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Holidays must end, as you all know
This is the synopsis of my week.
On Tuesday, I left Boston at a relatively unspeakable hour, although in comparison with some of the days to come, I really shouldn't have complained. I stared blankly out the window until somewhere into New Hampshire; I read Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever (1996), which is worth its price for the title novella; I was met in West Ossipee by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schreibergasse, G, and my ungodson, who now speaks in complete, if somewhat eccentrically pronounced sentences and believes eating vegetables is fun.1 They introduced me to Lake Ossipee, where I rolled up my corduroys and waded in the shallows, little glassy ripples warmer than the sea and flecked with pine straw; I got a splinter from the dock in the bottom of my foot and took it out with my pocketknife. (This was the kind of trip that abused my body in a good way, i.e., it did not disintegrate and I find this heartening, despite the fact that getting up this morning I was aware of muscle groups that I thought had been AWOL since 2005.) Josh took me up one of the trails around either Camp Cody or Camp Calumet, I think in order to determine whether I was going to disintegrate. Some poison ivy which had been optimistically springing up at the edge of the beach was eradicated. There was lasagna for dinner and then ice cream from Bobby-Sue's, a sort of small local chain that makes impressive ginger and quite tolerable oreo flavors.2 Josh and I went walking after dark and were not run over by late-night drunk drivers, although it kind of wasn't for lack of trying on their part. The plan was to spend the next day hiking around Sandwich Notch and the Bearcamp River, so my hosts turned in before eleven o'clock. I stayed up far too late working on a story.
On Wednesday, it rained solidly and unceasingly and we did not hike anywhere because we did not desire to drown. Instead we sat around the house reading, playing a game of Boggle (which I lost), and periodically looking out the window at the squalls and the driving grey combers the lake had turned into; there were frequent apostrophes to the weather, sometimes with expletives. I read J.G. Farrell's Troubles (1970), which I had bought from the book kiosk in South Station on the sudden panicked (and wholly accurate3) intimation that I would not have enough to read in New Hampshire. This novel may deserve a post of its own, so suffice to say that I loved it and I am now looking out for copies of the other two-thirds of Farrell's "Empire" trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978); it is at once a political tragicomedy and an absurdist love affair and if I had to liken it to anything, it would be Withnail & I (1987). I finished reading and it was still raining. Sunset kept looking as though it would clear, but the rain only picked up again in that peculiar tallowy overcast that comes under storms. We grilled hamburgers, in the rain. Sometime after dark, Josh and I maxed out on cabin fever and went swimming in the lake, in the rain. It was lovely.
On Thursday, the sun came in through the curtains with the kind of pre-autumnal clarity that is best admired in the knowledge that one doesn't have to do anything about it, but Josh and G pried me out of bed—is it apparent enough that I am not a morning person? I am nocturnal and prefer to observe sunrises from the late end of the night—and all four of us drove off to Sandwich Notch per the original plan. G demonstrated immense patience by kid-watching while Josh and I hiked upstream to look for the fabled natural waterslides, which turned out to be downstream via a ridiculously picturesque route of ferns and moss and small bright mushrooms. There followed a lot of splashing and sliding. I took off my boots, because I climb better without them, and roamed around the huge granite slopes and boulders farther downstream; Peter painted our feet with a stick which he kept dipping in an eddy of the river, insisting we not move while he worked. There was a beautiful leopard frog in a kind of freshwater tidepool, soft-backed prismatic bronze and green. We swung by the Old Country Store in Moultonborough on the way back; we returned with fudge and in the afternoon I went swimming for the first time by sunlight in Lake Ossipee. When Josh offered me an inner tube to float on, I didn't realize he meant the actual inflatable ring from a sixteen-wheeler's tire. (Swimming is no problem, but I have somehow misplaced my ability to float.) I got leeches, but I survived.4 There was meat pie and kale for dinner and afterward I spent what must have been over an hour with G discussing her novel, otherwise known as, she talked to me about the characters and the background and I threw worldbuilding questions at her without pausing for breath until Josh kindly, but firmly detached me for a walk.5 It was a brilliantly clear night, so we identified the constellations we could—Cassiopeia, Orion, the Big Dipper, Scorpius—and discovered, by the time we got back to the water by driveways and service roads, that we'd walked all the way around one of the bays of the lake. There were two skunks by the side of the road, quite unafraid of us. We were not shot by a rabid fox, although we were passed three times by the same guy in a truck. I read half of Josephine Tey's A Shilling for Candles (1936).
