A little more than a year ago, I wrote a column discussing how much I hate wearing a bathing suit. But, as I face another summer, I’ve come to realize that conversation was incomplete. Because it didn’t even touch on the complexity of bathing suit season.

The threat of the season starts kicking in sometime in the middle of April. Around the middle of May, it’s in full swing and by the first of June, if you still haven’t acknowledged it, you’re in trouble. That’s because the upcoming season results in all living, first-world women to what? That’s right, ladies: get skinny.

The most interesting thing about this phenomenon is I don’t actually have a particular suit to get ready for. That’s because I hate all of my bathing suits from previous years, which did nothing to make me look more like Jennifer Lopez. That means that the holy grail of suits is still out there and it’s for that magical, invisible suit that I am preparing.

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Over the past year, we’ve been lucky enough to spend more time in the great city of Louisville. We’ve always liked this place for its fun outdoor art, its waiters with man buns and beards, its comfortable size, and its flat, runnable roads. But it’s our new credit card that is primarily responsible for these little jaunts, since we manage to rack up enough points on a pretty regular basis to get a free night’s stay at the downtown Hyatt. A short, cheap drive and a free hotel room will drag even the staunchest ruralite out of the holler.

Since there are a few foodies that read my blog and since it’s the perfect time of year for a mini-break, I thought I might recommend a few places we’ve found along the way.

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After helping to host a subdivision-wide yard sale on Saturday, I can finally say I get the attraction of the wheel and the deal.

This is a belated realization as I come from a long line of bargain shoppers. First off, my little brother Matthew has never paid full price for anything — whether it’s on sale or not. Whatever he’s buying, he has no qualms about turning on the charm and asking for the manager.

Then, to their automatic question of “What can I do for you today?” he’ll smile broadly and say, all cheerful and light, “What can’t you do for me?”

This is not even a kind of funny joke and, actually, veers on this side of smarmy. Yet it works for the little twerp almost every time. Ten percent, 15 percent, 30 percent, he’s had it all. He’s had a leather couch replaced twice because it got scratched. He got it for 50 percent off to begin with.

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This past Saturday, I looked down at my feet and contemplated how dirty they were. Mud was caked in perfect stripes where the straps of my flip flops had been, and the spaces between my toes were black. I looked over at my girlfriends’ feet and theirs were the same, the dirt echoing the formations of their shoes.

The night before, we’d made the trip to Atlanta to attend the Shaky Knees music festival. It was my friend Candice’s idea, since she still knows all the cool bands, and Sarah and I met her at our hotel nearly jittery from the excitement of a girls’ weekend.

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I ask you this: Was there anything better than playing with Legos when you were a kid? Think hard before you come to the inevitable conclusion, which is, of course, no. There was nothing better.

I was contemplating this a few days ago as I put a birthday care package together for little Miss Greta Pancoe, my best friend Kristin’s daughter. I bought her Lego, of course, since she’s now 5 and that is the magic age, at least according to the box, that one is officially old enough to play with the best toy in the world.

My little brother Matthew and I spent hours playing with the stuff. Like our Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs, they were hand-me-downs from our older cousins Richard and Roger. The Legos were our favorites and nearly every weekend, if not every day, we’d spread the stuff out and get to work.

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“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible.” Wait, is it indivisible before under God? Or under God before indivisible?

This was my ragged thought process as I drove up to Frankfort a few weeks ago to become naturalized as an American citizen. It was the final step in a long series of steps that, frankly, had taken me 10-plus years to take. Now all I had to do was remember the pledge correctly.

I texted my question to my friend Jessica Crockett, who was student government president in high school and led the pledge every morning (“Nerd alert,” she admitted upon sharing that sweet piece of trivia).

“Under God before,” she immediately texted back.

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I’m almost, but not quite, finished writing about the trip to Australia we took a few weeks ago. It really was a momentous vacation for our family, so, at the risk of being the neighbor that makes you watch his extensive slideshow of his trip to Gettysburg, I’d like to talk about it just a little more.

We spent the bulk of our trip in Melbourne, where my stepdad Peter is from. Immediately upon leaving the airport, the city felt familiar, extremely Western and clean, with an incredible skyline. We saw billboards advertising movies that were recently in theatres here (Furious 7, anyone?), everyone had iPhones, there were Kentucky Fried Chickens everywhere, and people were fit and well dressed. Of course, it was fall  and the leaves were changing, which was a bit of an adjustment, but otherwise, it was like we were in a flatter version of San Francisco or a hillier Chicago.

Of course, it doesn’t take long before the uniqueness of the country becomes apparent. It just takes speaking to a native Melbournian before you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore: “How you going?” they’ll ask you.

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We’ve just returned from a two-week trip to Australia, a beautiful, interesting, family-filled, at times stressful, most times wonderful vacation and, in the end, on the plane ride home, it made me think about purses.

I realized this after settling my bag under my seat before takeoff. I had brought two purses for this journey: my steady, Irish green canvas bag that holds everything and a new purchase, an over-the-shoulder hot pink number the size of a pack of cigarettes.

I’d seen it online and realized it was just what I needed: capable of holding credit cards and cash, but so light I wouldn’t even notice I was carrying it. I imagined myself walking the streets of Melbourne with it over my shoulder, this fuchsia vixen adding a hot (and essential, no?) splash of color to my tame outfits. I hemmed and hawed over its rather outrageous price. But then I heard “YOLO, YOLO,” the fatal acronym that is sure to be music to MasterCard’s ears: You Only Live Once. So click, and the transaction was complete.

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Some of you may remember way back in the summer when my little brother Matthew and I had a frank conversation in my porch in the middle of the night. He’d come to attend William’s dad’s funeral and, despite the sad circumstances, we were using this rare visit and that late hour to catch up. That chat, which was hazy from the smoke of his Benson & Hedges and my Virginia Slim, eventually steered toward Matthew’s smoking habit.

True, it wasn’t the ideal circumstance to tell him how much I wanted him to quit, since I was puffing away myself. But I laid it all out on the line: that he coughed and cleared his throat all the time, that I was worried he would die before me and I wouldn’t be able to bear it, that it was time and he knew it. Somehow, something sank in for him that day.

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It was a long time coming. Little Gabrielle Baker, who’s not so little anymore, sat in the doctor’s office playing a game on her phone. She sat on that pleather mattress — not pink, not orange, not brown — doctor’s offices have, swinging her long legs, looking quite a bit less nervous than her stepmum.

That stepmum was talking incessantly, telling her how fine everything was going to be, telling her, in fact, just often enough that it was betraying her doubt.

But then in walked the allergist, who is happily my friend Sarah, and stepmum could shut up.

“Are we ready?” Sarah said, with a big smile on her face. “Did you bring it?”

I handed her the bag of sweetened flaked coconut she’d asked me to bring.

“Let’s do this,” Sarah said.

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