Mainelife...thru the eyes of someone from away

Ahhh

I'm looking foward to spending quite a bit of time in these chairs this weekend. We're off to the land of no internets, and hoping it will cease to be internet-less by tomorrow morning. 

Summer

There isn't a bad time of the year to live in Maine, but spring and summer are filled with sights like this one (Monhegan Island).

But with these sights come open windows (No AC for us hearty Maine folks)  and with the open windows comes the pollen: oak, goldenrod, etc, etc, and so forth.  It coats every surface in the house with yellow fairy dust and makes dusting a daily necessity.  Unless you're me and you just give up.  Any one who comes to visit also has a pollen problem on their dining room table and it will just need dusting again tomorrow, so.....

Aside from the kitchen counters and the TV screen (the picture was getting slightly hazy) I've ignored the gathering coating for more than week.  There's a corner of the hard wood floor that's begging me to write "Wash Me" in the dust and one can clearly see each and every spot where the cats have napped in the sun.

I was doing really, really well with this plan until I realized that today's the day for the cleaning lady and I've been running around pre-cleaning for her, because, gosh, she can't see my house looking like this can she? 

The Natural Playground

While waiting for the weather on NECN this morning, I caught a report on a new all natural playground in Waterbury, VT.

There's a  xylophone, a water garden, a slide built into the hill, a cave to explore and a drainage system to funnel water from the athletic fields away from the hill to help curb erosion and no plastic or metals. 
Growing up  in Ohio, we played dodge ball and kickball and hung  from the monkey bars on a slab of asphalt that got soft and melty by the middle of May, and survived, but this seems so much "cooler" in so many ways. 

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

What a title, eh?  A baby blue cover with a melting hot fudge sundae.....chick lit at its finest and perfect no brainer reading while in the midst of significant work responsibilities....but it's not.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown is a first novel of insightful, searing, and intelligent social commentary.  It also provides devastating insight into women: the feminist; the sex kitten; the brilliant, sophisticated young woman who has given up everything else to be the perfect wife  are all examined without being patronized or stereotyped. 
If you need a beach read and don't want total mindless blather, this is a wonderful book.   

The Land of No Internets Or TV or Cell Reception

.....became far less romantic at about 6:30 on Friday night when RG's phone gave the "you have a message chime" despite the fact that the phone never rang. 
It was our dear friend, Joan, leaving a message about Tim Russert's passing.  No reliable cell reception, no EDGE network for the iPhone, no internet, no TV. Not even during the 2007 World Series did a media blackout seem so wrong. 
Tim was a member of our family.  Every Sunday morning, I worshiped at the church of Meet the Press, and came away more informed and better for it.  Most mornings, Tim sat with me for coffee, first on Imus, then on Morning Joe.  He shared an appetizer or main course with us when he was on the NBC Evening News.  On big political nights, we'd go to bed with Tim and his whiteboard as he helped us unravel the polling data for a particular state.
So we busied ourselves with Cushing activities.  We went to Beth's and bought fresh picked Maine strawberries.  I baked a shortcake.  On Friday night, in the dusky light of a summer evening, we took the kayaks down river, exploring the shoreline and watching the bait fish swim in iridescent  schools around our paddles.
We got up early on Saturday morning, had a cup of coffee and in order to take advantage of the tides, liberated the boat "Cranky" from its winter storage in Thomaston.  We took the boat down a "flat ass calm" (which we were assured is a very technical Maine nautical term) St. George River to Port Clyde, around Hupper Island and back up the St. George. We waved to Andy Wyeth (ok, not exactly Andy, but his house), and we moored the boat at its summer home in Collins Cove. For the record, Cranky is the white boat on the
left. Richard (the neighbor's) boat is the aquamarine boat on the right. He winkles and fishes out of it....it's not pretty, but it seems to work for him. He doesn't have a dock or float, so we let him tie up on our float to save him wading out every morning.

Because we're not a deep water mooring, the boat will sit on mud two times a day.  This offends my midwestern, fresh-water boating sensibilities, but there's nothing to be done about it unless we want to pay for a mooring up river. The khakipookeye colored house at the point also offends my sensibilities, but there's nothing to be done about that either.....This was the first weekend that I was able to summon enough courage to walk around in that mud at low tide.  Not as bad as I'd thought, but not nearly as nice as a sand beach. 

After a quick lunch, we finished our gardening and yard work.  We cut the grass, weeded the parts of the garden we didn't get to a few weeks ago and we planted "old fashioned" perennials like Daisies, Rudbeckia, cone flowers, coriopsis, lavender, cat mint, snap dragons (not a perennial, but hard to resist) and bachelor's buttons. 

In the evening, too tired to kayak or take the boat out again, we amused ourselves by sitting in the fish chairs and watching some fisherman catching Mackerel on the point.

This morning, we were up before the rain (and in concert with the tides) to take the boat up river, through Thomaston to the narrow part of the St. George.  We watched Kingfishers dart about and saw a Gray Heron perched in a tree, sleeping.  We saw a Chinese sanpan moored in the middle of nowhere in the river and arrived back home just as the first raindrops fell.

Next weekend, for better or worse, Time Warner Cable will install 79 channels of digital goodness and Road Runner service. We can live without the TV, but we can't live without our internets....

 

Happy Friday....And It Really Is

We're headed off to Cushing for the weekend.  I'm taking a vacation day today...if it wasn't a vacation day, it would be a medically required mental health day.  The last eight straight days of work have been some of the most mentally taxing, physically long days that I can remember.

The garden has started to bloom and is in the beautiful stage of little maintenance, great rewards...the stage that lasts about five days, as I recall.

