Summer!

Still here! Working, working, working…

Attila and I are definitely getting closer to contentment. We have decided to drive into the village to go for a walk every evening. We can now do this because Attila has worked every waking hour since the firewood was delivered, to get it stacked and ready for next winter. He is so close to finishing the job so that he is winding down, taking time for himself, and for me, and walking every evening this week.

We live in Muskoka, an area listed as one of National Geographic’s ten best summer trips in 2011. Of course, we are not on a summer trip, we live and work here, which is completely different than being on holiday. So it is a real treat to have the opportunity to go for a quiet evening walk.

We have lived here seven years and are just now able to spare enough time to go for a walk together of an evening. Better late than never.

This week one of our walks was out into the wild to assess the wild blueberry crop. Not much to write home about there, the berries are sparse. They should be ripe next week, so we will probably spend one evening picking, which will only yield enough blueberries for one batch of blueberry pancakes. It will be fun, but more of an amusement than a real supplement to our food supply.

The weather has been beautiful, hot and sunny almost every day. It has been cooling down at night so that we are able to keep the house at a reasonable temperature just by leaving the windows and curtains closed until the heat of the day passes.

We do not have a chesterfield in our living room at the country house or the little house in the city. At both locations we have a chair for Attila and a chair for me. We have a futon at our country house, that folds down to a double bed, but it isn’t very comfortable and I consider it a poor investment. I always have to take a painkiller if I have slept on the futon. We have a pull out couch at our little house in the city that becomes a double bed, which is very comfortable and is in our bedroom there, made up and ready for us when we visit. There has been only one comfortable place to lie down at our country house and at the little house in the city. That changed during the the last month.

One of the extravagances that we have indulged in this summer is to purchase a good quality single bed for our spare room. This single expenditure has changed my entire life. Attila suffers from restless leg syndrome, and from snoring. Usually I fall asleep first and I don’t notice either. But there are nights when I have something on my mind and I do not rest easily; those nights have been almost sleepless for me for the last 18 years. Now, when I am restless and cannot settle into sleep, I can crawl into the single bed, where there is no movement and little noise. I sleep soundly on those nights. The world seems a much kinder place when one has had a good night’s sleep. My world has become a much kinder place, and all because of a little single bed in the spare room.

When we visited our little house in the city last weekend I was having one of my restless nights the first night we were there; we had a rare two-day weekend, and drove down on Friday night. As I lay awake I thought how wonderful it would be to have a single bed in the other bedroom.

“Yes,” I thought to myself, “tomorrow I am going to see about buying a single bed for this house too!”

Then Luna and Janus and Imp and Elf and Tink and Benny and Bim arrived for a visit, pulling a little trailer full of items for our little house in the city. The universe is looking out for me, they brought a bunk bed with mattresses! So now we have extra single beds at our little house too.

What a lovely weekend we had! Luna and Janus arrived on Saturday. Terra came over Saturday morning when she came off her night shift, so that we had a house full of loved ones. When I woke up Saturday morning I found Terra quietly playing with Imp and Elf and Tink in the second bedroom, everyone happy. Later Lares arrived and the company was complete. On Saturday afternoon Terra and Lares, with Luna and Janus, took Imp and Elf to see the latest Cars movie, it was a big event. Tink stayed with us and played happily for hours and hours. However, about two hours before the movie goers arrived back, Tink suddenly felt the need to see her mother and father, and of course they were not there. She wept. Tink will be two years old in September.

There was nothing for it but to put a Madeline video on the machine in the living room, where Tink sat on her riding toy. It distracted her from feeling miserable. After a short while I noticed she was leaning face down on the toy, fast asleep, worn out from emotion. I grabbed the crib mattress that Luna and Janus had brought with them, placed it in front of the TV, carried Tink over to it and lay her down. She slept peacefully until the gang was back from the movies and then carried on with her day, although she did give me the occasional dirty look throughout the evening. A very resilient little girl!

We relaxed, sat outside under the trees on lawn chairs, BBQ’d our dinner, and had a great visit.

This weekend Terra and Lares are visiting us in the country. They have already had a big adventure. They arrived last night about 11:30 pm, and after chatting a bit we all turned in for the night. However, Lares has asthma and needed his puffer during the night, hot, humid and very stuffy weather we are having. He forgot his puffer at home, so at 2:00 am off they went to the hospital, an hours drive away. They had a good experience there, in and out they said. They arrived back here about 4 am but had locked themselves out. Their choices were to wake us up or sleep in the car; they slept in the car!

I slept through the entire adventure. When Attila and I got up in the morning I was surprised that the lights were on in the room where I though Terra and Lares were sleeping. Then when we opened up the windows we heard Terra outside. Shocked, we rushed downstairs to let them into the house.

We do let our company sleep in beds here, really we do!

After Attila left for work this morning, they went back to bed to get some well earned rest.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

19 °C
Pressure: 102.0 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: 19.0°C
Dewpoint: 13.7°C
Humidity: 71 %
Wind: SE 4 km/h

Quote

“If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day ’til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you..”
Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce

Notes

Jim Croce

“James Joseph Croce, better known as Jim Croce, was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 10, 1943, to Jim and Flora Croce. Jim took a strong interest in music at a very, very young age. At five, he learned to play his first song on the accordion, “Lady of Spain.” He says, “I was the original underachiever. I’d shake that thing and smile, but I was sort of a late bloomer.” Croce attended Upper Darby High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. After his graduation in 1960, Croce went to work for a construction company, staying employed there for three years before deciding to enroll at Villanova University in 1961…

Croce met his future wife Ingrid Jacobson at this time, during a hootenanny at Philadelphia Convention Hall, where he was judging a contest. When they married, he converted to Judaism…

Croce, 30, Maury Muehleisen, 24, and four others died in a small commercial plane crash on September 20, 1973, shortly before his ABC single, “I Got a Name”, was to be released.
Croce had just completed a concert at Northwestern State University’s Prather Coliseum in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and was flying to Sherman, Texas, for a concert at Austin College. The pilot and all passengers (Croce; Muehleisen; Croce’s booking agent Kenneth D. Cortose; George Stevens, the comic who was the show’s warm-up act; and Croce’s road manager Dennis Rast) were killed when the plane crashed at around 10:45 pm EDT on September 20, 1973, about an hour after the end of the concert…

Jim and Ingrid Croce’s son Adrian James Croce was born September 28, 1971, and is now an accomplished singer-songwriter, musician, and pianist, performing under the name A.J. Croce. He has released seven CDs of original music, beginning with a self-titled CD in 1993, and one best-of CD (Early On: The American Recordings 1993–1998). A.J. Croce is also the owner/operator of his own record label, Seedling Records.
Croce’s widow owns and manages Croce’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar, a project she and Jim had jokingly discussed a decade earlier, located in the historic Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego, California. She opened the business in 1985.”