Reliving the 'joys' of summer 2011 
by Dan Rzewnicki, Editor in Chief
September 2, 2011
I will be the first to admit that summer is my favorite season. However, that does not mean that certain parts of summer don’t grind my gears. For instance, with summer comes the joy of doing nothing. However, even staying up until midnight telling knock-knock jokes to myself gets old after a while no matter how hard I continue to laugh at them.
Every young adult (the word teenager casts a dark light on us) knows that with summer comes a great deal of driving from place to place, and most of these trips are completely unnecessary. However, I was very disappointed to find that as soon as I began to drive, my formerly reliable car suddenly turned into a hungry, hungry Hyundai.
Another part of almost every young adult’s life is a summer job. At the beginning of summer, I was working very little and having to rely on the money I made on the corner (picking up bottles and recycling them for the cash) for sustenance. Then, once July rolled around, I was quite pleased to discover that I was working over twice as many hours. But, as the month rolled on, I seemed to be working every day that I did not want to be working. There is just no happy medium with employment. If only I was a teacher and could take off nearly three months every year.
Vacation is also a part of summer, and this year I spent a week in Deep Creek, Maryland. The thing that grinds my gears most about vacation is ridiculous prices.
While on vacation I was going to get a gym membership at the local gym, Deep Creek Fitness (Where Fit Happens!). However, the gym lady wanted to charge me $15 a day to lift at her tiny gym. In other words, it was going to cost me over twice as much money to lift for a tenth of the days I lift here at home. So I said forget that noise; I’ll spend my week getting pleasurably plump instead.
While visiting Deep Creek, my family and I also visited Swallow Falls State Park twice. The first time, we arrived at the park at about eleven in the morning, and the admission fee was $3 per carload. A few days later, we made a return trip with my grandparents included and arrived at the park just a few minutes after noon. The “afternoon admission fee” was now a dollar more per person than it was for an entire carload. (For those of you counting on your fingers right now, the fee was now $4 per person.) I was appalled at this outlandish pricing, especially since I seriously doubt that the woods are any more exciting at noon than they were at 11:59.
One last thing that grinds my gears about summer is the weather. The weather this summer seemed to be even more unpredictable than the weather this spring. (However, to predict the weather this spring all you had to do was call for rain the whole next week and you were bound to be right at least six out of seven days.) During summer, it seemed one day I was crawling across the desert that was formerly my front lawn, scavenging for any last drop of water. Then it seemed the next day, I was riding down the street in a canoe wearing a bright pink poncho (me, not the canoe) searching for the last piece of dry land.
With summer also comes a variety of other bad things, such being forced into child slavery (i.e. doing chores), attending summer practices for sports, dreading the thought of school being right around the corner and spending more time with a significant other (really dodged a bullet by riding solo this summer!).
It is sad to say, but my favorite season really grinds my gears.
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