On Friday, there was Mount Hancock. I think this was the first mountain I'd really gone near since I climbed Monadnock for my twenty-first birthday. I spent about half the time being furious with my body for completely letting me down—my vision started whiting out as we got into the steeper bits of the north peak, I was shorter of breath than I expected, my ears were ringing badly—and the other half, after I'd had a ham sandwich and actually given my system some electrolytes to work with, really enjoying myself. (Note to self: next time, bring salt.) Dinner was at Chequers Villa, where I researched the crud out of a plate of frutti di mare linguine. I did not have as much chance to talk to Josh's brother as I would have liked, since yelling things at a mountain does not count as conversation in my book (and may be grounds for a restraining order in his), but I am hoping to catch at least one of his plays at the Portland Stage in the fall. Rather late in the evening,maweisse and Stephen6 joined us at the cabin; I got to see a rather spectacular joke-telling performance from Josh; and while the sleeping arrangements were slightly ridiculous, we did manage to fit everyone inside. I stood on the dock under the stars and talked to gaudior and rushthatspeaks, who now have a lake and a dock of their own. I fell asleep before two in the morning.
And I slept until noon on Saturday and spent most of the early afternoon drinking licorice-mint tea and playing roofball with Josh and Stephen; I finished A Shilling for Candles on the bus back to Boston and watched The Piano as previously described and did not answer the way too many e-mails I'd built up in five days without internet, but that's okay. They were a wonderful and a badly needed five days, full of woods and water and mountains and conversation and silence, all things I need to keep sane. The sole drawback was the piercing quality of my dawn-rising ungodson's voice, which you could market as an alarm clock; but we worked out a way of dealing with it, and I'm not as sleep-deprived as I could have been. I believe this is what people mean when they talk about having vacations. They're good stuff.
1. He was shy of me until sometime after dinner, when I read him Norma Farber's As I Was Crossing Boston Common (1975); thereafter he would do things like barrel up to me at full speed and grab me around the knees—hugging height for him with a standing adult—and poke me with sticks. He was napping when I left this afternoon, but I assume someone has explained to him that I did not mysteriously vanish. If they haven't, I'll have the fun of reappearing someday out of the blue and really confusing him.
2. Ice cream is the only form in which I eat Oreos or Hydrox—straight, they're tongue-hurtingly sweet. I make this statement alongside the equally true fact that I consumed over this week a staggering amount of yummy bars, which is what my hosts' household call a kind of home-brewed, three-layer brownie made with condensed milk. The kick of the theobromine entering your bloodstream almost distracts you from the sensation that your teeth are dissolving. Go know.
3. With peculiar exceptions like City of Illusions, The Scarlet Letter, and The Moonstone, the shelves of Josh's aunt's cabin seem to be one of those places where bargain basement paperbacks go to die. They had a Nero Wolfe novel, but it wasn't written by Rex Stout. There was a prehistoric YA called Bond of the Fire (1968) by Anthony Fon Eisen, which had even worse infodumps than Jean Auel and none of the entertainingly graphic sex. There was Ken Follett's The Big Needle, originally published as Simon Myles' The Big Apple (1974), which did have graphic sex, but not of the sort worth reading for, unless you find headdesk, rinse, repeat entertaining. I consider myself to have raised the literary atmosphere immensely by adding a slightly foxed paperback of Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat I bought for two dollars from the Moultonborough Old Country Store.
4. This is less horrifying than it sounds. They were small leeches, olive-colored and thumbnail-length; one of them had the sense to bugger off when I flicked it repeatedly with a fingernail and a judicious application of salt took care of the other. I found the experience less viscerally revolting (oh my God, leeches!) than unwelcome and nonplussing (seriously, leeches?). This was apparently the first year they'd put in an appearance at Lake Ossipee; Josh had found another earlier in the week. I'm hoping by next summer they've decided it's not worth the trouble.
5. I apologized for being Charles Babbage, which caused Josh to opine that I'd always reminded him more of Ada Lovelace. Since he was being the sensible one, by default this made him Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This is why I love my friends.
6.Who may have livejournals or other internet handles, but I do not know them. Everyone I know seems to be gravitating toward Facebook. Excuse me while I continue to avoid that particular trend.
And I am pleased to report that it didn't all crash back into despair in Boston: this afternoon was a surprise birthday party forfleurdelis28, organized by her sister at the MFA. There was chocolate cake. We may have snarked unfairly at Jan Steen's The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1671), but seriously, it had beautiful fabric and nobody's faces were in the same scene. Also I may have traumatized some passing children by going on about the rape of Kassandra and Hephaistos' leg-humping of Athene in one of the Greek vase rooms, but isn't that what scholarship is for? I may spend the rest of tonight watching 12 Angry Men (1957) on TCM. I may also just go to sleep. For a change.
