How do you plan to spend your summer?

Today is June 1, the first day of meteorological summer. Three months of what should be a slower-paced life, a time of possibilities and potential, are ahead of us all.

Many people regard September as the real new year's. But I also think summer feels more like the start of a new year than January does. Maybe we could call it the mini new year, or the pause that refreshes.

Certainly, especially for people with children in school, it's a welcome break.

There's all the potential fun of summer: taking trips to the beach, or to a new and therefore more exciting swimming pool. Taking the train into Chicago to check out Millennium Park or to walk along the lakefront. Going to a Cougars game. Enjoying a White Sox or Cubs game. Visiting one of the area's many museums, including one you've never visited before. Taking the kids on a long bike ride along one of the trails we're so fortunate to have. Participating in the Geneva Public Library's annual reading contest.

Planning a summer vacation. Enjoying said summer vacation, whether it's the cottage or resort you visit every single year or a new and exotic spot you've never seen before.

But beyond the fun stuff, summer, for some reason, also feels like the time to try to accomplish projects earlier relegated to the back burner.

(Several summers ago I vowed I would place our photos -- the ones before we went digital -- in boxes by year. I wasn't trying to think grand, as in get all the photos in albums. Oh no! I just wanted to get them organized by year. I don't think I even started.)

I know I'm not alone when I say summer is a time for activity, for tackling projects you'd otherwise pass by.

Helen McLaughlin is one of those people, like me, who thinks summer is a perfect time to redecorate, with new paint and a subsequent new look. Her other project is more ambitious, at least to me, and will be eminently emotionally satisfying. She plans a "Book of Stories."

"There are so many funny stories about my parents and our growing-up years that we need to get down on paper," McLaughlin said. Her mother had said, months ago, "Laughter has been so important to this family. I want my life remembered with laughter." That remark will be her dedication page, McLaughlin said.

And this family history will owe much to modern times: McLaughlin plans to make a physical scrapbook of stories specific just to her Geneva family and a digital scrapbook of stories common to her and her seven siblings. Her family members then can print those pages out, if they wish. What a great idea!

Carrie Ahern says she plans to make good on her annual ambition to clean and paint the closet that accumulates all her family's memories and memorabilia, as well as the garage. This year she's even planning to pay her 20-year-old daughter to help make sure it gets done. Between the help and "the fact that for the first time in 17 years I won't have children in baseball and/or softball, there's a good chance it might get done," Ahern said, adding, "But call me back Labor Day weekend to see if it really did."

Val Farkas will be scraping and painting the house, as well as staining brick she considers mighty unattractive. Jill Schulz, a teacher in Batavia, is taking a graduate class, plus driving her teen-age daughters hither and yon, plus taking on volunteer projects. No sitting around eating bon bons, she joked. Debbie Coffland says she'll organize her basement "even if it kills me." She says she always thinks she has plenty of time to get something done. "And then poof, summer is gone." The culprit is that gorgeous sun, enticing her to "grab a book and read instead of painting the bathroom."

I love Susan Ward's plan to use the summer to think ahead to Christmas. She wants to sort through all the boxes of decorations she's accumulated in 27 years of marriage, making a box for each of her three children to use in their homes someday, and then either donate the excess or sell items on ebay.

Despite those chore lists, nearly everyone I talked to also was very much looking forward to summer's slower pace, the nice weather, the lack of schedule that permits living life at a more leisurely speed. As Ward said, "summer is welcomed for the great weather, beauty of nature that surrounds us and generally a change in the daily routine of our lives." She plans to enjoy this nice weather, walking or biking.

Farkas looks on summer as a new start and a chance to reconnect with her children, now 14 and 16. "We get so busy during the school year," she said. "I just love having them home each summer," and she hates to see the school year approach come August.

Judy Meehan hopes to break the cycle of rushing around. She plans to "take time to enjoy the little things that make summer special: the weather, the gardens, the ability to go outside, getting together more often with friends, especially now that we all work.

"Too often we get caught up in the daily routines and forget to keep in touch with what is truly important around us," she said.

June 1. Three months. How will you spend them?