It's a sad day. C's beloved hamster, Little Guy, died today. He wasn't looking so great when we went to pick him up from a friend's house, and by the time we got home he was gone.
We held a short memorial service and buried him in the vegetable garden, which is a special and loved place for C.
How's that for irony - the rodents we want dead are still frolicking in the kitchen but we couldn't keep the one we love alive.
If Little Guy fails in the prime of his life while we are away for one month, what hope do I have for our geriatric dog who has nearly kicked the bucket three times so far this year?
Ominous.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Home again, Home again, Clickety click
It has become clear that we will need some variant of a house-sitter when we're gone. We arrived home from Michigan last night and it appears that a crew of mice have been taking care of the place. Just like us, they seemed to spend most of their time in the kitchen and sunroom (rooting through the kids' toy baskets) but in time they found their way to the bedrooms too. I spent half the day today cleaning away mouse droppings, and now I'm sitting at the computer, listening to the traps click.
It's a hundred-year-old house. These things happen. My job is to detect rodents' presence and set traps. My dear husband does the rest. So far we're two down; who knows how many to go.
Want to hear the funny thing? Tomorrow I'm going to pick up our pet hamster from a friend's house. Mental note - remove the trap from the boys' room before Little Guy gets back. We don't want any collateral damage.
When we got home last night, I had not made it in the door before J was on the phone inviting friends to come play. Between 7 and 9 pm we had nine friends stop by. It's good to be home.
SO here are the things that need to be done once a week to maintain the house while we're gone:
Run water in all the sinks and flush all the toilets so the s-traps don't dry up and allow stinky sewer gas into the house.
Check for rodents; set traps; remove bodies.
Water the plants (over the summer I just move them to the back deck and they survive on rainwater but come November that's not going to work out).
Start the car and drive it around the block to prevent the tires from flattening.
In the week before we return, we need a housekeeper to give it a heavy duty all around cleaning - dust settles when we're gone, and everything gets a thick coating. The air smells musty and the water tastes funny.
It's a hundred-year-old house. These things happen. My job is to detect rodents' presence and set traps. My dear husband does the rest. So far we're two down; who knows how many to go.
Want to hear the funny thing? Tomorrow I'm going to pick up our pet hamster from a friend's house. Mental note - remove the trap from the boys' room before Little Guy gets back. We don't want any collateral damage.
When we got home last night, I had not made it in the door before J was on the phone inviting friends to come play. Between 7 and 9 pm we had nine friends stop by. It's good to be home.
SO here are the things that need to be done once a week to maintain the house while we're gone:
Run water in all the sinks and flush all the toilets so the s-traps don't dry up and allow stinky sewer gas into the house.
Check for rodents; set traps; remove bodies.
Water the plants (over the summer I just move them to the back deck and they survive on rainwater but come November that's not going to work out).
Start the car and drive it around the block to prevent the tires from flattening.
In the week before we return, we need a housekeeper to give it a heavy duty all around cleaning - dust settles when we're gone, and everything gets a thick coating. The air smells musty and the water tastes funny.
Leg 3 Tour de Michigan
Michigan really is best done in two legs. Some day we'll get that right.
Walloon Lake was lovely as always. I think that was the longest stretch of time we've ever spent up there with my sister and her family, and it was wonderful. Her girls (ages 4 and 6) are really fun to be around, and time with them is always a high point for my kids. I love to see them together.
For a side trip, our two families (nine in all for whoever's counting) drove out to Sleeping Bear Dunes on the Lake Michigan coast. In another year or two we'll do the Dunes as a camping overnight because it takes a while to get there, but it's worth it even for a day trip. The dunes are a funny thing - when we turned into the parking lot I thought "that's ALL?" - I was expecting them to be visually bigger. But when you're in the middle of the dunes it really looks and feels huge. The sand is powder-soft and miles deep -- Steve dug holes deep enough to bury C and A vertically!
Thing is, at the edge of every slope there are dune grasses and even trees here and there. In Michigan, even the sand dunes are mostly green. Wait till we get to the real desert where at the edge of the dune there's just more and more sand.
I love the feeling you get at the top of a mountain, when all you can see is a horizon of peaks overlapping like waves. I wonder if the desert is like that. I read that there's a place in Qatar you can go to experience "singing sands", where the sand is the perfect texture that it makes a resonant sound when it tumbles down the dune. I read a National Geographic article about another place with singing sand - that's something I want to experience.