It was a good week.
On Tuesday, I left Boston at a relatively unspeakable hour, although in comparison with some of the days to come, I really shouldn't have complained. I stared blankly out the window until somewhere into New Hampshire; I read Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever (1996), which is worth its price for the title novella; I was met in West Ossipee by
schreibergasse, G, and my ungodson, who now speaks in complete, if somewhat eccentrically pronounced sentences and believes eating vegetables is fun.1 They introduced me to Lake Ossipee, where I rolled up my corduroys and waded in the shallows, little glassy ripples warmer than the sea and flecked with pine straw; I got a splinter from the dock in the bottom of my foot and took it out with my pocketknife. (This was the kind of trip that abused my body in a good way, i.e., it did not disintegrate and I find this heartening, despite the fact that getting up this morning I was aware of muscle groups that I thought had been AWOL since 2005.) Josh took me up one of the trails around either Camp Cody or Camp Calumet, I think in order to determine whether I was going to disintegrate. Some poison ivy which had been optimistically springing up at the edge of the beach was eradicated. There was lasagna for dinner and then ice cream from Bobby-Sue's, a sort of small local chain that makes impressive ginger and quite tolerable oreo flavors.2 Josh and I went walking after dark and were not run over by late-night drunk drivers, although it kind of wasn't for lack of trying on their part. The plan was to spend the next day hiking around Sandwich Notch and the Bearcamp River, so my hosts turned in before eleven o'clock. I stayed up far too late working on a story.On Wednesday, it rained solidly and unceasingly and we did not hike anywhere because we did not desire to drown. Instead we sat around the house reading, playing a game of Boggle (which I lost), and periodically looking out the window at the squalls and the driving grey combers the lake had turned into; there were frequent apostrophes to the weather, sometimes with expletives. I read J.G. Farrell's Troubles (1970), which I had bought from the book kiosk in South Station on the sudden panicked (and wholly accurate3) intimation that I would not have enough to read in New Hampshire. This novel may deserve a post of its own, so suffice to say that I loved it and I am now looking out for copies of the other two-thirds of Farrell's "Empire" trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978); it is at once a political tragicomedy and an absurdist love affair and if I had to liken it to anything, it would be Withnail & I (1987). I finished reading and it was still raining. Sunset kept looking as though it would clear, but the rain only picked up again in that peculiar tallowy overcast that comes under storms. We grilled hamburgers, in the rain. Sometime after dark, Josh and I maxed out on cabin fever and went swimming in the lake, in the rain. It was lovely.
On Thursday, the sun came in through the curtains with the kind of pre-autumnal clarity that is best admired in the knowledge that one doesn't have to do anything about it, but Josh and G pried me out of bed—is it apparent enough that I am not a morning person? I am nocturnal and prefer to observe sunrises from the late end of the night—and all four of us drove off to Sandwich Notch per the original plan. G demonstrated immense patience by kid-watching while Josh and I hiked upstream to look for the fabled natural waterslides, which turned out to be downstream via a ridiculously picturesque route of ferns and moss and small bright mushrooms. There followed a lot of splashing and sliding. I took off my boots, because I climb better without them, and roamed around the huge granite slopes and boulders farther downstream; Peter painted our feet with a stick which he kept dipping in an eddy of the river, insisting we not move while he worked. There was a beautiful leopard frog in a kind of freshwater tidepool, soft-backed prismatic bronze and green. We swung by the Old Country Store in Moultonborough on the way back; we returned with fudge and in the afternoon I went swimming for the first time by sunlight in Lake Ossipee. When Josh offered me an inner tube to float on, I didn't realize he meant the actual inflatable ring from a sixteen-wheeler's tire. (Swimming is no problem, but I have somehow misplaced my ability to float.) I got leeches, but I survived.4 There was meat pie and kale for dinner and afterward I spent what must have been over an hour with G discussing her novel, otherwise known as, she talked to me about the characters and the background and I threw worldbuilding questions at her without pausing for breath until Josh kindly, but firmly detached me for a walk.5 It was a brilliantly clear night, so we identified the constellations we could—Cassiopeia, Orion, the Big Dipper, Scorpius—and discovered, by the time we got back to the water by driveways and service roads, that we'd walked all the way around one of the bays of the lake. There were two skunks by the side of the road, quite unafraid of us. We were not shot by a rabid fox, although we were passed three times by the same guy in a truck. I read half of Josephine Tey's A Shilling for Candles (1936).
