Monthly Archives: June 2015

Here’s the thing, I can’t pick on him too much because he’s doing this out of love for ME.   Still, in the interest of keeping it real, I can’t let it pass.  I’ve got to call him on it.

My Captain and his best friend, Ty, are working on building a beach chair shed that My Captain designed for renters of Pop-Pop’s beach cottage to use.  So he’s spending a good portion of his vacation, well, working on it.  But that is the way My Captain rolls.  He’s got to be busy.  He’s got to be doing.  Making a difference. Sweating.  That’s just who I married.

Oh, sure, he says he’d like to just sit down with a beer and be a vegetable, but he never does it for more than a couple of hours before he finds stuff that ‘needs doing.’   And if he doesn’t find it, you can bet I will.

So here is the spot next to the garage the shed will eventually go.

And here are the guys at work building it.

But none of this is the point of this post.

The point of this post is that it is literally impossible for anyone to look cool wearing safety glasses.

Impossible.

Utterly impossible.

As in, NOT possible.

Despite sweaty muscles.

Despite the love-colored glasses through which I see him always.

Despite his cute butt, as reflected so beautifully in the old pink mirror.

There is just no way to turn safety glasses into something NOT dorky.

But My Captain doesn’t mind for several reasons. 1) He knows safety never takes a holiday, and a few hours of dorkiness easily off-sets wood chips through an eye.  2) He’s on a mission, and can’t be bothered with how he looks while carrying it out.  and 3) He knows and trusts his dearest friends and family to love him anyways.

And he is right, as always.

But he’s still a dork.

Summer has finally come!   Hooray!  Yippee!  Wahoo!!!!!  And Pop-Pop’s little cottage at the beach was waiting for us, along with Pop-pop’s roses, which still wave ‘Hello!’ to us in the ocean breeze.  Don’t tell ME that man is dead!  He blooms every summer in those flowers, as if to say, “What, you didn’t think I would actually leave you, did you?”

My Captain’s best friend, (since 3rd Grade!), Ty, and his wife Maggie and munchkin, Emily, joined us at the beach cottage for a few days, to jump start summer.   It’s always more fun with friends!     They’ve been here with us before, and therefore already knew the two immovable rules that have stood here since I was a little girl:  1) Everyone HAS to wear a shirt to the dinner table and 2) Everyone does their own thing, (except for rule number 1).   I don’t recall what original event happened that rule # 1 had to be created, but the law of everyone wearing a shirt to dinner is firmly entrenched in my mind, even after nearly five decades, so it must have been a doozy!

Fast forward to yesterday.  We’d spent all morning on the beach, in the sun and salt breeze.  We all came up to Pop-Pop’s air-conditioned cottage for lunch and a bit of a rest from the scorching sunshine.   I was looking forward to being with my beloved family, and my good friends! I was excited to hang with them, away from our usual work-week schedule and grind.  I couldn’t wait to start a game of cards or backgammon or something equally fun in fellowship during lunch.

But when I came out of the kitchen with my sandwich, I found that everyone was already adhering to rule #2.

They were all already doing their own thing, whether it be watching bad cartoons whilst consuming their body weight in unhealthy orange cheese balls…you know something is unhealthy when it is packaged in a barrel.

Or reading while sipping coffee.

(At least, it MIGHT have been coffee.)

Or working on learning Spanish, or designing a new shed for beach chairs and umbrellas.

(While drinking whiskey and beer.)

And while being ogled by the only one who hadn’t yet found an occupation for their lunchtime.

Other than, of course, taking pictures of everyone, and being a nuisance in general….at least until the warning-stink-eye came my way…..

Ah….togetherness!

But hey, at least everyone was obeying Pop-pop’s rules!

Happy Summer, Everyone!

Critter kills me.  He absolutely stinkin’ kills me.

We like to go for walks around the roads and country lanes near The Little Cottage, and this spring decided that we would pick up the trash (aka litter) that had accumulated so badly over the winter.

Garth and Amy Seely, of Landscape and Nature Discoveries, here in Montgomery County, Maryland, have been sponsoring trash pick up days for local school kids, and so we took a page out of their book and did the same out here on Peach Tree Road.

In the course of a few hours, Critter, Varmint, and I picked up over a dozen, 33-gallon trash bags worth of bottles and fast food bags.  It was truly disgusting.  Amy had wisely suggested we do this early in the spring, because in the summer and autumn, the habitat is, er, LESS friendly to having hands and arms picking through it.

It felt so good to be cleaning up our little corner of the world.   But as good as we felt for doing our part, we felt equally as strongly a horrible sense of disappointment in our fellow country folk who so voluminously scattered their trash.

Don’t get me wrong, Critter bitched and moaned the whole time.  He vacillated between being totally disgusted, and totally victimized.   Why should HE, after all, be the one to pick up after someone else?   I could only raise an eyebrow at that, for it wasn’t more than hours earlier that I had been picking up Jolly Rancher candy wrappers off the same couch his cute little pumpkin butt had just vacated.

“That’s different!” He wailed in righteous indignation. “I forget to pick them up!”

Huh.  We’re going to have to find a way to jog your memory, Candy Wrapper Boy.

Fast forward two months.  ONLY two months.  My Captain and I were walking the same road this evening and spied:

More beer cans and pop bottles.

Strewn all over both sides of the road.The SAME stretch of lonely road my munchkins and I had just cleaned two months earlier.

It was disheartening, I promise you.

And Amy Seeley of LAND had been totally correct….there was no way it would be easy to pluck that garbage out of the vegetation now….intermingled between the honeysuckle and Virginia creeper lay some heavy duty poison ivy, man.

“Oh yes,” I assured My Captain, “This new litter is just going to have to wait until next spring.”

“Or,” he winked, “you could just send Candy Wrapper Boy out here now to send the message, er, home.”

Nah.  I’m tough, but I’m not THAT tough.

That, and we’re out of Calamine.