8.26 What I did on my summer vacation

One of the nice things about living on the east coast for the past few years, is that we've been able to visit Lac Brompton every summer. Sur l'eau is still there, although S is quite a bit bigger than he was when we moved back east. (Upstairs is the living quarters, downstairs is the boat house/shower house; the whole thing straddles a stream, which is completely verboten nowadays, but Sur l'eau is grandfathered in.)

The lake is getting built up quite a bit, but we're at the quiet end and it's still quiet except on the weekends.

The stump is a remnant of days gone by when the whole area belong to the logging company - it sits in the bay at the end of the channel for the stream and collects up gravel. The gravel forms "Duck Island",

which varies in size from 1-duck to 8-duck, depending on how recently it has rained a great deal. When we arrived it was an 8-duck island, but after raining a bit on each of 3 days, it was down to just 1-duck capacity.

Mostly we had mallards (as usual, up to 21 at a time), but there was also a family of mergansers that came by each morning to fish in the bay.

The last morning, there was also a mink. I almost got its picture as it was checking out the shore and the boats, but just as I went to focus, it suddenly made a splashing dash for Duck Island, much to the annoyance of the mergansers.

After poking about on the stump, it took off swimming across the bay and we didn't see it again.

5.11 Ten places that make me happy

1. The 1000 Islands - On the St. Lawrence Seaway, between NY and Ontario, are 300-some odd islands, known as the 1000 islands. Blue waters, lovely scenery, lots of things to do. I'll never forget the day my (then) 8-yo brother took his little kayak and paddled to Canada and back (crossing the sea lane each way) without telling anyone where he was going...

2. Yosemite - One of my favorite places to visit, as long as one avoids the hordes of people on the valley floor. To visit the valley floor, one should go in the off-off season. There are so many different kinds of places to see there, depending on the season and the height one goes to. We went to a star party on Glacier Point - cold but fun, staring at the stars in the clear night. (Before the sun went down, they were letting people look through the telescopes at a camping party across the valley on Half Dome. That is, they were until a couple separated from the rest of the party, went over the edge out of sight from their own party and started taking each other's pants off. At that point, the star party decided it might be best to concentrate on the rising moon in the sky instead.)

3. Washington, DC by night - Having grown up around DC with parents who liked family outings, we spent many a Sunday afternoon in the Smithsonian and visiting the monuments. I discovered visiting the monuments by night as an adult and it's my favorite way to do so. The numbers of people are diminished and the monuments are more beautiful all lit up at night. It's easier to find parking, too!

4. Mendocino - California coastline at its best. I'm not a big sandy beach person, but I love listening to the waves on the rocks, and the restaurants in town are great.

5. Lac Brompton - just north of the Vermont border in Quebec - a long narrow lake with several islands and a cabin on the shore that has belonged to J's family for generations.

6. Powells - the only thing better than a bookstore, is a huge bookstore that goes on for floor after floor after floor.

7. Saturday Market - very few places with lots of people are going to make my top 10, but the Eugene Saturday Market is definitely there. Farmer's market crossed with crafters, along with good food and good entertainment. What more could one ask for?

8. Exploratorium - A wonderful hands-on science museum in San Francisco. We took K&S there several times when they were small. The local science center has a room full of hand-on items loaned from the Exploratorium here in Rochester - not quite the same as having the whole Exploratorium at one's fingertips, but a nice place to go play. It's too bad they've almost outgrown it. When they're in their mid-twenties they might be ready for it again ;-)

9. The Smithsonian - as previously mentioned, we spent many a rainy Sunday afternoon in DC at one or another of the Smithsonian buildings. When we moved back to the East Coast, I seized the opportunity to introduce them to K&S. Doing it from a distance means they've only gotten to each building once, but at this point they've seen most of them, including the big Air and Space museum out near Dulles and the new Native American building.

10. Home.

outunwiti

Lac Brompton is a lake very like the Finger Lakes in New York. On a sunny day, it looks gorgeous from up on the hill top. There is a cabin on Outunwiti, dating to the 1940s, but sadly, nowadays a magnet for teenagers looking to make mischief. This year's damage was worse than the usual smashed beer bottles and trash, and we got little maintenance done except for clean up.
The lake is a lovely place to go visit and we always enjoy ourselves. If you click on the picture, you'll be taken to the flickr set and you can look through the rest of the pictures, taken on a day much more typical of our stay this year. It was cool and occasionally rainy, with some thunderstorms.
I got very little knitting done; what I did get knit was finishing up the Baby Surprise Jacket I had started before I left, and in working interminable rows on Hyrna Herborgar. I made the monumental mistake of carefully gathering up all my patterns into a notebook to take with me, and then misplacing the notebook before I got it packed. The BSJ pattern was with the knitting-in-progress, so I was ok there, but for Hyrna I had to go by memory and calculation (15 fans in the expansion x 36 stitches per fan [I hope I remembered Sylvia's notes correctly on those points] divided by 6 stitches per diamond repeat = more stitches than I have even yet on the needles). I haven't had the heart to go check to see if I remembered correctly or not.
I got nothing done on the afghan blocks, having no patterns to work from, and I didn't get started on MS3, ditto.