That was it for Modest Vacation 2021. Join us next year for, we hope, more exciting adventures.

Now back to book reviews and overthinking and self-absorption, with fewer twilit scenery shots.

Day 6 was the Schoodic peninsula. The day, and our easy little hike, started rather rainy but cleared up entirely. I have lots of pictures of crashing waves. But to pick just one photo for the day, I have to pick this one; an evening walk we did out our motel back door, to the park carriage roads and up to Witch’s Hole Pond. I really just have a thing for evening light.

Nasturtii?

Another photo taken on our mohair-dropping road trip Saturday.

Buy GMS mohair yarn. The goat you knit may be my own.

So contemplate for a moment the non-existence of god. Contemplate a materialist worldview, “above us only sky.” Everything you perceive with your senses – that’s all there is.

What has been gelling for me lately during silent non-verbal moments of contemplation is: Tom + Vera = Me. That’s all there is.

It’s not that putting the nail in the coffin of the Mystery answers the nature/nurture question for me so much as it renders it moot. How much does our environment shape our personality? Well, what is a “personality”? Contemplate for a moment the possibility that there’s no such thing. There’s just a bunch of stuff people do.

If “this” (squeezes bit of skin between fingers) is all there is, then I know now precisely “who I am.”

And incidentally, behind the scenes during all of this drama and contemplation have silently stood two people: John & Barbara. And it occurs to me how none of this has the slightest bit to do with them. It seems unfortunate that we do not have separate words for “the woman who gave birth to you” and “the guy who fertilized her ovum” vs. “the female primarily involved in raising you” & “the male primary involved in raising you.” They are just mother and father, at best modified as “biological” mother & father and “adoptive” mother & father. But they are so entirely different.

There’s a funny black wasp in this picture; shiny with some blue going on.

I’m supposed to go back to work tomorrow & I don’t remember what I do for a living.

What does CBDC stand for again?

From the department of “Well I Should Hope So,” a perfect day drinking blood-orange gose with the cedar waxwings out back at Hogback Mountain Brewing, then biking the awe-inspiring Bristol-Monkton road, got my mojo working again. The Vermont biking just stones me to my soul. Stones me just like jelly roll.

Today I’m prepping for weaving school – trying to get a head start on what the warp will look like, even though I know they will spell it all out for me when I get there; and refreshing my memory on some of their tips and tricks. Glad I bought the handbook.

Look forward to some gorgeous weaving pix this week!

So X has been taking apart the Prius bit by bit, because there is a terrible mouse smell in it. We brought it to the mechanic to see if they could remove the dash and clean the vents, but they told us it wasn’t coming from the vents, so we don’t know what to do. Since in this state it is a total loss and probably a health hazard, I told X he could just rip it apart, take an axe to it if he’d like, and get his frustrations out and maybe solve the problem in the process if we’re lucky.

Today is a stunner of a day – dry, high sixties – and we are going bike&brewing. I’m in the middle of a 2 week vacation. Life’s perfect and yet I’ve had this low level depression. X has too, maybe more than usual. He suggested maybe we should get tested for covid. Then he nixed that idea when I started seriously considering it. I don’t know, the ennui of everything being perfect? The ennui of being 52 and having no more mysteries left to solve? Being old? X says there’s nothing more to look forward to. Just tiny joys. I know that when you get old you have to make sure that you still have goals and things to live for. But nothing you can come up with seems important anymore. Struggling to earn a livelihood and gain a footing in the world, that was important. The sheep & wool fair, I don’t know.

Couldn’t resist that.

I know to everyone else this is just a really fun story, but for me, it’s my life. Just show some gentleness with regard to my emotions.