locavores my foot

It seemed like a good value-added idea at the time: An organic garden for the tenants to graze in. Eat locally and all that. Other summer cottage owners had the same idea. I wonder whether anyone ate anything out of their gardens.
I came back to find withered edamame and string beans, flowering broccoli and basil, a few courageous nasturtiums and a whole motherlode of bug-eaten collards. Fortunately, I like collards, as I'll be eating them daily. And very locally.

house portrait

Trying for a shot for the Offshore Property website, which seems to have one from when the porch was first built in 2001.

hermitage

It poured all day yesterday, and the sound of the waves and the rain on the uninsulated roof of Claudia's Surf City was amazingly soporific. I got out of bed to buy the Times, but otherwise hermited, accepting no calls or visitors, reading no e-mail, severing connections with the mainland, marooned on the island of my bed on the island.
Today the sun is brilliant, and I gotta get moving. I have to weed gardens (seaweed for mulch?), weed around septic tank filters, paint windowsills, cut brush, move boats, weedwhack (sp?). Then I better check me for ticks.

home is the sailor

After a long season, it's good to be home by the sea, with everything amazingly shiphape.

boze mill

You look at this picture by Chris Garrison and wonder: How did they have cameras in prehistoric times?

nice tomatoes

The final fruits of summer—unless I get lucky in Block Island and some vestige of my garden remains.

and counting

Three years ago today.

otherwhere

The doors have shut forever at the Calabama. Considering that the establishment was in Arkansas, it did seem to have a bit of an identity problem—or at least a fervent desire to be otherwhere.
I on the other hand, am on my way otherwhere (Calimex? Rhodeyork?) and have no desire to be there just at present. I'm rather liking it where I am, in the city so nice they named it twice.

friends

There have been some complaints lately that I spread myself too thinly, spending a few days in one place with one set of friends and then moving on to the next. (Above: Me with a deer-n-the-headlights Bear, and Ruca with Yoyo.) That will certainly be the case this fall, with travel all over the country.
It makes me wonder about the recent NYT story about how friends make you quit smoking, gain weight, drink and be happy. I have smoking and nonsmoking friends, drinking and nondrinking, fat and skinny, happy and miserable, gay and straight. Most of them for many, many years now. So what's the deal? Have we influenced one another? Or are these studies totally bogus?

road trip lag

Another image from Missouri. Apparently I am not quite back in New York City yet. . .

fox and goose

Reportedly, Fox and Geese was Queen Victoria's favorite game—a strategic board game kind of like Go or Checkers.
This superannuated fox was donated by FLM, and it made Ruca the Precious Pup go crazy when she noticed it on top of the refrigerator at the Goose. The goose was donated by Bill when I said I needed a stuffed goose to go with the fox.
And speaking of the refrigerator, I had a dream that a Coke Classic ad was being shot using this very Frigidaire and cutting to the benches outside of Thomasville's (unfortunately) disused gas station (see earlier post). (You too could lease it for $500 a YEAR plus a portion of profits.)
And speaking of Fox, I hate Fox. They are a sick, sick company. Their latest Acorn thing makes me puke, luring volunteers into error. Righteous indignation because a prostitute is trying to get a mortgage? Prostitutes shouldn't be allowed to own? Give me a fucking break. We are all geese, and Fox is the fox.
And another thing. Also this.

home

The trip would have been shorter but for the MacDonald's breakfast sandwiches in Ohio, which didn't do Chris or the dog any harm, as they didn't eat the sausage.
Still, we have landed.

roadside attractions

another spring, Missouri. . .

the best heirloom tomatoes of the season, Indiana. . .

somewhere near dayton

with an illegal dog

tiki torches

How can we leave all this? Well, we will. Tomorrow morning we set forth for Points East. Click on pic for better view of Chris's stitched-together panoramic.

water water

. . .everywhere. There are maybe 50 springs in a 20-mile radius around the Goose. The one above is at Boze Mill; it produces 12 million gallons a day. Clear, beautiful. Hummingbrds ply the air over the sluiceway. Not far from there we saw a tiny fountain that appeared to spring from a boulder no bigger than a bucket.
Water is the oil of the future. Desertification and ensuing water wars have already begun in Spain and Kenya and California. They will spread. Not to internalize the apocalyptic views of so many in this area, but it's as well to have a steady source of your own.

floating

That's me and my daughter on the waterways of my childhood. Her husband is taking the picture. They do the paddling. I'm the passenger now.
Going downriver, though, not much effort is necessary.

Oh and yeah, Block Island gets featured—again—in the New York Times, which neglects to mention the plethora of cottages for rent off-season. See link at right!

family values

Yesterday we discovered that the backs of a new series of quarters will feature several of our favorite natural beauty spots: Weir Farm (childhood home of CBA) in Connecticut, Block Island (home of us) in Rhode Island, and the Ozark Scenic Waterways (home of the Goose) in Missouri, which we hope to explore by canoe today. To find out which of your favorite spots are to be immortalized on hard cash, check out the website about the quarters.
Of course, since it's a government website there is a good possibility that this is just another step in the march towards Hussein Obama socialism and that all of these natural wonders will be emptied of people who will all be put into camps without medicare run by the UN and underwritten by the non-gold-standard federal reserve and forcibly immunized until they are dead. . .
But I prefer to think that it's just about the design of coins.

somebody's been in the ozarks too long

ozark-american weekend

We went down to the swimmin hole. . .

. . . welcomed friends. . .

. . .enjoyed nature. . .

. . .as well as more domesticated nature. . .

. . .and managed to escape chiggers. . .

sunday post

season's end

I remember now why I bought this place in Nowheresville, The Ozarks.
On Block Island, as Labor Day weekend begins, systems are falling apart and tempers are fraying. If real estate agents are asked once more whether there are any bugs, they are going to snap. "Yes, there are bugs," they say over and over. "There are roly-polies and crickets and silverfish. Show them to your children. This is not New York City." (FYI, there are bugs in the city too—just different ones. Cockroaches and fruit flies and bedbugs.)
According to a series of calls from Douglas and the real estate agents, tenants moved into my place yesterday to find a nonfunctional hot water heater. (After three seasons? This seems unconscionable. My guess is that a breaker is off, but we'll see.) (Also, why did the real estate agent call my ex husband? My nearest on-island relation?) Anyway, the Gas Guy told the tenants he'd be over to look at it today, and his guess was that the fan motor had blown out. We'll see.
"But we have to bathe the babies tonight," the tenants told Edie, the queen of real estate agents.
"You have a stove," she told them pertly. "Heat up some water and put it in the bathtub."
"Sometimes I fear for the coming generation," she told me this morning. "They don't know how to do anything."

i just want to be alone

In one way it's harder to paint a small space than a big one: You have to stay out of your own way. Yesterday, I didn't. I managed to spill a quart of peptobismal pink paint all over the floor of the closet, with the result that more things got painted than I had intended. Pink. Got some of the floor painted post disaster, but for my next act, I will paint myself out of the bathroom and indeed the entire house. . .

when the river floods

Fortunately, the floor is concrete. Unfortunately, it is still awaiting its second coat of paint. Right now we are more drought than flood, and the Eleven Point River remains within its banks.

no historic district commisssion

It's so much fun not having to be tasteful! What with Chris's glass brick work (and thanks again Sara for the bricks!) and Hannah's turquoise eyeliner, the Goose is looking mightily spiffed—if not precisely conservative. We had tacos on the veranda last night by candlelight, and today the work crew heads for Arkansas and the crystal mines. Trying to talk myself into putting a second coat on the floors while they're gone. . .

sprucing the goose