Dear lord it is somehow time for school again

 I read somewhere that as you age time feels sped up because your sense of time is determined by the way you sort experience and memories, and as you age you have more established categories (which I imagine as file folders) in which to place experiences as you have them, so your brain does not have to take the time to build new categories, just drops the experiences into the established categories and moves on.* 

Point is, the last year has passed extremely quickly for me, presumably because I am so old that nothing is new to me any more. And yet, in that time I have moved out of and back into our house, started a new job, and experienced a kid going through the college application process and then leaving for college. Feels like that should have taken longer. 

We're starting a new school year, and a new phase of school for both kids. Skipper had her first day of high school yesterday, and Duchess has her first day of college next week. Skipper is tackling high school (loud, chaotic, class sizes of 30+, confusing, etc., and thus not at all Skipper's jam) with her usual grim determination. When I asked her how the day was, she said "It was okay. Only 171 more days to go!"**

Duchess, after a week and a half of the crosscountry preseason, is starting freshman orientation proper tomorrow (and meeting the rest of her fellow freshmen, including her roommate). She's having a pretty great time so far, in Duchess style, which means that she has been getting acquainted with every single person on campus, including the lady who serves pasta in the dining hall and a French guy she met in the dorm elevator. (He lives in Paris. Imagine LIVING IN PARIS and deciding to go to college IN MINNESOTA.) She has been generously communicative with us in this initial stage, and it's been fun vicariously experiencing the collegiate delight of going somewhere new and starting a new life with lots of comfortable safeguards. She's making lots of new experience categories.

*I tried to look this up to determine if this single-sentence paragraph has any actual science behind it or if I just completely made it up, and the search results I got were along the lines of "when will my toddler learn to sort objects" and so I may have made it up.

** I don't know where she got this number, or if it's accurate.