Take That Frosty
Here you can see one of panels to my mock up of my upcoming film, “Frosty Versus Zorro.” I don’t have the full story developed yet. I haven’t decided whether the snowman goes to Mexico or the sword fighter goes to Vermont. Plus, I haven’t quite figured out out how to draw it out long enough. Our masked cape wearer has the upper hand with the steel, obviously. And Frosty lost his broom so he can hardly fight back. Ah well. Chalk one up for the man in black.
We took a nordic ski around the field this afternoon– a post-lunch sticky slip walk. Our skis held the snow well. The glide was less than the kick. We didn’t stay out all that long. Snow has been falling on and off all day so hopefully conditions will improve for tomorrow. The warm conditions made for excellent snow sculpturing possibilities, however. My son and I slapped around the white stuff and made a guardian for our home. Here he or she (undecided) stands:
Notice the Groovy Pocket
That Hat is Handy As New Snow Falls, Especially With No Legs to Get Out of the Weather
Last Sunday we took the trip over the hill to Charlotte for the annual tractor parade. Next year it will be on October tenth, and will be the tenth one–10th on 10/10. The weather was pretty much perfect, candy was involved and the display of machines was impressive. Here are a few shots from the day:
The Crowd Gathered
The Pumpkin Lady Handed Out Candy
No Tractor Parade is Complete Without a Sousaphone
The Band Got Things Started
This Guy Took the Lead
Dressed for the Weather
Rainbow of Tractors
Oddest Tractor Award
Over From New York Again This Year
Orange Tractor
Blue Tractor
Pink Tractor
Small Tractor, Large Man
Proper Headgear
There They Go
See You Next Year
I got a new camera, finally, today. I ordered it on August 22nd from Amazon. If I signed up for some service I did not want, they would have shipped it within two days. That free shipping apparently comes with a price now. It arrived by UPS while I was off working and I found it on the porch when I got home. Unfortunately I had no time to really check it out. I opened it and took a photo and set it back on the counter. Then I worked for a while more before picking my daughter up from school, taking her to the dentist, and then picking up my son. Then we had dinner to make and dishes to wash and now it just about bed time. I’ll get to the experimenting soon.
In the meantime here is the photo I snapped this afternoon:
Max Zoom with the New Camera
Compare this to a photo I took this afternoon with the old camera:
Max Zoom with the Old Camera
The color isn’t the same since I took the photos several hours apart. But you can get a sense of the quality of the photo as well as the ability to capture things far away. I look forward to playing some more.
Last night was a full moon. I got invited to go along on a moonlight paddle in Burlington. Lots of people have taken moonlight paddles, myself among them. Being on the water at night when the moon shines is a treat not to be missed. I’d say it’s a must do experience. Last night, however, I was a novice. I went stand up paddleboarding.
Stand up paddleboarding is basically taking a surf board out with a tall paddle. You stand up and move around by, well, paddling. I had done plenty of canoeing and felt comfortable with that. I can balance. I felt pretty much good to go. And I was. I got the hang of it quickly. I went with a group led by Rachael Miller of Stormboarding. Here is a photo of hers, to give you an idea what it looks like:
Copyright Stormboarding
The problem was, although I had seen photos and had talked to Rachael about it, I had never done it. And since we would be heading out after dark, I wasn’t going to see it last night either, at least not all that well. There was a full moon and I did wear a headlamp, but still, it was dark. Anyway, it was a blast, and an experience, all told, that most people probably won’t have. Here is why: we combined stand up paddleboarding, a full moon, a still summer Vermont evening, and an exuberant and confident punk rock band.
I was the first to greet Rachael, and the punk band was already getting started, playing at a pavilion right on the waterfront. I signed the three page waiver and then tied glow sticks to the shoulders of my life vest. Since we were out at night we needed lights, being watercraft, to be legal and, more importantly, to be visible to anyone else on the water. Red glow stick on the left, green glow stick on the right. The headlamp served as the white light which should be visible from any direction, but was close enough. As the others arrived we all tied on lights, carried boards to the dock and, after some instruction and a couple of photos, started paddling.