It amazes me how we can spend four weeks - a whole month - at the lakes and it's still sad to leave.
BONUS READER QUIZ: What is wrong with the above picture? You know us well if you can spot the one thing that's just not right... Click on the "x comments" or "Post a Comment" link below to make a guess!
Walloon Lake was lovely as always. I think that was the longest stretch of time we've ever spent up there with my sister and her family, and it was wonderful. Her girls (ages 4 and 6) are really fun to be around, and time with them is always a high point for my kids. I love to see them together.
For a side trip, our two families (nine in all for whoever's counting) drove out to Sleeping Bear Dunes on the Lake Michigan coast. In another year or two we'll do the Dunes as a camping overnight because it takes a while to get there, but it's worth it even for a day trip. The dunes are a funny thing - when we turned into the parking lot I thought "that's ALL?" - I was expecting them to be visually bigger. But when you're in the middle of the dunes it really looks and feels huge. The sand is powder-soft and miles deep -- Steve dug holes deep enough to bury C and A vertically!Thing is, at the edge of every slope there are dune grasses and even trees here and there. In Michigan, even the sand dunes are mostly green. Wait till we get to the real desert where at the edge of the dune there's just more and more sand.
I love the feeling you get at the top of a mountain, when all you can see is a horizon of peaks overlapping like waves. I wonder if the desert is like that. I read that there's a place in Qatar you can go to experience "singing sands", where the sand is the perfect texture that it makes a resonant sound when it tumbles down the dune. I read a National Geographic article about another place with singing sand - that's something I want to experience.
It amazes me how we can spend four weeks - a whole month - at the lakes and it's still sad to leave.
BONUS READER QUIZ: What is wrong with the above picture? You know us well if you can spot the one thing that's just not right... Click on the "x comments" or "Post a Comment" link below to make a guess!
Leg 2 Tour de Michigan
Time to visit my folks in Ann Arbor, and it just happened to be Art Fair. Art Fair is the four days of summer when the city completely turns on its ear - four of the main streets downtown, from one end of the town to the other, are closed for the fair, rendering it virtually impossible to get from one place to another. At the same time, thousands of people who wouldn't know their way around in the best of situations descend on the fair city to further clog streets, parking lots, and restaurants.
I remember when I thought of Art Fair as the biggest party of the year. What a miserable old bag I've become.
Really, though, I still do enjoy visiting the fair - I'm a fan of art fairs in general, and I did have the chance to see most of the booths. I even bought something. But Art Fair added a layer of complexity that I could have lived without this year.
Another flash from the past - we spent some time at the Racquet Club, where I spent uncounted days when I was a kid/adolescent. They still play gutter ball, pom pom, and Marco Polo. I gave the kids a tour ("That's the barn we always thought was haunted, here's the bush I hid under when it was time for tennis lessons, this is where we crawled around in the dirt chasing kittens") and it's hard to believe I'm remembering when I was my kids' age. It seems almost as likely that I'm thinking of something they did.
Ah, me.
Oh yeah, where was I? Way, way off topic as usual. This is a weblog about traveling where?
The point was to go to Ann Arbor because that's where my dad was laid up. By force of sheer grit and determination he's getting around remarkably well but there's no doubt he needs surgery to fix that disc. Now there's a series of visits he needs to line up to get that done - an exam, consult with the neurosurgeon, pre-surgery tests, etc. In the meantime he's hobbling around and Mom is following him around worrying.
Thank God for martinis - vodka, dry with an extra olive.
I remember when I thought of Art Fair as the biggest party of the year. What a miserable old bag I've become.
Really, though, I still do enjoy visiting the fair - I'm a fan of art fairs in general, and I did have the chance to see most of the booths. I even bought something. But Art Fair added a layer of complexity that I could have lived without this year.
Another flash from the past - we spent some time at the Racquet Club, where I spent uncounted days when I was a kid/adolescent. They still play gutter ball, pom pom, and Marco Polo. I gave the kids a tour ("That's the barn we always thought was haunted, here's the bush I hid under when it was time for tennis lessons, this is where we crawled around in the dirt chasing kittens") and it's hard to believe I'm remembering when I was my kids' age. It seems almost as likely that I'm thinking of something they did.
