Paddle Board

Every year or two friends invite us out on Owasco lake on their pontoon/ party boat.  This year they said they had "new toys" to try out, a paddle-board and a kayak.  It was a beautiful day to be out on the lake.

I decided to give the paddle boat a try.   It is a larger version of a surf board, only instead of riding the ocean waves,  you paddle you way around the lake, standing up, ideally.   I thought the hardest part would be just getting up onto the board.  I managed to do that.  You can paddle on your knees, or even sitting on the board.  But pretty soon,  to soon, I, got myself in a standing position.   I stood up on the board long before I had the feel for the way the board and the water interacted, much less how the board acted with a person on top of it.   Predictably, I soon took an ugly, awkward tumble, falling forward of all things, landing on my chest and then into the water.   Fortunately, I assured everyone, I was just fine, and went on to paddle on my knees and/or sitting.

This evening, I must confess,  I am feeling the consequences of that fall.  I don't know exactly what the pain means......a bruised sternum,  a cracked rib?   But clearly, now I can feel it for sure!  Thankfully, I managed to be fine until I got home!

Susie Gliding Along

Susie and Wayne go out every day, so they are pros.   In the picture you can see how it is supposed to be done.

All in all, it was a wonderful day.  First we had a picnic lunch.    I enjoyed being in the water.  It was perfect.   We took a nice trip around the lake and looked at all the mansions.  We caught up on all the things that have been happening in our lives since we last saw one another.

Hopefully they will invite us again another year.


Next time, however, I think I'll take a pass on all the toys!

Grand-daughters

'Sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of.'

Well, maybe not entirely, and I should know.  I have raised four daughters, successfully, I might add.  The measure of that is that they are all functioning adults, making positive contributions to society.  One has two daughters.  Another has one daughter, which means that I have three grand-daughters.  They are all employed, in one way or another.

 On Gerry's side, now we have added to the fold, two new great-grand-daughters.  Guess I'll leave the matter of having sons to other families, and hopefully it will all balance out in the end.

I am especially grateful that my grandchildren do not live very far away, and I get to see them pretty often.  The ones pictured here are Emma, five years old, and Sadie, three years old.   In September, Emma will begin kindergarten, and Sadie will be off to pre-school.    Once they are in school, it all goes so fast.   The teen-aged grand-daughter is going into her senior year of high school.   We'll attend all her senior year school events, as those opportunities will soon be over.   She is a talented singer/actor who often gets the lead in school plays.

So, when the oldest graduates, the next one will be starting first grade, and we get to do school events, a completely different direction,  all over again,  for as many years as we are able.

Thank heavens for little girls!

Emma and Sadie

After

Bye, Bye Beans!!

Two blogs back (It Takes Time), you can see the "before" picture.  Here is the after.  If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it!  At least, I saw the woodchuck eating the bottom half, so I can safely assume that he climbed the trellis all the way to the top and defoliated the entire bean plant.

Enough!  Enough!   If I am to garden in this spot ever again, a chain link fence will be required!

So devastating!

The High Line

Some enterprising New York City folk converted an old elevated, and abandoned railroad track into a city park!  The High Line Park is now quite a tourist attraction.  "We walked the Line on Saturday."   Actually, I sat for a while, because we had done so much physically  (a 1000 steps to the Mets game, tennis, walking in the city, etc.). My feet and assorted other places were hurting.  As I sat, I could not help but notice that people were speaking every language from around the globe.  Several asked me for directions as I sat, and of course, I could not be helpful, as an out-of-towner myself.

I guess the story is that some folks noticed a lot of random plants growing there on the abandoned tracks, and decided it would be a good place for a green, developed, creatively designed walkway several stories above ground level.   The "park" which extends several city blocks,  has lovely flowers growing,  ornamental grasses,  occasional benches,  some reclining chairs,  some water features, etc.

It was a popular place, with crowds of people, and not much room to walk, some of the time.  But along the way, you could buy food of various sorts, from ice cream sandwiches to wine to tacos to hot dogs to frozen ices.









Tourists lounging in the sun on wooden benches.

Gerry is in the green shirt,  Viki in the red shirt.






It is indeed a unique place.   Of course, we see greenery all the time in upstate.   Perhaps part of the attraction making this such a popular tourist destination comes from the lack of gardens growing in the city.  

I do think that is changing.  I saw lots of trees growing in Manhattan, and some of them were on top of buildings!

It Takes Time

Four or five years ago,  I bought this eight foot trellis and had a particular vision of vines climbing up it and all around it, all the way to the top.

Every year, I tried.   I know one year,  I tried with morning glories,  but the heat and other elements stunted the flowers and they never really made it up the trellis.  So that was one failed attempt.

I know for at least two other years,  I bought and desperately wanted climatis plants to climb up my trellis.  I have in my mind's eye a beautiful deep purple prolific climatis that completely enveloped a post in our front yard in a previous parsonage house.    I've never been able to replicate that.   Now that I think about it, that particular location was very shady, and I have no such shady spot in our current home.   So that was several more years of failed attempts.