On Friday, there was Mount Hancock. I think this was the first mountain I'd really gone near since I climbed Monadnock for my twenty-first birthday. I spent about half the time being furious with my body for completely letting me down—my vision started whiting out as we got into the steeper bits of the north peak, I was shorter of breath than I expected, my ears were ringing badly—and the other half, after I'd had a ham sandwich and actually given my system some electrolytes to work with, really enjoying myself. (Note to self: next time, bring salt.) Dinner was at Chequers Villa, where I researched the crud out of a plate of frutti di mare linguine. I did not have as much chance to talk to Josh's brother as I would have liked, since yelling things at a mountain does not count as conversation in my book (and may be grounds for a restraining order in his), but I am hoping to catch at least one of his plays at the Portland Stage in the fall. Rather late in the evening,
maweisse and Stephen6 joined us at the cabin; I got to see a rather spectacular joke-telling performance from Josh; and while the sleeping arrangements were slightly ridiculous, we did manage to fit everyone inside. I stood on the dock under the stars and talked to gaudior and rushthatspeaks, who now have a lake and a dock of their own. I fell asleep before two in the morning.And I slept until noon on Saturday and spent most of the early afternoon drinking licorice-mint tea and playing roofball with Josh and Stephen; I finished A Shilling for Candles on the bus back to Boston and watched The Piano as previously described and did not answer the way too many e-mails I'd built up in five days without internet, but that's okay. They were a wonderful and a badly needed five days, full of woods and water and mountains and conversation and silence, all things I need to keep sane. The sole drawback was the piercing quality of my dawn-rising ungodson's voice, which you could market as an alarm clock; but we worked out a way of dealing with it, and I'm not as sleep-deprived as I could have been. I believe this is what people mean when they talk about having vacations. They're good stuff.
1. He was shy of me until sometime after dinner, when I read him Norma Farber's As I Was Crossing Boston Common (1975); thereafter he would do things like barrel up to me at full speed and grab me around the knees—hugging height for him with a standing adult—and poke me with sticks. He was napping when I left this afternoon, but I assume someone has explained to him that I did not mysteriously vanish. If they haven't, I'll have the fun of reappearing someday out of the blue and really confusing him.
2. Ice cream is the only form in which I eat Oreos or Hydrox—straight, they're tongue-hurtingly sweet. I make this statement alongside the equally true fact that I consumed over this week a staggering amount of yummy bars, which is what my hosts' household call a kind of home-brewed, three-layer brownie made with condensed milk. The kick of the theobromine entering your bloodstream almost distracts you from the sensation that your teeth are dissolving. Go know.
3. With peculiar exceptions like City of Illusions, The Scarlet Letter, and The Moonstone, the shelves of Josh's aunt's cabin seem to be one of those places where bargain basement paperbacks go to die. They had a Nero Wolfe novel, but it wasn't written by Rex Stout. There was a prehistoric YA called Bond of the Fire (1968) by Anthony Fon Eisen, which had even worse infodumps than Jean Auel and none of the entertainingly graphic sex. There was Ken Follett's The Big Needle, originally published as Simon Myles' The Big Apple (1974), which did have graphic sex, but not of the sort worth reading for, unless you find headdesk, rinse, repeat entertaining. I consider myself to have raised the literary atmosphere immensely by adding a slightly foxed paperback of Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat I bought for two dollars from the Moultonborough Old Country Store.
4. This is less horrifying than it sounds. They were small leeches, olive-colored and thumbnail-length; one of them had the sense to bugger off when I flicked it repeatedly with a fingernail and a judicious application of salt took care of the other. I found the experience less viscerally revolting (oh my God, leeches!) than unwelcome and nonplussing (seriously, leeches?). This was apparently the first year they'd put in an appearance at Lake Ossipee; Josh had found another earlier in the week. I'm hoping by next summer they've decided it's not worth the trouble.
5. I apologized for being Charles Babbage, which caused Josh to opine that I'd always reminded him more of Ada Lovelace. Since he was being the sensible one, by default this made him Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This is why I love my friends.
6.
And I am pleased to report that it didn't all crash back into despair in Boston: this afternoon was a surprise birthday party for
fleurdelis28, organized by her sister at the MFA. There was chocolate cake. We may have snarked unfairly at Jan Steen's The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1671), but seriously, it had beautiful fabric and nobody's faces were in the same scene. Also I may have traumatized some passing children by going on about the rape of Kassandra and Hephaistos' leg-humping of Athene in one of the Greek vase rooms, but isn't that what scholarship is for? I may spend the rest of tonight watching 12 Angry Men (1957) on TCM. I may also just go to sleep. For a change.It was a good week.
PS/Iar-nóta