End of vacation

I have been very negligent in posting recently.  I see my last post was my second week of vacation.  We ended up going to Stonington instead up Cobscook Bay.  Spent two nights down at The Old Quarry Campground; a nice place right on the ocean, great docks, nice people.

Here's a picture of me hanging out at the campground . . . and hanging out . . . and hanging out.

Bill, the owner took us out on a guided kayak tour of the islands one day and Captain Steve took us out the next day in a lobster boat tour to Isle au Haut and around the archipelago.

kayaking around the islands

Isle au Haut

He dropped us off on Green Island, a deserted island where the only other visitors left in a sailboat just as we were arriving.

There’s a fresh water quarry where we went skinny dipping while Steve took his only other passenger back to Stonington.

The freshwater quarry

Rick taking the plunge

Me, enjoying the water

The other passenger was the owner of another island, one of the potato islands I think.  Steve had arranged to pick her up and bring her back to Stonington. We met up with her out in her dory about 50 feet offshore.  The dory shot out from under her as she was boarding our boat and Rick and Steve had to pull her up out of the sea and get her into the boat.  She was very good natured about it; not that unusual an event on the islands perhaps.   

After retrieving us from the island we went to see some nesting ospreys, then a circuitous route back to Stonington.  We had to head right back home, take quick showers and drive up to The Granary in Farmington to celebrate Christopher’s 21^st birthday. 

Chris enjoying his first legal drink

I returned to work on Monday where my office was torn apart with stripped walls and floors.  So I worked through Wednesday out of Sara’s office and Rick and I left mid morning on Thursday to go to the Podunk Bluegrass Festival in E. Hartford, CT.  Nice festival grounds and nice people.  It was very hot but the band played well though they only earned 4^th place in the band competition.  Don placed 2^nd in the songwriter’s competition with his song, Ice in Your Veins.  Ken Irwin of Rounder Records was very interested in Rick’s original song, Highway to Your Heart so they’ve been emailing back and forth and he’s trying to get a national band to record it.  He’s also interested in other songs Rick has so he’s started recording some demos to send him. 

Rick playing at Podunk

The NitPickers

I went back to work on Tuesday at which time my office was ready for me to move back into with newly painted walls and hardwood floors laid.  They also bought me a nice new desk and it was good to get things set back up after purging a shitload of old files. 

Still boxes to unpack

Jared’s 25^th birthday was on Wednesday so we had a little party for him here at the house with Justin and Keely, Chris and Sara, Auntie, Donnie, Glen, Tom, Lisa, Chelsea, Bill and his girlfriend Frederique who had just arrived from France the night before.

Bill and Frederique

Bill and Frederique stopped over again on Friday afternoon and accompanied us to The Depot for pizza and beer after which we strolled through the Gardiner Art Walk.  Bruce was have an opening at Mad Dog.  He and Bill had known each other 20 years ago but of course he never knew we were brother and sister. 

Today Rick went to play at a pig roast and I went up to Aristo and had Justin do my hair.  I stopped by his house afterwards; it’s coming along nice and he’s been taking good care of his yard.  He’s got some delicious blackberries growing out back. 

Tomorrow the NitPickers are playing at The Village Inn.  Eddie and Michelle, and Bill and Frederique are supposed to be joining me up there for dinner.  

Summah Vaca Continued

So I hung out at camp reading, kayaking (two days in a row - a (pathetic) record so far this summer), and chillin.  I went over 36 hours without speaking to another human being - nice.  Doesn't seem that long but having never lived alone it's quite unusual for me to go that long.  Some year I'd like to try to go a whole week!

I returned home Wednesday night and Thursday we took the camper down and set it up at White's Beach in preparation for the bluegrass festival over the weekend.

We purchased a camp table and a quickshade which was an excellent investment; made our campsite much more spacious and homey.  We stayed up until 2 a.m. Saturday morning and had a huge crowd picking around the band's campsite.  At one point I counted at least 15 pickers.  

On Saturday we ended up taking an emergency run home to fix the water at the house.  The boys called to say that there was no water pressure.  Sure enough it was just the filter.  However, why the filter would have plugged so quickly I'm not sure.  We left shortly after the NitPicker's third set on Sunday at noon.  

By Sunday I couldn't stand it anymore and made Rick take down the top half of the wall blocking the new addition.  There's still a half wall and still a bunch to do but it feels more real being able to actually see it.  

Tuesday I went out to camp and finally planted a couple of perennials the boys had given me for Mother's Day.  Decided not to spend the night and returned home and pulled out my clay and started playing.  I'm really jonsing to get my hands dirty with it but I'm pretty limited in what I can do without a wheel or a rugged table to throw slabs on.  So basically I've been making some stamps that I'll be able to use for some handbuilding projects once we build my table.  

