July Things

How can July almost be over already? Oh, summer, why do you have to be such a warp-speed time warp? I thought this would be the summer that I sat on my front porch, watching the bees pollinate the flowers, but we don't have a front porch, and I let the marigolds on my deck die from lack of water. And, well, there's been a lot of other stuff going on.



This month has been very full (I'm trying to excise the word "busy" from my vocabulary—and my mindset—and if I look at it objectively, this July hasn't been nearly as busy as in years past, when I had to go to work every day and stuff). I spent a weekend, plus one bonus evening, in the company of alumni and faculty from my MFA program, which was lovely. We talked about things like point of view and revision, publication and rejection. Things that would make people in my normal life glaze over with boredom. I imagine it's like when my husband and his building buddies get to talking about dimensional lumber and R-values.

And I had a whole entire weekend (well, just from about mid-morning Saturday to Sunday evening) all. to. my. self. And it was so amazing to be the master of my own (very, very quiet) universe. I spent a great deal of the time uploading and backing up photos, in my Sisyphean quest to open up space on my hard drive. With no one else home hogging up the bandwidth, I got a lot done. I also read. A lot. (More on this month's reading Monday.) And I only left home to pick up Saturday night's dinner and I only cooked to heat up leftovers. It was glorious.



C and M returned Sunday evening and Monday I headed up to join E and Z at their grandparents' camp. The weather had turned cool and cloudy, so after lunch, we packed up and headed to their house, where we played games and then, the next day, headed to the coast where the boys tried their hands at seine-netting (they caught a few tiny fish and some shrimp, which they had fun eating for lunch).



We've also gone swimming at various lakes and ponds, made one more trip to the beach, and raised two monarch caterpillars, which is very exciting, since it's been years since we've seen monarchs around here. I'm almost done with my 100 days of learning to paint (I'll be talking about that in my next newsletter; don't forget to sign up here). I've gotten less work done on the book than I hoped, but more than I feared. And other than book work and all that photo uploading, I've spent very little time on the computer, meaning I've ignored blogs, both mine and yours (I'm sorry). I've also rarely gotten the camera out, which you know is out of character for me. So maybe I have been watching the bees just a bit, metaphorically speaking.



We leave for vacation in a couple of days, which means it's going to be quiet around here again, but if you want, you can follow along on Instagram @andrea.lani.

What July Things have you been up to?

Weekend Things--Easy Does It

Increasingly, Labor Day Weekend has become a time to rest up and recover for summer, and brace ourselves for all that fall brings--school, homework, soccer.

Again this year, we opted to spend just one day at camp, eating, lolling on the dock, trawling for fish from the boat, paddling to Ten Pound Island to pick blueberries and huckleberries.

At one point, the boys were all inside playing poker and I was sitting on the edge of the lake, reading a book, when I heard a rustling in the trees overhead and something large and feathered plopped into the water right in front of me. I let out a yelp of surprise (those inside the camp claim it was more of a shriek that could be heard echoing up and down the pond) and the osprey, no doubt as startled by its sudden drop as I was (I really do think it fell into the water) shook his wings and took off up the lake, trailing his last shreds of dignity.

On the way home, we stopped at John's Ice Cream for dinner, and ended up going into a cafe for French toast (the boys) and a veggie burger (me) first. It started to rain just as we got back in the car and made our way toward home and one last day of summer vacation.

Weekend Things

I was hoping to go to the beach again this past weekend, but an overnight houseguest necessitated houseguest-level cleaning and kept us close to home on Saturday. I started the day with a morning walk with Z.

I am ridiculously excited about this--peaches! On our very own tree! About 30 of them, for the first time ever, all starting to ripen. We each ate one of the first harvest Friday. Heaven!

I haven't seen any monarch caterpillars yet this season, and I'm getting worried about them.

Z and I did find these other caterpillars on some milkweed plants. Z thinks they're swallowtails. I took the caterpillar book back to the library, so I can't check. We were going to bring some of the leaves inside, but we forgot to come back later with a jar.

With the weekend's wonderful sun and a bounty of cherry tomatoes coming out of the garden, I solar-cooked and froze our first (and second) batch of pasta sauce (more on solar-cooking tomatoes here).

And I made this recipe for blackberry-blue-corn tamales, which I've been waiting to make, since I discovered it just after blackberry season last year. I was a little bit disappointed in the results ("Why did you make this with playdough?" E asked). It was definitely not an "worth waiting a year for" good, nor a "get all skun up picking blackberries" good. But on Sunday, I ate one cold with plain sour cream, and I liked it so much better. I think sitting in the fridge overnight improved the texture, and the flavors of the blackberries came through better cold, without the strongly flavored cream.