The band was really hammering it out by the time we curved around past the Coast Guard station, yelling and, seemingly, having a fun time of it. The moon was climbing, with Mars along to keep it company. The water shone. We moved together stealthily. It wasn’t the peaceful paddle that some had expected but it was a good time nonetheless. We moved pretty quickly without any wind or waves and paddled right into a cloud of skunk spray. If we had had anything tasty to snack on it would have been a true five senses experience. We turned around at what Rachael identified as, showing off her knowledge of nautical terminology, the “can thingees,” drums of some kind, in the water for a purpose I could not discern (to tell the truth, I couldn’t really see them). We hugged the shore and cruised back to the dock.
We were out for about an hour and, as we drifted in and pulled the boards out of the water, the band packed it up for the evening. I had fun and would surely do that again, even if it were regular old daytime. I doubt I again will get to experience paddling standing up and a full moon and Mars and a warm September night and perfect calm on Lake Champlain and the inspired lyric of “Weapons Factory!” pelted out over the odor of skunk. If you find yourself experiencing such a mix, do let me know. We’ll compare notes.
A while back I wrote about my new interest in Kenken. I had tried sudoku and had some fun with that, but kenken was way more interesting for me. I still am hooked. My wife has recently borrowed my book of puzzles and has been plowing through them. Good for her. I am a little concerned that I will have none to do in that book when she ends her spree, but no matter. At the moment I am into kakuro.
My parents, in their wisdom, gave me a half dozen puzzle books for father’s day. One of them was a book of kakuro puzzles. I had never done them before, never even seen them before. The book describes them on the back cover:
Kakuro are half sudoku, half crossword, and use a combination of logic and arithmetic. They will require you to focus, think carefully, and reason your way out of missteps.
It is a good thing these are math based puzzles, otherwise I might not forgive the split infinitive in the description, but why be picky? I managed to flub the first puzzle in the book, making an error somewhere that I finally just left behind, but once I got the hang of it, I couldn’t stop. They are a blast. Here is a sample, from kakuro.com:
Sample Kakuro Puzzle
Both this site and kakuro.net have some good samples and online puzzles and links. The idea is to add each row across so it adds to the number written at left without repeating any digits 1-9. Then do the same for the vertical rows with the number at the top. So if you look at the top left, you need to add two numbers to get 4. Only 3 and 1 work. Then you need to figure out which order they need to be written. It is good fun, simple to understand yet often challenging to solve.
I still am jazzed on crossword puzzles and kenken, and those books still litter the house, but at the moment, kakuro holds my interest the most. In fact, I need to stop typing now. I have a puzzle left unfinished from earlier.
Leaving the Island, Heading Home, Looking Back
When I was in high school I read an essay called Return to the Lake. I remember that it was a good read, although I couldn’t tell you who wrote it, and I remember that I, along with some other folks, visited Lake Winnepesaukee soon after reading it. The essay was essentially about visiting, as an adult, a lake that had had meaning when the writer was younger. I returned to my own lake this past week.
We all went, this nuclear family of mine. We swam and swam and ate and swam some more. My children love the place, that place being Three Mile Island Camp. It is an Appalachian Mountain Club camp where I worked twenty years ago. I loved it then. It had a huge impact on my life. It still is pretty good.
We stayed in a couple of tiny adjacent rustic cabins right on the lake. I got up every morning, looked out at the still water for ten minutes or so, laid my glasses on the dock, and slipped into the water. I felt cool and calm. Some mornings I swam with loons. One morning I swam in the rain. Then I climbed back to the small porch and waited for my wife and my children to waken.
We had little to do all day. Meals are prepared by the staff and they do the clean-up. The cabins have no electricity, although the main house where family style meals are served does. We played and swam and rested and spent time with friends. We ate at the appropriate times. When it rained we hung out on the porch and drank tea and chatted while the children played games inside. Life is pretty good like that.