Of course they'll need to be bisque fired before I can use them.  I'm thinking I should go ahead and get a kiln asap which will allow me to do handbuilding right away.  I can wait a while to get a wheel as I want to continue to take lessons with Malley anyway.  But it will be great to have a space where I can spend time doing the time intensive detailed work that I don't like spending class time on.  

I'm now almost at the end of my 3rd week of vacation.  I'm certainly rested but I don't feel like I've done anything very eventful, which in fact I haven't.  I'm headed up to Stratton this weekend to see Cindy, Grace, and the rest of the girls and check out the Plazapalooza on Saturday and maybe the East Benton Fiddler's Convention on Sunday.  Next week Rick and I are planning to take off in the camper and head up towards Cobscook Bay State Park, maybe Campobello, maybe come back via Moosehead, depending on weather and whatever.  Unfortunately, we're unable to take the kayaks with us on the camper but maybe we'll be able to rent some along the way.  

The Beginning of Week 2 of 2010 Summah Vaca

Got to camp about 7 last night after a stop for some supplies from Hannaford: sesame chicken with brown rice, broccoli and raisin salad, grapes, yogurt, cheese, butter, and raisin bread.  I knew there were crackers and plenty of beer and wine already here.  Jared left the camp in very good shape after his party last night.  I put away my groceries and made the bed with the fresh sheets I'd brought, ate dinner and banged on my djembe for a while as the neighbors weren't around it seemed.  The feeders have been empty for the last few days so the critters have moved on temporarily.  They'll discover the supplies have been replenished quickly enough.  In fact the flying squirrels showed up after a few hours but the reds didn't discover them until well after I was up out of bed this morning so I didn't have to listen to them fight over it starting at 4 a.m. like I often do.

I woke up and made a pot of coffee, ate a yogurt and went for a paddle on The Cobb.  The prediction was for hot and humid so I wanted to be back before mid afternoon.  A nice breeze kept me cool enough and I enjoyed rediscovering all the familiar landmarks.  Very few swallows under the bridge this year.  This purple flower that looks like some sort of water lupine is more ubiquitous than usual it seems.

Upstream about a half a mile I saw a sweet little kitten on the screened in porch of one of the rickety camps nestled at the very edge of the water.  I had never noticed it in use previously but this little guy looked pretty content to be there.  

The only other person I saw on the paddle was my neighbor and his daughter who were apparently there after all.  

It's always nice to see camp come into view on the return trip.

I love seeing all the flowers in bloom.  

I took a quick shower and sat on the deck in my towel and let the warm breeze dry me off.  The broccoli salad and a couple slices of toasted raisin bread made a delicious lunch.  It's great being able to get internet out here through my blackberry.  The deck is shaded enough that I can see my screen and with the sun sparkling off the flowing stream, an occasional osprey or heron stopping by to fish, and the flowers dancing in the wind that has picked up some, I realize it's one of those perfect days where I have absolutely nothing I have to do and I'm exactly where I want to be. 

Vacation - Week #1

Just got back this morning from a week at Popham Beach.  It's the second year we've spent the week of July 4th there.  We rent a little one room cottage with a deck that overlooks the ocean.  I love hearing the constant lapping of the waves all night long.  If we leave the curtain open we can see the ocean right from bed.

I took an early morning walk down the beach and sat in the lifeguard station and drank my coffee.  That island you can see in the distance is accessible via a sandbar at low tide.

On Friday Rick and I did the short hike up to Fort Baldwin and climbed the tower hoping for some fantastic views.  Unfortunately, the trees have grown up so much in that area that the views are just of foliage.

We probably wouldn't have seen much anyway as it was a fairly foggy day.

The first five days the weather was sunny with temps into the 80s and 90s.  The fog didn't move in until Thursday and Friday though it gave us a brief break on both days.  I read two books:  The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo by Steig Larsson and Pocketful of Names by Joe Coomer.  The latter takes place on an island off Stonington, Maine so it seemed particularly apropros.

Lots of music around the campfire at night with the NitPickers and others who happened by.  And a great fireworks display for the 4th.  We thought we put on a pretty good show but was matched by one other group on the beach and actually outdone by another.  I think between the many parties shooting off (illegal) fireworks we got as good a show as any I've seen in recent years.

This part of the coast is not great for kayaking.  I tried it there last year and found it very difficult to  maneuver due to the shallow water and breaking waves.  It's been a couple of years since I really had a good ocean paddle.  We talked about whether to look for a different location for our oceanside vacation for next year - perhaps around Stonington where the kayaking is good - but decided to go ahead and book the cottage for another year.  Maybe we can go to Stonington for a day or two and do a guided kayak tour around the islands.  Rick has never ocean kayaked and doesn't have an ocean kayak so he'd need to rent one.  And I'd feel better if I wasn't the most experienced person in the group.

