The screened gazebo after the rain storm. Now I understand what we were supposed to do with those tie-downs. I've bought a sturdier version that has a dome-shaped roof for the rain to roll right off of. Must pick up the debris of this one and pack it up for future use (now that Jenica has solved the mystery of how to assemble it)

View from my living room. Lawn needs mowing--ALREADY! This once a week stuff is more than I like. Taken when there was a low cloud cover and you couldn't see the mountain across the lake.

The view from my bedroom. Unbelievably lush.












I spent yesterday barcoding books in the Mooers Library. Mooers is a tiny town next to the Canadian border. We had about twice as many barcodes as we had books, which doesn't bode well for that collection. I suspect the reason for this is a high loss rate, something that's really common in these small libraries that don't keep good circ. records, have lousy (or no) shelf-lists and don't charge overdues. Anyway, we pretty much got the whole collection finished in one day but she wants us to come back. What for? I wondered, but we agreed we would return with laptops to barcode books which didn't have barcodes sometime in the future. There aren't very many of them so the whole team shouldn't have to go.

Also working with us was my really good friend Ann, who worked here at CEF when I first came. She was laid off in 1991 when we had big cuts in funding and had to take one bookmobile off the road (now it seems so strange that we would have 2 bookmobiles, but we did--and they both went on overnights, one in the south and one in the north. Those were the glory days!). Anyway, Ann and I became really good friends and my best friend in those days was her daughter Brook. Brook and her boyfriend Dan lived on the next road over from us when I first moved up here (in that cute little former schoolhouse in Peru). They had no indoor plumbing, lived in this barely-more-than-a-shack that Dan had built. Dan was a farmer, milking the last of his family's herd. Then he realized he'd have to make some real money so he worked for Jamie at the sawmill for a while but he really hated that and started his own landscaping business. We ate dinner together every single night. No exaggeration. Every single night. They usually came to our house, where there was plumbing. We went out for dinner a lot, too, pretending we could afford it. We did everything together. After we moved to the house we bought (for a whopping $22,000) they broke up, Dan built a grand addition with indoor plumbing (even a washing machine), which I thought was the meanest thing a man could do, but Brook moved on. She now lives in Saratoga, married to a liquor and cigarette distributor and has lots of money. She hasn't had to work full time for the past 15 years but now teaches English full time at the college level. She got her master's degree. She still considers us to be close friends but we saw each other for the first time in more than a decade 2 years ago. It was easy to pick up our friendship, but the circumstances of our lives are so entirely different now that the dynamics of our relationship were entirely different.

Poor Ken is having a bit of a tough time these days, too much to do (he puts too much pressure on himself) and at the mercy (he thinks) of the schedules of others. He didn't know until yesterday morning whether we'd be able to have dinner together last night, but he didn't communicate that well to me and I missed his truck when I drove by so I tooled on home. He called at 6:30, as I was starting dinner at home, to see if I was coming over. OOPS! So I put aside my meal and went to his house. He was pretty flustered and not in great shape but pretty cheerful at what he had accomplished during the day. His riding mower needs a new muffler so he's using his small mower, too hard really and he won't accept help. Anyway we had hot dogs, which I never eat but packed with pickles and good mustard were delicious. They weren't even hot dogs, they were "ball park treats." Ugh. He had 3 and pronounced them delicious. It made him happy and that's what counts.

The neighbors on the lake put in their new dock on Monday. It's 40' long. I have to check it out from our camp--I'm expecting it to be an eyesore. No more discreet wooden dock, this one has a metal frame with cedar plank pallets you put in the frame. I figure it cost $5000. 10 units at about $500 each (I priced a similar dock for us but when I realized that a measly 2 units would cost $1000 I gave up). Ken thinks it's nice because one man can put it in alone, but he said last night "Of course, there's nothing like a wooden dock." He thinks we should figure out a way to attach our dock to shore and raise and lower it without taking it out completely. I think we need to build a new dock altogether, since ours is old and was a freebie, Fred's old dock that he gave to Jamie and me when we were still together: at least 12 years ago.

I'm really tempted to buy a kayak soon. I've been looking at one online and yesterday I talked to a friend about hers. Hers is a Walden Paddler, which you have to like for the name alone. It's made of recycled materials and she bought it locally. That's a huge advantage. I have to call the guy she bought it from in Westport, today I think. I just think I would enjoy having a kayak I could paddle around the lake on calm days, and I know my sister would like using it when she was here. It's the non-tippy kind, very stable and non-threatening. We'll see.

Our automated system is down right now--server problems. This presents a big problem. What to do, what to do. Print out stuff from OCLC, I guess. Then what? Oh, I'll think of something.