Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Bitter enders

Summer bounty: canned peaches

Summer is coming crashing grinding to a halt whether we wish it too or not, and in my case the answer is a most emphatic "not!"

But all good things come to an end, and as I've said many times on this blog, I do enjoy my job most of the time. In particular, it will be a bit of a relief to be able to justify time to concentrate on adult things again, thanks mostly to the miracle of daycare.


Much as I love my kid, I don't get much done when I'm watching her. And she needs to be with her little friends some of the time, or she won't be properly socialized in time for school.

In other news, our bus is up for sale. This is primarily because most recent trip to VA to see Aimee's folks was hard on me, mostly because of all the bag-carrying, but also because we managed to break the bed in our Airbnb! I repaired it, of course, and indeed it was in better shape when we left than when we arrived. The lady whose home it was seems none the wiser. I think the bed, a miserable piece of flat-pack MDF dressed up in heavy black lacquer as it it were a real piece of furniture, was already broken before we arrived, but hadn't yet collapsed, and when we arrived to make use of it, already substantially weakened. Anyway, long story short, it took two days to fix.

Additionally, Aimee said she wouldn't go camping in the bus. That wasn't unreasonable, since the bus is very small and doesn't have a bed for Edana. But I want to go camping with my kid! And so, it turns out, does Aimee.

So we're selling the bus and buying a camper trailer. We already have one, in fact, We placed a deposit on it Sunday and will pick it up in a couple of week's time, once the owners have had one more trip. I'm going to miss my venerable bus, but there's not much point having a camper that you can't go camping in.

We'll use the new camper to visit Aimee's folks and to camp here in Maine. I'm already exploring with the map to see where we could go that a little kid might like. I'm also replacing the truck's trailer hitch and wiring up the appropriate seven-point plug.

In other news, the garden is producing tomatoes now, my favorite cooking ingredient. I have a nice chicken-garlic-tomato risotto cooking as I type. The Land Rover needs a muffler, and indeed I already cut the old one off in hopes of getting a new stainless one from the UK for cheap, thanks to the "Brexit" premium on dollar-pound exchange rate. This hope proved fruitless, because once we added the shipping, a stainless series Rover muffler was as prohibitively expensive from the UK as they are in the US. We'll get another mild steel one and hope to make it last longer.


Monday, August 1, 2016

There and back again, again


To Virginia and back with a toddler. In a 1997 Camry.

Need I say more?