Ah, me.
Oh yeah, where was I? Way, way off topic as usual. This is a weblog about traveling where?
The point was to go to Ann Arbor because that's where my dad was laid up. By force of sheer grit and determination he's getting around remarkably well but there's no doubt he needs surgery to fix that disc. Now there's a series of visits he needs to line up to get that done - an exam, consult with the neurosurgeon, pre-surgery tests, etc. In the meantime he's hobbling around and Mom is following him around worrying.
Thank God for martinis - vodka, dry with an extra olive.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Leg 1 - Tour de Michigan
Because the classes RTM teaches all fall during the school year, he has the summers off which makes it possible for us to take an extended month-long summer vacation in Northern Michigan. Our kids are the fourth generation of Monroes at RTM's place on Mullett Lake, while my parents are relative newcomers to the region - they're approaching their 20th year on Walloon Lake.
Sometimes, especially up here, I almost get how neighboring cultures can harbor ill feelings for each other even after decades of peace.
People can have uncommonly long memories. I shouldn't say that - it sounds bad, and that's not a fair representation. It's just that there's a stronger feeling of generational history here than I have seen anywhere else, probably because this is the only place I have experienced where families keep coming back for generation after generation.
Pittsburgh is like that for several of my friends - I should ask if they have any idea what I'm trying to say.
It's just beautiful up here, though. We have everything I could want - family for visiting, lakes for swimming, sand for building, long roads for cycling, good food for - well, you get the idea. I get more high-quality exercise here than anywhere. At home I do a lot of quickie workouts, just enough to stay in shape for the rare occasion when I can really go knock myself out. Here I can knock myself out on a regular basis. Running, open water swimming, hammerfest biking, you name it. Sweet.
S0 we've been up here for two weeks and it's time to move from Mullett Lake to Walloon, although that's not what we're going to do. Turns out my dad's back, which has been an issue on good days, hasn't been having any of those lately. He's holed up at home in Ann Arbor waiting for an MRI and an appointment with the neurosurgeon. So we're going to bring the whole famdamily downstate to relieve him from the tedium of waiting. Or relieve him from the comfort of a quiet couch in front of his choice of non-animated TV show. Whatever.
I'm worried about my dad and it's beginning to dawn on me that this may not be a convenient time to leave the country. Although we don't live really close by, I like to think I can be there if my folks need me. So add that to my list of concerns.
(PS An idea for a future posting - What Could Go Wrong? Sounds like a fun one - I'll hold off on that one for a really wigged out hormonal day. You are hereby warned.)
Sometimes, especially up here, I almost get how neighboring cultures can harbor ill feelings for each other even after decades of peace.
People can have uncommonly long memories. I shouldn't say that - it sounds bad, and that's not a fair representation. It's just that there's a stronger feeling of generational history here than I have seen anywhere else, probably because this is the only place I have experienced where families keep coming back for generation after generation.
Pittsburgh is like that for several of my friends - I should ask if they have any idea what I'm trying to say.
It's just beautiful up here, though. We have everything I could want - family for visiting, lakes for swimming, sand for building, long roads for cycling, good food for - well, you get the idea. I get more high-quality exercise here than anywhere. At home I do a lot of quickie workouts, just enough to stay in shape for the rare occasion when I can really go knock myself out. Here I can knock myself out on a regular basis. Running, open water swimming, hammerfest biking, you name it. Sweet.
S0 we've been up here for two weeks and it's time to move from Mullett Lake to Walloon, although that's not what we're going to do. Turns out my dad's back, which has been an issue on good days, hasn't been having any of those lately. He's holed up at home in Ann Arbor waiting for an MRI and an appointment with the neurosurgeon. So we're going to bring the whole famdamily downstate to relieve him from the tedium of waiting. Or relieve him from the comfort of a quiet couch in front of his choice of non-animated TV show. Whatever.
I'm worried about my dad and it's beginning to dawn on me that this may not be a convenient time to leave the country. Although we don't live really close by, I like to think I can be there if my folks need me. So add that to my list of concerns.
(PS An idea for a future posting - What Could Go Wrong? Sounds like a fun one - I'll hold off on that one for a really wigged out hormonal day. You are hereby warned.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)