Vacationland!

We went to Maine! We picked up Duchess (fresh from three weeks in Sweden) in the airport in Boston and headed north to visit family, experience the heat and humidity and mosquitoes of an East Coast summer, and have some classic Southern Maine adventures.

We spent a week by Sebago Lake, with appropriate amounts of swimming, kayaking, beach-sitting, shuffleboarding, ice cream-eating, LL Bean trips, and tennis. 

We played a round of traditional family Extreme Croquet, which Papa Big Cook won, AS ALWAYS. Antarctic Uncle gave the girls impromptu driving lessons in a stick-shift beater over the grass on his property. We got to take a sail on Casco Bay. We ate fish and chips and lobster rolls and soft-serve ice cream. It was a delight.

And then we spent half a day in Boston, revisiting a few places and recreating some photos from a visit a decade ago. 

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Catching up

 It's been a minute! And we've had adventures!

I went to Miami for work, thoroughly enjoyed it, never going back.

Then Cook and I left the girls at home for a week and went to New York City. (I told a coworker this was our first EVER vacation together without the kids, and she was horrified to the point that I got embarrassed about what I guess is yet another failure of Self Care.) This was utterly delightful. We went to museums (Transit Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters, Museum of the City of New York), we went to the Comedy Cellar like good tourists. We went to a bar to listen to live jazz, we visited a bunch of interesting city stuff (so many parks, the Roosevelt Island Tram, Stuyvesant Town, the East River Ferry, East Village community gardens). We ate a lot of good and/or interesting things (an egg cream soda, enormous Italian sandwiches, khachapuri, pickled kumquats, etc.). And while we were gone, the kids took excellent care of themselves and each other. So it was a triumph all around, totally worth waiting nearly 20 years.

 

And then I went on a short camping trip with a friend to a hot spring in southern/middle Oregon.

And now suddenly summer has begun! Skipper is done with school and looking forward to a summer of naps on the couch. Duchess is off in Sweden again, visiting family and friends and exploring on her own, but she'll meet us on the East Coast for a family visit to Maine. 

New year

 It's 2024!

Portland is in the throes of a major winter weather event - a snowstorm but with such cold temperatures and high winds that it has felt violent and stressful rather than peaceful and hushed. We're supposed to have an ice storm tomorrow to finish it up.

Our holiday was lovely; low-key and cozy. We played the Reindeer Games again (kids won). 

Duchess has gone back to college, and we're all facing the long slog of January/February but also, hey, a new year! Another trip around the sun! 

Realignment

 Duchess came home yesterday, and we're catching up on all the holiday prep. Today she and I went to Tuba Christmas, and then the whole family went to get a tree. Duchess and Skipper disagreed strongly on which kind of tree to get (soft and fluffy vs stiff and sparse) but Skipper generously conceded to Duchess's preference. 

Regular Life

Fall is over! 

We hosted a Japanese high school student for three weeks, which was awkward and weird and also sometimes delightful. Our guest was a cheerful, easily-pleased 17-year-old whose English conversation skills are pretty weak, so conversations were limited to simple topics and short sentences. 

She had classes and field trips during the day on weekdays, so we were responsible for evenings and weekends. This required us to perform a better version of our life. Before she arrived, we cleaned up and organized and put away some remaining things we'd been procrastinating, and after she arrived, we had to just be better - make a salad at dinner time, plan outings on the weekend. Instead of getting a takeout pizza, we got pizza from three different places and did a taste test. Instead of lying around procrastinating chores on Saturday morning, we went bowling. Instead of doing extra chores on the three-day weekend, we went to visit some waterfalls. All of this took more time and energy and money than our normal life, but it was more of life, and that felt good. Also, I like bowling. 

It was a good fall for trees this year.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving visit from Uncle Rockstar and family. 

Skipper's school district was shut down for weeks by a teacher strike, but the timeline was uncertain the whole time, so she never knew if she would be going to school the next day. It was wearisome, but I felt very fortunate that Skipper is old enough to stay home alone and too young to have to worry about getting reference letters or learn AP content. She's back at school now, and they've taken away half of her Christmas holiday (to make up part of the 11 lost teaching days), so she feels quite resentful. 

Duchess will be home in a few weeks, and has already begun scoffing at our mild winter weather, now that she's a hardened Minnesotan. (Cook and I, who were in Minnesota during an exceptionally cold streak in January 1994 when the temperature stayed below zero for days,* just shake our heads and mutter things like "you just wait" when she talks about how she's gotten used to temperatures in the 20s.) We're looking forward to seeing here, 

*It was really cold, my friends. It was so cold that the governor closed all the public schools. (We still had class, and I remember wearing basically all my clothes for the trip across campus to attend bio lab.) It was so cold that we went out and tried to blow bubbles and they FROZE AND SHATTERED IN THE AIR.