This year,  I decided on the garden as a possible location, and thought I might try pole beans.  From previous years experiences,  I know that pole beans are very hard to find.  Mostly the garden places carry bush bean seeds,  so there was a challenge there,  but I figured if anyone had pole bean seeds, it would be Agway, and indeed they did.

So this year,  the particular vision I had with I bought this tall trellis has been fulfilled.  I see several life lessons here.   First, sometimes it takes time for a vision to reach fruition.  Second,  you can expect failure on the way to realizing the fulfillment of the dream.

The trellis is just a metaphor here for life.  It applies to all things, really.  If at first you don't succeed,  try, try again.  


All of this reminds me of a favorite saying of mine:  


Success is never final;  failure is never fatal.  It is courage that counts.

Out of Sorts

Today we visited the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.   There are many displays and buildings.  One leisurely walks around the lanes and visits the barn, the shops, the 'doctor's office', the apothacary, the church, etc.

One of our stops was to a small printing shop.  There a man in 18th century clothing was working on assorted print jobs, and he talked with us for a while about many of the words and phrases that have come into our language from the inside of the print shop, and specifically,  from the labor intensive work of typesetting, which is the way printing was done in olden days.   The metal plate letters are very tiny and have to be manually put in place on a board to construct words.

One of the phrases the printer told us about was 'minding your p's and q's'   I guess it is easy to make a mistake when picking those tiny letters out of their respective boxes and putting them in place, usually backward.   Lower case p's and q's look exactly the same and are easy to confuse.  The same is true of u's and n's.

Another interesting tidbit was about being 'out of sorts'.    A box or tray of "a" letters, or "r" letters, of "z" letters is called a sort.   Here is the way the printer described it:   For a typographer to be working on a job, say a wedding invitation, and to run out of sorts, or not to have any more "r's" is the most frustrating thing in the world!!  That frustration gets translated into "out of sorts",  which we still use in our language today, though typesetting went out long ago, thankfully!  It took hundreds of hours to set up one page of a book.

There were an assortment of domestic and agricultural tools and implements on display.  Gerry, of course, wanted to 'talk plows' with anyone who would listen.  

As for me,  I was just very grateful not to live in that century, but in the one I'm in.    If I had lived back then, I'd probably be out of sorts most of the time!

Loss of a Dear Friend

One of my loveliest friends passed away today.  I was first her pastor, then her friend.  Every time I went to see her to keep in touch,  she always said to me:  "I need you in my life."   That made me feel special. But,   she always made me feel special.  I have a pretty good idea that I am not the only one who has benefited from her loving nature.   In fact, anyone who ever encountered her could not miss her enthusiasm for life.

She loved people.  She was without guile, never unkind, always welcoming and positive.  The world will sorely miss this very bright light.

I am grateful for the ten years that I have been privileged to be her friend.  I will be participating in her funeral, at her request,  though I feel inadequate.

She was more than ready to move on to the next stage of her life,  and she got her wish exactly, dying in her sleep, and not lingering too long after the diagnosis.

I will miss her terribly!

No Stress Days

We are beginning to plan for a long road trip across the upper United States for next summer.  Assuming that we do undertake this adventure, it will be our first long trip since my retirement, which by then would be five years.    I reflected on that this morning, and wondered why I am the only person I know who does not love travel.  What I do love is the daily routine and activities of my current life.

For all the earlier stages of my life,  there was always a lot of stress {and trauma!}.  The list is quite long, of various challenges and struggles, ranging from being a single parent living on the edge,  to raising teens and a toddler at the same time,  to commuting to seminary and serving a church and raising a family at the same time, to meeting all the varied and sundry demands of ministry and being on call all the time. Striving for goals, trying to accomplish, busy, doing, hurrying, worrying.

As a child, my family moved quite a bit, because my father's job required it  (ministry).  In my twenties, we moved a great deal because it was required  (military).  In my own ministry, we moved several times because that is what was called for.  So between moving about [more moves than I can count], and traveling a lot in the process,  these things contribute mightily to my lack of interest in much travel these days.   That is because for the first time in my life, I am enjoying basically stress-free days.  And I am settled down in one place in a house I love, a community I enjoy.

When I look around me at others who do love to travel, often they are people who have lived their whole lives in the same location.

It occurred to me the other day when I was doing it, that I was actually enjoying ironing!  What a surprise.  Ironing was something I avoided like the plague in other days of my life.  I love to read recipes, buy groceries, prepare healthy food.  I love to do the crossword puzzle in the paper every afternoon.  I love going slowly into my day (sitting for a while over coffee).  I love playing tennis with Gerry, or reading books, watching Netflix movies.

I do suppose it is time to bite the bullet and go on a road trip.  I've never been in those particular states, though I have been in about 38 out of 50.

When reading about this kind of road trip, they suggested that if one is driving (which we are),  that it is a good idea to take two months.   Two months away from home??

Stress free travel.  (Is there such a thing?)