Overall a nice week but it will also feel great to sleep in our own bed tonight.

Saturday on The Cobb

We took a paddle out on the Cobb on Saturday; a gorgeous sunny day in the 80s with a nice breeze.  Found this little guy right where we put the kayaks in.  He wasn't very timid; stayed right there until the kayak practically bumped him.

We have a bumper crop of water lillies on the stream this year.  As well as a large number of damsel flies - also not very timid.

It was a beautiful day to sit on the shady deck afterwards and enjoy the warm breeze.

Camp renovations

Rick and I just finished painting the main room at camp and laying peel n stick tiles on the floor in the main room and the old porch area.  The sheetrock had been put up about 6 years ago.  A guy named David and my friend Tom had put it up and taped it and done some mudding but was badly in need of some finesse work.  My brother Bill had been staying out there the last three weeks and redid the mud and Jared went out and sanded.  So Monday I painted one wall and on Tuesday Rick and I finished painting and on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday Rick finished the flooring.  

I had originally planned to get a darker color tile but when I got to the home store they didn't have what I was looking for so grabbed a "stone look" light color.  I wish I'd stuck to my original plan.  I don't like the white look for camp, plus it shows the dirt big time.  But it's staying and I'll get used to it.  We're kind of wondering whether we'll come back in the spring and find that it didn't survive well.  We'll see.  

We've got a bunch of trim work to do still.  Maybe during my vacation we can stay out there a few days and get that done.  Our handyman Todd is staying out there this coming weekend - Father's Day weekend.  He'd done some free work for us last summer and we'd offered to let him and his family use the camp in exchange.  They never got around to it last summer and now that he's built the deck, he's pretty psyched about a weekend there.  He'll be surprised to see all the work we've done.  

The Bumper Sticker Anthology – Part IV – Howl If You Heart City Lights Bookstore

Howl if you heart City Lights Bookstore.  The first thing that comes to mind when I think about this one is that we were scheduled to go to California two summers before we actually went.  Christopher’s accidental fall off his Segway, requiring immediate surgery at Boston’s Children’s Hospital caused us to cancel our flights and reservations the night before we were to leave.  So instead of strolling around San Francisco in early June of 2007, I was spending the night in his hospital room at Children’s.  The plan had been to fly to California and drive back across country.  We had looked for a Westphalia to buy while we were there but decided to just rent an SUV to drive back.  In the end it didn’t really matter obviously as we cancelled the trip.  So two summers later we decided to give it another try, only this time we’d just be there for 10 days – fly into San Francisco, spend a few days, and then take two days to drive down the coast – through the Big Sur area – to Los Angeles and spend some time with Rick’s son, Jason. 

Our first full day in San Francisco we spent riding the trolleys, visiting Chinatown, Coit Tower, Vesuvios Bar and City Lights Bookstore, famous hangout of the beats.  Rick left one of his books there, The Beat Handbook, 100 Days of Kerouactions.  A reverse shoplifting or guerilla marketing kind of thing.  A year later he was offered the opportunity to review Helen Weaver’s book about Kerouac for City Lights and he asked them if they’d carry it.  They declined.  But little did they know that they did in fact carry it for some period of time.  Probably ended up in the trash but who knows, maybe some person bought it and City Lights sold it to them, not quite understanding their snafu with the inventory as he/she checked the book out. 

It’s a cool little bookshop, more polished and sterile now I suspect than at the time Ferlinghetti first co-founded it and Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady hung out there.  I bought a couple poetry books, a t-shirt, and the bumper sticker.  The reference to Howl was kind of a double entendre for us as just before we left Maine we’d volunteered with the Wolf Inquiry Project to go out into the woods in western Maine in the middle of the night and howl like a wolf and record any responses we got.  And of course, the obvious reference to Ginsberg’s poem. 

That had been my first, and so far only, trip to CA so I’m a little sad to no longer have a bumper sticker on my car in memory of the trip

Perhaps I’ll order one from their website for the new Forester though that’s not quite the same.  

Sunday, May 2nd

I hear the occasional splash from a fish jumping or an osprey diving for his prey.  It’s humid today, temp about 75.  Pretty nice for early May.   The water level in The Cobb is very low due to repairs being made to New Mills Dam in Gardiner.  The leaves are starting on the trees but the lack of foliage and water makes everything look brown and dead, especially on this slightly overcast day.  Yet there’s plenty of wildlife: there are probably 6 or 8 red squirrels within sight, running through the trees, coming to the feeder.  Many people dislike the little ninjas but I’m kind of fond of their chattering and the way they vibrate with life most every moment of their existence.   I spied one sitting for an hour in a notch in the tree out by the stream this morning.  I seldom see them still for that long.  There’s birdsong all around, red wing black birds, goldfinch, the hairy woodpecker, as well as the ubiquitous osprey.  I saw four of them flying overhead yesterday while sitting on the deck. 

