Confessions of a Grandma

This woodsy look once surrounded the entire campsite.  Now, it looks like the above and the below, plus one other newly cleared area.  Many trees were cut, leaving stumps like this.  This was a live tree, cut to make a levering log.  The loose dirt is what we filled back into a hole that was dug about three feet deep all the way around this rock. The fireplace with a baggie of glass and metal brackets and wires--a mess.

We got back from camping this afternoon.  Once again, we managed to spend three days of record breaking heat in the mountains, sitting next to and occasionally dunking ourselves into a cool mountain pond  I'll write about the experience later.  I've had a chance to get a pile of laundry done (almost), dispatch the truly monster weeds in the vegetable garden, and pick pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers.  I froze a gallon of stewed tomatoes, but I just don't know what I'll do with the cucumbers.  I read the newspapers to catch up on the latest doings of Washington, tea party people, Earl, and skimmed through the back log of blogs I follow.  Tomorrow it's pack up once again and head to Connecticut for a family reunion--so I'll miss Justin Beiber at the Champlain Valley Fair.  Right now, I'm pouring myself an extra large ice water--HEY, HERE'S AN IDEA...DROP IN A SLICE OR TWO OF CUCUMBER--and go watch Project Runway, which holds a strange but compe...

No, Silly, I wasn't blogging while camping.  I waited until we got back.  There is no connection that far out in the wilderness, anyway. We saw the moose on a previous trip, a few years ago, but I am playing around now.  I've never uploaded a video before so I'm trying something new--just like it says to in my horoscope.  It's not much of a video...the only action being me shaking the camera for a couple of seconds.  It's an experiment, that's all.

What says summer more than a supper of corn on the cob-- just picked fresh --and blueberry pie? Not major health food, but my taste buds are happy. The canoe is loaded except for the cooler, which will get packed up first thing in the morning. We'll make an early start hoping to avoid the predicted north winds--nothing worse than paddling a fully loaded canoe into the wind. I have not finished the story I am working on for my writing group meeting next week. I usually don't like missing these "deadlines" but I find myself not stressing about it. It will get done and people will have time to read it before the next get together. I finished the shawlette that I've been working on and I am quite pleased with the results. Perhaps I'll model it at some point in the near future. When we get back from camping, I think I will be about ready for another grandchildren fix. Gosh, the summer is going by so fast!

I thought I was free of the self destruct mode, but...Today I slammed my left foot in the front door, scraping my instep and making a bloody mess of my heel. However, I found it immensely amusing and I've been giggling about it all day. Now, I'm manic. Mike is threatening to outfit me with a hockey goalie's uniform--minus the skates. We are going camping on Monday so I spent the day preparing some meals for that. I remembered that we had a fan in the basement so I dragged that up to the kitchen and it really helped since I had the oven on and our air conditioner is only in the bedroom. Mike got out all the equipment and started some of the packing. It takes a certain amount of work to relax so completely for a couple of days. We sat out on the deck tonight for supper and watched the sun go down. Mike grilled tuna and I roasted potatoes in oil and herbs from my garden and made green beans in a lemon-butter sauce. The green beans were the first from my garden. It was...

Friday, we headed out very early to go camping. The place where we like to go is not an organized camp ground. There are a limited number of primitive camp sights on the pond and it is first-come-first-serve. We knew that, being a holiday weekend, it was likely to be more used that it would ordinarily. Since we have retired, we really try to make out camping trips mid week. It's less "crowded" for us and we are not taking a space from people who only have the weekends off. This time, though, July 4th weekend happened to be the first time in five or six weeks where the weather reports were predicting three nice days in a row. We decided to take the chance. We didn't get the camp site we like the most, but we did find a new site across the pond. It worked out nicely. We pitched the tent near the water's edge. The weather turned much warmer and, since out camp faced to the west, we had lots of afternoon sunshine and a great view of the setting sun. With the lingering...

We are getting things packed up for a weekend of camping. I will in the wilderness for the next three days--beyond the reach of cell service and Internet access. I'll have a good book or two, some knitting project, my crossword and sudoku puzzles, binoculars and camera, and some walking shoes and canoe paddles. Quiet time. I hope it warms up. The climatic conditions have gone pretty haywire. We had warmer weather in April than we had in June. Today the temperature is 56--way too cold for our brief summer season, too cold for camping in my book--but that is supposed to change by Saturday. Gotta go do some shopping. We do eat quite elegantly when we camp if nothing else.

