<p>Love canoe paddles as a wedding gift. </p>
<p>Have a great trip, FallGirl!</p>
<p>Looking forward to the wedding report.</p>
<p>Cool enough that I’m wearing jeans today. Feels nice. Now on to battle with Comcast: they are still charging me for a modem I returned March 30th, despite three successive calls in three months to customer “service”. Grrr.</p>
<p>OK, finally had time to catch up on all the “doings” here. Congratulations, best wishes, sympathy, and/or good karma to everyone as needed!</p>
<p>Family camp last week was great, as always. We had rain a couple of evenings, but otherwise the weather was spectacular. We’ve been going to camp since S was 1 - it’s the kind of place where the same people go the same week and have the same cabin every year. For 1 week each year you’re best friends with all these people, and then, for the most part, you don’t see them again for an entire year. All the “kids” have grown up together, and now some are returning with their own children. S made it to camp for about 24 hours - he worked on staff from 2009 - 2011 and had fun reconnecting with current staff he knew.</p>
<p>Last Saturday we left camp and “lake hopped” from Winnepesaukee to Squam Lake to spend 1 night with friends. They have a recently re-done (a la NMinn) house right on the shore. Sunday we returned to Cambridge and I started the piles of laundry. Monday I drove out to my hometown in western MA to play in a charity golf tournament with my brothers and my father. Great fun - and I played respectably well. We finally headed back to the beach on Tuesday – only to head out to Worcester for the day on Wednesday. Tomorrow we go back to Cambridge for a friend’s 60th birthday party.</p>
<p>Wednesday was S’s 23rd birthday. I’m optimistic that he’s doing better. He saw a few of his Air Force ROTC buddies over the long weekend of the 4th, including 1 who is in pilot training. Now S is saying maybe he WILL reapply for a pilot slot … He (S) has also planned a trip to Europe with a non-AF friend for later in August. He’s pretty sure he’ll be able to hop a (free) ride on an AF plane leaving from his base in NJ, flying into Ramstein AFB in Germany. </p>
<p>All good wishes for a wonderful wedding, NMinn. I may have said this before, but whenever the time comes, I’m hoping D will go the small and simple route … :)</p>
<p>Oh, and GREAT whale video, kmc!</p>
<p>OK, I still haven’t been able to actually see the whale video. I’ve found links, but the video that plays is not of breeching whales. Not sure how I’m messing up.</p>
<p>arabrab, some of the videos of the whales play advertisements first. Try this one? <a href=“http://ntv.ca/video-of-double-humpback-whale-breach-goes-viral/”>http://ntv.ca/video-of-double-humpback-whale-breach-goes-viral/</a></p>
<p>Hope it’s a fabulous, wonderful wedding day, NM!</p>
<p>That one worked! Thanks, c_q! (And wow – how spectacular.)</p>
<p>I hope NM has crashed following a fabulous, wonderful wedding. </p>
<p>I hope so too! Keeping up with reading about all of you, but no recent updates. Spent a few days with my Dad last week. He had a 2nd heart attack. But they slipped stents into a blocked artery and he is doing fine. He was up on a ladder cleaning the gutters the day before. And it is not like he doesn’t get attention from us, or offers for help. In fact, I am there quite often, and am pretty upset about the gutters. His wife was in the hospital, then nursing home for rehab, for about 7 weeks this spring, and I was there most days throughout that ordeal, so maybe he feels guilty about using my time, but Lordy, ladder climbing when you have sudden onset of dizzy spells?</p>
<p>BTW I can empathize with the crazy relatives. Hang in there, everyone!</p>
<p>Hi CBBB!
Sounds like a really fun week and great news for your son. Sounds like he is back on track. Very cool re: AF plane!</p>
<p>Treetop - Sorry to hear about your dad. I have seen an upshot in stubborness among the older relatives as well. Ugh!</p>
<p>Can’t wait to hear about the wedding! i can’t imagine my D getting married at this point but I still love wedding details!</p>
<p>Treetop – I’m sorry about your dad’s surgery, but glad that it went well. It is so hard to convince elderly parents to stop doing risky things. I can’t tell you how many times MIL tumbled to the floor because she was trying to pick up something she dropped – even with 24 hour aides in the house! </p>
<p>Went to a great garden party last night but managed to get 3 mosquito bites on my heels, and they’re driving me nuts. </p>
<p>treetop-glad your dad is doing okay. Cleaning the gutters at my inlaw’s house when they were still alive and in the family home was the one thing we put our foot down about . My husband didn’t clean the gutters in our own homes and didn’t feel comfortable doing it at his parent’s home. His dad did ask him once but he just said he didn’t want to take the risk. He had a coworker permanently paralyzed from doing that kind of thing . He does all of our yardwork and certainly will get up on a short ladder now and again but draws the line at getting up to clean gutters on a second story. We finally have leafguard type gutters which I’m very happy about. We had a guy for years that cleaned our gutters and he always seemed to find something else that he wanted to fix and get paid for while he was at our house.</p>
<p>We picked blueberries and blackberries yesterday and will be enjoying those for a few days. Hope everyone has had a nice weekend.</p>
<p>Treetopleaf, sorry things have been difficult. Good luck with the relatives.</p>
<p>We had birthday dinner party number 4 of 6. ShawWife decided to make it more complicated, but it will be great. Tuna grilled with olive and sun-dried tomato sauce, sautéed squash blossoms, porcini mushroom souffle, corn with garlic scape pesto, spinach and currant pie, and lemon torte. Tonight’s guests: a world-famous scientist and wife (my wife’s best friend), a wonderful ER doc who does anesthesia without drugs and a director of a major Harvard project, an author/NPR commentator and an artist, and my post-doc advisor and his wonderful wife and daughter (he’s got Parkinson’s and is doing badly but is not only a great man of American academia but a gem of a human being). Fun to bring them all together.</p>