Y'all have a lovely weekend.  We'll be putting in the boat (which is named Cranky--it came with that name, but we're keeping it as it's an apt description of the skipper) so there should be a good blog post out of that!   

Farewell, Crown Pilot

For the past month, there's been a bit of a kerfluffle here in Maine.  Nabisco has decided to stop making and distributing the Crown Pilot cracker.

Never heard of the Crown Pilot? Evidently, not many outside of the state of Maine have heard of them either, but from the mid-coast to downeast Maine, they're beloved and there's quite an effort being made to get them reinstated.   

Described as a cross between hard tack and a saltine cracker or a tastier version of a ship's biscuit, depending who you ask, they're an acquired taste.   

This is the second time that Crown Pilots have been pulled from Nabisco's product line--they were brought back due to the ruckus that loyal customers created (kind of like the nuts and Jericho)  and residents are inundating Nabisco with calls and letters again: 

May Hall and other residents are dialing away. “The operator asked me where I was from,” Ms. Hall said. “I started to spell Chebeague, but the operator already knew how.”

I'd like to get my hands on the recipe and start a new career as Crown Pilot Cracker Baker.

Happy Friday

What's that you say?  It' s not Friday?  But it's my fifth straight day of work, so it must be Friday....mustn't it?

I did manage to fit in three tennis matches over the weekend and weed and prune some of the garden,    (which by the way, continues to confound me.  Two hours north of us, in Cushing, the lupine were in full bloom 10 days ago.  But not the lupine in our garden.  They're just beginning to think about blooming and they look like they'll get around to it sometime this weekend.   It's like we have our own little micro-climate) but other than those two leisure activities, the entire weekend and much of my sleep time was devoted to work.

Now my entire team from Cincinnati is in Boston, yesterday we trained the folks who will be joining our company and today, we begin transitioning product from here to our publishing house.  These meetings are always just a bit awkward.  We sit in a conference room with people who have worked on these books, sometimes for years, and they tell us in minute detail all about the status of the revisions (permissions, photo research, manuscript delivery, author quirks and preferences, etc) the sale history, the marketing plans, literally handing the projects over us, so that we can begin working on them.  Uncomfortable in so many respects. 

Y'all have a lovely Tuesday.  Stay cool and well hydrated...

Summah Reading List

Based on the way that this first unofficial week of summer has  gone, I'm not going to have a lot of time for leisure reading....but a girl can always make plans and hope so I've compiled this summer's list of books to read.  (if the book is available as a Kindle Edition, I've linked to that version, figuring all Kindle books are available in print editions--or at least the ones in this post)

If any of you all have recommendations for books to add to the list, please leave 'em in the comments section.

Beach Reads

• Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope.  Smart, sophisticated novel about a women's group in London who meet for drinks and conversation on Friday nights and the impact that careers and men can have on female friendships.  I just finished this book and loved it.
• Careless in Red by Elizabeth George.  Smart British mystery/thriller.  This one is on the wish list.
• All The Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen.  Slacker fiction about three young men who are having a hard time getting a handle on life.  The dialog  is witty, the story compelling.  I'm half way done with this book and it's an enjoyable read. 
• The 10-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer.  A wonderful, smart book about the impact of the "mommy track" on women's lives.  I highly recommend this book for any woman who works, whether or not she's "opted out."
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif.  An Amazon Best of the Month for May, 2008.  This novel has been called the Catch-22 of  the Pakistani Military and one always needs a madcap, fictional account of current event in the Middle East. 

Non-Fiction

• Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History by Ted Sorensen. A memoir by JFK's speechwriter.
• The Reason for God by Timothy Keller.  An apologia for Christianity.  David Brooks wrote recently in the NYTimes that it's easy for Christians to defend their faith when speaking to an atheist, "but the real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits."  Keller's book didn't convince me that Christianity is anything but a cultural artifact, but he did remind me that there are some wicked smart Christians out there and he's certainly one of them. 
• A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horowitz.  A hysterically funny look at the history that we're never taught in school. 
• Truth and Consequences by Keith Olbermann.  A good old Bush-bashing, but I can't resist. 
• Takeover by Charlie Savage.  Extraordinary background into how the Bush-Cheney White House has changed (possibly forever) the balance of power by land-grabbing vast amounts of authority for the executive branch.   Savage won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the effects of the signing statements used by George Bush to erode civil liberties,and expand the executive branch, but this book is much more than just an extension of that reporting. 

Four Season Organic Gardening

The March issue of Downeast Magazine had an article that really piqued my interest.  It featured  Eliot Coleman, the father of organic gardening, who is now running a four season farm in mid-Maine. 
He has about 15 acres and from that 15 acres he was able to gross over $120,000 last year, growing fresh, organic vegetables for local restaurants. 

He's constructed a series of movable plastic greenhouses that allow him to plant earlier than he could with unprotected beds and grow throughout the coldest of Maine winters--without any heat, save the sun.  On very cold nights, he puts one more layer of bed lining over the crops for added protection. 

I surely don't have the greenest of thumbs and we're not asking for food stamps quite yet, but given that fuel oil is going to cost us more than $4.50 a gallon (by all estimates that we've seen) to heat the house this winter (last year we paid an average of $3.33)  and our grocery bill is already sky high, I'm already planning to start baking our own bread and I've planted a number of tomato plants in grow boxes.    Why not try to grow lettuce, zucchini, green beans and other veggies to help offset the cost of living?

Eliot and his partner Barbara Damrosch run a website called the Four Season Farm if you'd like more information on year round gardening.

UPDATE:  Everyone is getting in on the recession garden idea.