is legendary. His intense yet calm warnings of potential doom sort of make me want to nail plywood over our windows even though my town is hundreds of miles away.

Second, it’s Freakin’ Finally Football here in the South. And probably other places, too — we just don’t think too much about them this time of year. High schools have been at it for a couple of weeks or so, and SEC play opens on Thursday with South Carolina visiting why-are-they-still-playing-football-please-just-let-them-stick-with-basketball Vanderbilt. As much as I harbor pure and unadulterated dislike for one specific team in my conference (Hint: It is not Auburn.), I’m an enthusiastic fan of all things SEC. And this year, I even have an SEC student — Younger Daughter is in Knoxville doing grad work at the University of Tennessee. I’ve already started collecting an orange wardrobe.

Third, that thing about Younger Daughter moving to Knoxville to do grad work? She’s a grown-up woman making grown-up choices and doing just fine on her own, thank you very much, yet I still cried when we moved her two hours farther away. Of course, the tears could have been my middle-aged body protesting after a couple of days of packing and lifting and tugging and toting — although she did most of the prep work herself — but I think I unconsciously was revisiting here first day of kindergarten, which I did not handle well AT ALL. She called a couple of days later while walking around campus. “How are you doing?” I said. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just me and 30,000 other students.” Welcome to the SEC!

Fourth, my incredibly cute and adorable grandsons are … incredibly cute and adorable. The 9-month-old is calm and relaxed and constantly entertained by everything going on around him, although he already seems dissatisfied with crawling and you know he’s thinking, “So, you just put one foot in front of the other and try to not fall down, huh? I bet I could do that.” The 4-year-old, on the other hand, is the one usually doing the entertaining — why sit quietly when you can pretend to be a pirate or Batman or a ninja warrior? Dirt, mud, water and sand are his tools of choice, yet he also enjoys a good tea party and, for awhile the other day, decided his name was Trixie. This bodes well for 21st-century manhood.

Fifth, I help with a mediawriting lab at our local university. One of the first assignments this semester was a just-for-fun project to see how well the students did when they had to write something by hand. You know, with a pen and a piece of paper. Like the olden days. As they worked, I noticed they all seemed to have developed their own individual style of loopy or choppy sort-of printing — none of them used cursive anymore and most of them hadn’t written anything in cursive in years. Interesting …

More to come —