Sunday morning, I made this dress. C and I have a couple of weddings to go to this fall, and I thought I'd try to get it done in time for those, even though it's not very fallish. I was going to make it for Ireland, but that never happened. It turns out that maybe it's not quite the dress for me. If I were to make it again, I would use a dark (ahem, slimming) color, skip the pockets, which were a huge pain and also add width to the hip area, where I don't need any extra help, and make it about three or five inches longer. I do love those blue poppies, though.

The rest of the day, we spent a friend's island in the middle of a lake.

We get invited there once every summer, and the boys love the boating, swinging, fishing, and swimming.

M got to try his hand piloting a sunfish on his own.

And Z was in heaven trawling for fish. At the end of the day, he paddled back to the landing in a kayak, which he had tried last summer, only to spin in circles and necessitate towing by a canoe, but this year he made it the whole way, keeping in a straight line, and keeping up with C and me in our canoe.

A Day in the City (Maine Style)

For his birthday, E got a gold pan, and has been dying to use it. I promised to take him to a place I knew about in Augusta, where the hiking trails lead to a sandy-bottomed stream just right for gold-panning.

It took a whole month, but finally we came to a weekend not occupied with baseball or rainstorms or sick kids, and so Saturday afternoon we drove up past the airport, behind the cemetery and began our hike.

The trails wind their way past the two enormous storage tanks that hold the city's water, and allow for a glimpse of where the public works trucks are stored, but other than that, and a bit of traffic noise, you'd never know this spot was sandwiched between Augusta's main drag, with the airport and armory, and the Civic Center area, with its big-box stores.

It turns out none of us knew how to pan for gold, so C looked up some videos on youtube. What on earth did the '49ers do without smart phones?

Z had been wanting to go fishing as badly as E had been wanting to pan for gold, and I suppose the stream loomed larger in my imagination and/or memory that it really was, because I suggested to him that it would be a good place to fish. He came prepared in his fishing t-shirt, fishing vest, fishing pants, fishing hat, and fishing bug net, and brought his fully loaded tackle box, and of course, his rod. He wasn't terribly disappointed when the stream turned out to be only a few inches deep, especially when I promised him we could go fishing in the Kennebec later.

After dinner at the airport Thai restaurant, we went down to the boat launch in Hallowell.

Z didn't want to cast at first, afraid he might accidentally catch a giant sturgeon (and lose a lure). It took me a while to convince him that he didn't have to worry too much about that. We did see a few of them jump out of the water, and they really are huge. I was hoping to catch one on camera, but most of the time you don't see them until after they've landed.

A heron, not a sturgeon.

I had to laugh, thinking that we went to the city to go hiking, gold-panning and fishing, but I guess that's one advantage of living here.

P.S. Don't forget to enter my zine giveaway.

P.P.S. I almost forgot to mention, check out my LiteraryMama book review of two books by dads who hang out with their kids in nature.

What We've Been Up To

My parents have been visiting us for the last few weeks (I just dropped them off this morning), so I haven't been making my evening library visits (thus no blogging--we live in a broadband black hole and I can't deal with upload times using my cellphone as a wireless modem--and not much writing, either). Instead we've been busy taking in the tourist sites, including quite a few on my Summer To-Do List.

The Major Reuben Colburn House, which was not open, so we peeked in the windows. There were some guys painting the barn and they let us go into that building, which houses the batteaux that Benedict Arnold's expedition rowed up the Kennebec.

Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve (just in time for the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring).

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

A weekend at Camp with another set of grandparents.

A stroll through the Arboretum.

Saying goodbye to summer at Pemaquid Beach.

The LC Bates Museum.

The WW&F Railway Museum (they really got to ride that pumper car).

While C and I went to work, my parents took the boys on all kinds of adventures, like the State Museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Aquarium, the Windsor Fair, two book stores, about eighty-five ice-cream shops. And they took some solo trips to Acadia and other coastal spots, searching for lighthouses.

Meanwhile school started up,

And soccer, too. 

And our next three weekends are filling up with friends, parties and fairs. I don't know why I thought I'd be able to take a breath this fall.

I was able to get a packet out to mentor amid all the fun (not a great packet, but a packet no less), and now I'm in that "I will never have another idea again" mode. Hopefully inspiration will strike soon, because October is looming, and with it packet #4 and two workshop pieces. Maybe this brrrr fall weather will encourage me to stay inside, pen in hand (47.5 degrees this a.m.!!!).

What have you been up to lately?