Lake Week 2008 Part 1: Rain

Saturday: Travel is surprisingly easy, since it's not a holiday weekend. With a stop at the Moulton Farm, we're at the lake around 1. Lunch and supper with my in-laws, with plenty of relaxing in between. L goes in the water and gets an unexpected dunking when her grip on the dock's edge slips, but no harm done. JJ has chosen an inopportune time to develop stranger anxiety.

Sunday: The loon pair in the cove have a chick this year. D takes L to GPC in the morning for two hours so I can write, still working on reordering a few scenes in the middle of the book. JJ sleeps for four hours, making up for a rough first night. Rain 12-2. Trip to Center Harbor for groceries. Rain 5-sometime in the early morning. D gets started on his project for the vacation, taking inventory of the accumulated junk in the crawlspaces and closets upstairs. Shortly after we get JJ to bed, an oak tree comes down, narrowly missing big cottage porch (or so we thought, later realizing that a branch had glanced off the roof--you can see it in the background of the second picture).

Monday: Rain. I make pancakes. D drives down to Boston to see his cousin and about the legal arrangements for the cottage's future. I play with L, cut pictures out of the newspaper for her to glue, make a fire and spend the rest of the day keeping JJ away from it. He's teething or something, nursing every time I turn around. L watches the animated Robin Hood DVD on my laptop, runs out of steam around 5 pm and gets very clingy, but it's a surprisingly good day for having been stuck inside the whole time. For dinner I make a huge pot of pasta and sauteed globe zucchini and the little star-shaped ones we call flying saucer squash (we eat it for lunch for the rest of the week).

Tuesday: Another threatening morning, so we drive in to Meredith. It clears up. We walk along the waterfront and marvel at the millrace by the Mill Falls, which can barely contain the amount of water coming through.

Lydia walks on the rocks at the water's edge. We visit the Innisfree Bookshop, where I manage to only buy a couple of things, then walk up to a new gourmet food store a friend told me about. On the way back we stop at a new bakery for an enormous round of foccaccia. Businesses are always coming and going in Meredith. Lunch on the porch is bread, cheese, and sliced cucumber. D tackles more inventory. I take L down to the dock to play, and think about how last year we wouldn't let her on the old concrete stairs without someone to hold her hand. Now she scrambles surely around the shore rocks, finding sticks and pebbles to throw into the lake (and one of her brother's socks, which earns her a time-out), and puts her feet in the water. We drive over to GPC, but the ice cream parlor is closed and it's begun raining again, so we turn around, occasioning tears from a disappointed little girl. She is mollified by some more scissors-and-glue action, and her mother congratulates herself for having thought to bring the stuff along. Intermittent showers throughout the afternoon. Dinner is pork fajitas, rice and beans, and salad.