Home today we cranked out laundry and mowed the lawn and picked the abundant vegetables from out garden. Check this out:
A Few Veggies Ripe After a Week
We ate salad and corn on the cob (local but not ours) and blueberries (we even had some of those ripe!) and veggy burgers for dinner. We looked out over the field and decided it is as good as looking out over a lake. It was hot. If we were still on the lake we would have just jumped in the drink to cool off.
The air has cooled now. The children are off to bed early. I am happy to be home. I could have stayed longer but, like Christmas, experiencing it only once every year increases its appeal and its value. If we lived there year round we couldn’t have this amazing garden. We will return next year to swim and to play and to rest. We have some of that to do around here in the remaining days of summer. And a little work to do as well.
Once we get enough work done, we can return to the lake once again. And we will love being there all over again.
A couple of years ago, Santa brought this big inflatable bouncy toy thing. The kids ended up calling it the bouncy castle. We tried to set it up maybe a year ago, after a decent hiatus, but it had too many holes. Last week, however, my wife motivated to patch the holes and blow the thing up. It has gotten lots of use since. My daughter the photographer took a series of photographs yesterday from an insider’s perspective. This short photo essay is the result:
Rushing at it from outside
Leaping in
Working to avoid co-bouncers
Inside
Outside
Isn't this fun?
Hinesburg Firetrucks on the Way
There Were Old Cars...
...and Old Tractors...
...and a Pinkish Tractor.
There Were More Firetrucks, Including This One from Huntington
A Horse (with Graduate) of Course
A Motorcycle Type Jobber
Hardware Float...
...and Hippy Float
That's All She Wrote
I hung up a bunch of old CD’s recently over some garden beds, to keep out the birds. This morning I looked out the window to see a robin pecking at the dirt at the edge of one of those beds. Then it hopped right over the bed. It nearly got clocked by the spinning disk. It worked last time.
Our dishwasher has a whole slew of adjustable bars and rods, the better to efficiently stack all one’s dishware and cutlery. One of them seemed to have lost its adjustability recently. It flopped. I removed it today to find that it had rusted right through. The little rod was pointy, yet crumbly, with rust. I took out one half and wrestled with the second for a while before deciding to leave it for tomorrow. I figured a dishwasher is for lazy people anyway so I had good reason to be lazy with that task.
Our neighbors have a small pond, just over our property line. What its intended use what I can’t say. It doesn’t seem to get much human use at all–no swimming, no irrigation, no livestock watering. It just sits there, leaking onto our side, home for ducks and frogs. The bullfrogs are especially loud these days. The groan and croak at all hours, but seem to especially like the hours just after dark. All of us pretend to respond to them now and again. Cracks us right up.
For Father’s Day I got a book of crossword puzzles. I am pretty hooked on crossword puzzles and have been working my way through a book of 200 of them from the New York Times. This new book is a little different. One of the clues was this: Royal mistake maker. The answer? Dumbshit. Cracked me right up.
We have been watching old science fiction movies lately. You know, the classics. The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example. Last night we watched the original 1950’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was pretty well done, eerie and even a little scary, but not gore-filled. All of these movies have the year listed on the sleeve from Netflix. Last night’s said 1956, but when the film opened it said 1955. The other films have had this same one year discrpancy. My guess is the the film posts the copyright date and Netflix notes the date the film actually was released. I guess they used to do things a little slower back then.
We went up the road this afternoon to pick up our share of produce. This was given to us as a gift again at Christmas. Great gift. As we walked out to the field to pick strawberries, the children found a mud puddle. Well, maybe puddle isn’t quite right. It was a mud puddle and had become a thick bowl of muddy paste. The children were wearing mud boots so of course they slopped about in it until their footwear was gray and wet. They had a blast. Then they sat in their dirty boots and ate all the strawberries we picked while I picked some daisies to bring home.
The cucumber beetles are starting to hatch. I have been slow to attend to them. I hope to get some Neem and see what that does. I have heard good things about it, that it makes the beetles go away. I want them to go away. I picked one off a pumpkin plant today and slayed it. They are beautiful little bugs. And I want them to live far away from here. I want some cucumbers this year, dammit.
Mercury on the Move 