<p>Wow, shaw! That’s very impressive both on the guest list and menu fronts. Glad you had a good time!</p>
<p>Moda - There was a really neat article on town where your nook is in the NYT today. (Yesterday?? Sometimes I can’t tell with the on-line versions!) </p>
<p>I can easily see why you are so happy there!</p>
<p>Happy Monday, everyone. </p>
<p>CBB, so glad to hear that you are optimistic about your son.</p>
<p>TTL, what is it about old folks and their gutters? My mom kept threatening to get on a ladder and clean hers out. Then she got a guy to do it, then once it rained, swore that he hadn’t done a good job. Now she’s looking into some of the leaf guard gutters but only wants a certain kind.</p>
<p>Went Ikea shopping yesterday for the two who are flying the nest in a month. I know it is often mocked, but I really like that store for very low cost items with a bit of style.</p>
<p>That was the best thing we did here - get those gutter guards. I think they prevent ice damming too. Too bad we didn’t think to get them when we had the roof redone on my mom’s house. I ended up there on the roof to save time - it’s a low ranch - and I left my wallet up there by accident. My FIL bought some cheap gutter guards at the hardware store, and once they were in place for a while resembled a tree sprouting system.</p>
<p>I think we need gutter guards too…mch drives me crazy when he’s up there with the power washer…and makes a fine mess of it to boot. </p>
<p>This morning on my way to work I decided what I want to be when I grow up – Rich and Retired ;
Anyone know where I sign up for that plan?</p>
<p>Woody - yes! I felt it was an incredibly accurate piece especially from a weekly visitor perspective. Many have thought she nailed it in a lot of ways and my FB is swamped with people around here linking the article. Still, we all have agreed there is a difference when you actually live here. For one, you have better access to your car. 
There are some absolutely awesome little roadside farmer markets with one larger guy will even deliver you a random weekly basket of whatever is fresh and ready to pick! There’s also a small hole in the wall little grocer that has the best meat and prepared salads, beef on wick, pulled pork… last year the Rehearsal dinner was all the local favorites, right down to some of the best homemade pies ever! Plus, there is the lake and I spend a lot more time on it over the weekend then I do engaging in anything else. But then too, those generational friendships that she referred to changes the perspective as well. But I will say this… it is my favorite place to be.</p>
<p>Shaw… what an amazing dinner. What are the odds you can plug ModaS for an interview if I give you his list of schools? Unfortunately he will not be sending in a secondary to Harvard even though he got one. He hadn’t realized they required a rec from every single lab supervisor and he had never asked the one two summers ago for one. His UG’s process is all recs go to them, they write the committe report etc. Yes, he could go through the hopes of adding a rec directly to the application, but S feels it was long enough ago and mostly he worked under his professor/advisor even though he wasn’t the supervisor of the lab that asking the guy seems random (and not giving him enough time that wouldn’t seem rude). Given the odds of his even getting an interview, he felt he’d save the 100 bucks. 
Still, there are 17 others. He’s sent the secondaries into 10 so far.</p>
<p>Moda, I’ve always wanted to spend a week visiting the locale of your nook. It seems so “me.” But the NYT article also made me realize how incredibly expensive it is. Hundreds for the gate pass to just get into where you’ve rented a cabin or room, then more for the actual events? Ah, well.</p>
<p>Missy - Gatepasses cover all lectures (both morning and afternoon) and the evening concerts. The only thing that costs “more” are if you take classes, but even those are fairly reasonable. For young kids, girls and boys club is also extra but by comparison was always far less expensive than any kind of day camp I would have enrolled my kids in back home. Plus, I didn’t have to take them! They just ride their bikes. In fact, as a parent up here it was always great that I didn’t have to do carpool for anyone, including my own.</p>
<p>As for the rest… The family house a basement full of various bikes (no need to rent), as a property owner I can get guest passes for a couple hours easy as pie (although they don’t include actually getting into the performances or lectures exactly - ), but too, the family buys full access gate passes for guests as does my sister. So, just so you know, if you wanted to come to check it out, you’d have a place to stay, you wouldn’t need a car per se and you’d have a gate pass. I even have extra parking passes for the main lot (although my car is pretty accessible even though I don’t have parking at the Nook itself.)</p>
<p>As a non-profit, gate ticket prices cover only about 80% of the costs, much like a college would say tuition works and why you should contribute to the annual fund - which I do here. It does cost a lot to run the place etc. Someone like Shaw, however, could possibly be a morning lecturer if his area of expertise fit the theme of the week (and based on his resume, that would likely cover quite a few weeks). Additionally, he (and his family, in fact) would be given housing on the lakefront and gate passes for the week he’d be speaking, PLUS he’d be hosted by the president for dinner and another cocktail party or two during the week.</p>
<p>I buy my season gate pass in March for a much lower price than what they’d be in you bought them upon arrival or even post March 1. By a lot. </p>
<p>Having been coming here as a family for five generations, let me just say that yes, I know it can be pricey, but I know the rules and I know how far they bend. Just an FYI on that one. </p>
<p>PS… no “cabins” We call them cottages here. ;)</p>