Gee, go out of the loop for a few days and look what happens? Arkansas Patti is bowing out of the blogosphere? Can that be true? Oh, that makes me sad to think of no more "The New Sixty." We had a relaxing few days of camping and canoeing. The hot weather broke before we left with a most spectacular lightning and thunder storm--very glad that was before we were sleeping in a tent. Tomorrow will be a big garden day. I put out my cucumber plants before we left and came home to find that some critter had eaten them right up. GRRR.

It was an easy week of substituting. I have to say, though, that the whole "working" thing really cuts into the effortless routine of my retired life. Nice to have a change and then appreciate my real life all the more. It's getting up to an alarm clock buzzing that I just really, really do not want to do anymore! Tomorrow, Mike and I are taking off for a camping trip. The record has been broken for high temperatures for this time of year so it will be very nice to sit in a quiet, shady spot near some cool water. I hope the bugs that are usually so problematic in June have not come out early just because it's been warm. If they have, we do have a screened "porch" on the tent and we always carry bug spray. Because we canoe into the camp site, we try to travel light. All the same, I will be packing a book, some magazines, and a knitting project--can't just sit and watch fish jump for three days. If you click HERE , you can see views of the reservoir. We w...

We had a week of hot, sunny weather--just like summer! We went camping for three days and did not get rained on or dumped out of the canoe. A voluntary swim was most refreshing, however. This is the view from our campsite first thing in the morning. Well, not exactly first thing, but when we got up. Nothing beats fresh air in the woods for good sleeping.

Mike was determined to go camping last week. He watched the weather through last weekend, hoping, I guess, that it would somehow improve over time. We left last Tuesday and set up camp. It really was the kind of day you want when camping by the water--sunny, hot, relatively bug free. Wednesday started out to be not so bad either--the day they were predicting a "slight chance of rain." It was a bit cooler so we set about digging out the years of ashes that had built up and rebuilding the fireplace at the camp site. It was good work and the fireplace really looked almost professional quality when we were finished. There was a thunderstorm around 4:00 in the afternoon. We watched it go across Pico to the east of us, and it went by in a matter of minutes so we thought we were home free then. Unfortunately, a second storm come in from the west, stalled over the entire Rutland county area and dumped about five inches of rain through the night (and that's a lot of rain!...

I'm a little anxious about canoe travel. I've been known to dump a fully loaded canoe. Our trip across the reservoir where we camped this week started out on a less than auspicious note, too. It was windy, a warm wind blowing dirctly out of the south, but it made the water choppy. No mishap on the way to the camp site, though. On Friday we took a couple paddles out and around looking for signs of spring and possible wildlife activity. We've seen, in the past, a snapping turtle, an eagle, loons, otter, deer, beaver, a moose, camp site marauding bands of ducks. This time it was something new--at least I'd never seen a sight quite like it--hundreds and hundreds of toads in a marshy area in the farthest corner of the pond. It might have been mating season. Or, they might have all been on a toad holiday and were playing rousing games of horse-back rides. Oh, and then there were the dozens of butterflies floating around the little beach at our camp site. So, I guess...

When spring is lovely in Vermont, it is just wonderfully lovely. Since three such days were being predicted for Thursday through Saturday of this week, we took the opportunity to try out our new Eureka! tent. New to us anyway. Mike bought it last fall on e-Bay. This has a screen front room which we had wanted after spending a few miserable trips huddled in our old, much smaller tent either because it was pouring rain or the bugs were unbearable last summer. We camp in the wilderness--primitive style camping. The new tent was very comfortable. There aren't so many bugs at this time of year but it was unusually warm for May so we appreciated the screened area for respite from the sun. We ate well. I had fixed two cold lunches--shrimp cocktail, cheese, crackers, olives, and wine for one day and cold chicken and salad (and more wine) for the next. Mike cooks over the fire at night and brews the coffee over a small fire in the mornings. We relaxed and read. And there's nothing like...