An occasional boater passes lazily by, sometimes with poles cast.   The monkey like sound of what I’m guessing is the pileated woodpecker joins the scene.  I wonder sometimes if it’s a flaw in my character that I can sit here for hours just taking all this in.  “Shouldn’t” I be doing something?  At least pretend to be reading a book?  There is a list of things I should be doing: getting ready to go to Jim Lunt’s 90^th birthday party, finish cleaning up after my paint job on the doorway, pack stuff and get ready to leave, but . . . 

I did write a poem today.

They greeted her with smiling faces

their prickly thorns and petals of love

she went about her chores

while the flowers sang their music

Raku Firing April 2010

We did our raku firing last Thursday night at Malley’s house.  It starts out on a base of lightweight fire brick which you pile your pieces on, and then set and load up two more layers of shelves using regular spacers between them.  We put the asbestos lined chicken wire “kiln” over the shelves and torched it with a propane fired weed burner.  I’d never seen a weed burner before but it’s a pretty big sucker and puts out quite a flame – fifty bucks at your local hardware store.  We let it heat up the kiln for about 45 minutes and very carefully lifted the kiln off the top of the stacked pieces.  Using very long tongs we took each piece off the shelves and gently dropped them into a large tin trashcan filled with some type of combustible material – leaves, sticks, shredded paper.  After each piece goes into the can we threw in more combustible material to give the next piece some cushion.  The various materials make unique colors against each glaze. After they smoke in this for 20 minutes we put them in water.

We used special raku glazes and left parts of the pots unglazed.  The bottoms of the pots turned out a really nice, almost shiny black, just from the charcoal of the fire.  Each glaze has a range of colors it might turn, depending on the temperature of that part of the pot, or what combustible materials it sets against in the smoking part of the process.  It’s a very unpredictable process but with very quick results.  We fired two kilns of pots in about three hours – very different than using an electric kiln where it takes a good 20 hours to heat, fire, and cool down. 

The raku process is not meant for dishware that you’ll be eating from so it has a limited usefulness.  But it makes a very interesting metallic like finish with various colors and patterns in each piece.  Here are some pieces:

Weekend at camp

I had planned to take some vacation time last week after the long weekend and spend it at camp.  Then we got a call from some friends from PA who wanted to come to Maine for the weekend so we offered to let them stay there.  I sometimes feel very guilty about having two nice homes while some people go homeless and it helps abate my guilt to generously share camp.  Many of my friends know where I keep the keys and know they're welcome to go out and use it when no one is there.  So I was happy to change my plans and let Keith and Beth stay there.  They stayed Saturday through Tuesday and left for Acadia on Wednesday.  I left work early on Tuesday and we all enjoyed a paddle and a campfire.  

Keith

                                Beth                           

This wicker chair had seen better days so we decided to make it part of our campfire.  Later, looking at photos, we discovered what appeared to be some evil spirit enveloped in the flames.  Look at the top of the flames.  Scary.  I tried to convince myself it was benevolent but in reality it does look pretty evil.  

So I took Tuesday afternoon off work to spend with our guests and Wednesday afternoon off to spend solo and stayed the night at camp and woke Thursday to a beautiful morning.  It was tough to wake up to such a gorgeous day and leave camp but I did.    

Even with all the rain we'd been getting the water on The Cobb had been going down and became extremely low this weekend.  This time of year the water should be high.  The loons and ducks count on knowing where the high water is in choosing their nesting sites.  I emailed the Cobbossee Watershed District to find out what was up and discovered that the water was being lowered to allow for some emergency repairs to the New Mills Dam.  Apparently the repairs should be done early this week and then the boards will be put back in place and allow the water levels to return to normal.  I think it's still too early for the birds to have started nesting so I think they'll be ok.  This is how low it was on Sunday:

Thursday night I woke briefly about 3 a.m. and found this little guy peeking in the window.   Actually he wasn't all that little but he was definitely cute.  

Sunday Rick and I were sitting on the deck and saw this heron land in one of the dead trees in the marsh.  I was able to get this photo of the heron about to launch just as the osprey flew into the frame.

I love that you can see his little rat tail thing (there's probably an official name for it) and the hair on his neck.  

Easter day kayak paddle on the Cobb

Some photos from our Easter day paddle.  It was sunny and 70s - a very unusual event for Easter in Maine. 

 Here I've stopped to listen to a chorus of frogs.  

The turtles were plentiful, albeit a bit lethargic after their winter hibernation.  I'm guessing we saw over 30 of them throughout our paddle.  Normally we see just 3 or 4.