Yesterday we biked the Chambly Canal, which was one of our perennial favorites pre-pandemic. Very nice to see everything just where we left it, including beloved brewery Bedondaine.

The route takes one along a stretch of gorgeous canal-front homes, and allows one to see pleasure boaters being raised and lowered in the various canal locks. I spent the day covetous of the boats, the beautiful homes and properties, and most of all the swimming pools (high 80s). (We saw many swimming pools, and only ONCE did we see people in any of them – why is that always the case?)

Today, though, I sat on my own back porch listening to the sounds of nature reading my Sunday Time & WSJ. And I didn’t think any of those homeowners had anything on me.
The Irish Pub where we ended the night:

No, actually we ended the night eating ice cream cones from the freezer of a Mobil station in Georgia. A summer Saturday is not complete without ice cream.

I got a very nice email from somebody who bought 4 skeins (“the whole lot the store had”) of my yarn at Six Loose Ladies. Asking if I had any more. I had to tell her that all my colors are really one of a kind. “I love all the colors and how they work together. The yarn is thick and so nice to touch.” she said. It’s a crazy feeling, when someone likes something you did that much, and you don’t think it’s that great at all. Kind of a cognitive dissonance.

The other night I was picking up Vietnamese takeout, like I do every 2-3 weeks. For the first time I noticed a selection of books by the register. I saw DUNE and I saw BEING & NOTHINGNESS by Jean Paul Sartre, which is quite a hefty tome. When Michael came back – the kid who always runs the front of the house, it’s a family place – I say “kid” but I haven’t the foggiest how old he is, just younger than me – I said, “That’s quite a selection of books you have there.” He said, “I get bored,” in his deadpan way. I said, “Jean Paul Sartre!?” He said, “Yeah, I think I have MYTH OF SISYPHUS back there too… It just helps to know that existential dread goes back a long way.”

MYTH OF SISYPHUS is a book by Albert Camus, but the actual myth was that Sisyphus was doomed to roll a boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down again, for all eternity. If I’d had my wits about me, the next thing I would have said was, “Is your job like rolling a boulder uphill for all eternity? Handing out those phos and spring rolls, over and over? Serving that old red-headed chick the exact same damn order, every second Tuesday? Over and over and over?”

I don’t know, you just never think of the guy who packs up your Vietnamese takeout having such a rich inner philosophical life, but why the hell not? I should be the only one who reads Camus?

My life,

Is a very very very fine life,

With 5 goats in the yard,

Life used to be so hard…

Imagine how much ass I could kick if I weren’t sleep deprived most of the time.

In other news, hello Mt. Mansfield, from Shelburne Bay!

Time for an unofficial Be Natural, i.e. an unedited unfiltered photo in both directions. Not that I ever edit or filter photos, but I am known to retake them if I look (too) fat and ugly, which is editing of a sort.

“Today is SOOOOO effin’ hot…”

“How effin’ hot is it???…”

That even though outdoor seating was available, we stayed in the AC. That is so not me.

My bday gift arrived yesterday for reals. What I was presented with on my bday was actually a set of LPs, even though Xopher ordered CDs and the box said CDs. I have a record player but it needs some attention, and I’m not really a vinyl nut. So, exchanged for digital.

I listened to 3 of the 4 CDs last night. The first is the album, the second is some unreleased tracks, and the last two are live from Wembley Stadium.

Tattoo You, along with High Tide & Green Grass, were my first two Stones albums, which I got in 1981 when I was 12 years old. I had two friends who were crazy for the Rolling Stones and frankly I just wanted to fit in at first. But a true fan I quickly became. Me and my best friend Tabitha listened to this album soooooooooo many times. I had it on cassette. She had a boom box. We did a lot of walking when we were kids, and always brought the boom box. I know every note on this album.

So I can’t be objective about it.

“[T]his melancholy feeling of forever-deferred clarity and calm… is often confusingly yoked to a kind of determination, the idea that with just a bit more effort, just the right tweaks this way or that, a sense of integration – …”bliss” or “oneness” or “transcendence” – will arrive. The cyclical nature of these two feelings – in which a person feels alternately broken and fixed, in a loop that never ends – constitutes the American religion of ‘self-improvement’.”

From a NYRB review of Alison Bechdel’s Secret to Superhuman Strength, which I did not think I wanted to read, as it has been billed as being all about Bechdel’s extreme commitment to physical fitness, and I cannot relate at all to people who want to work out all the time. But the review makes me think I might try it.

Killing time at the Fete du Lac des Nations before the fireworks & show. It’s rather a lovely area.

This is from the weekend prior to this. A random bridge over the Missisquoi. This weekend was too hot for biking, plus I was covering Saturday. But Sunday it was even too hot to play around with mohair washing. I caught up on some valuable resting and made a very healthful dinner.

A peek at the old homestead, on just an ordinary little walk on an ordinary little day in July; and that this is ordinary is what’s extraordinary.