Biking, Sewing, Reading, Writing, Running, Hiking

Been busy. We got our bikes out and rode to Slaughter beach on Delaware Bay. I love living where I can actually ride my bike to the beach. It's about 12 miles one way, but that's a decent bike ride. The route is mostly country roads, corn and beans growing along the sides, after cutting through a few blocks of the nearby small town. 

We were really excited to find the public boat ramps too. My husband and son took our boat, (dubbed "Dad's Little Dingy" by our daughter and it stuck) out for trotline crabbing for the first time. None of us had ever done it. They researched it, got the appropriate licenses and my husband built a little contraption to sit on the side of the boat to aid in pulling up the trotlines. They were successful! They nabbed a couple dozen crabs for their efforts and we steamed them up later with grilled corn on the cob drizzled in honey, cayenne and melted butter. A feast fit for us. 

I've been sewing a lot. My latest activity is designing a pair of funky comfort pants made from a faded blue cotton sheet with a paisley pattern. I bought the sheet at a thrift store a couple years back. I used another pattern just as a starting point to get the general curves and distances around the hips to the legs then added extra inches since the pattern was for stretchy material and a more form fitting presence. I added a waist band, happily using the folds already sewn in on top part of the sheet and threading thick elastic through part of it for the back waist. I am almost done except for deciding if I want elastic in the ankles, harem style, or just baggy, breezy legs. 

I've been reading Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, which has moments of serenity and also comparisons I find refreshingly honest and also bizarre between church-going behaviors and polar explorers. What will I read next? I keep buying more books than I can read. A good problem to have.

Along with getting started blogging again, I want to try my hand at writing a ten minute play for our Whooopee night at the local theater guild we joined.  The group is very welcoming and fun loving.  We are really excited to find this gem of a place with great people.  

I started running again.  Running just seems to be my zen thing.  That and hiking.  I started carrying my two cameras again and as luck would have it, towards the end of a hike that was right at about ten miles of total mileage for the day, I tripped and went down with my D-60 and though its not the first time, I think it's the last, at least with this particular 300mm lens.  I've fallen before with it but this time I think I've really wrecked it.  The camera took the brunt of my fall, the camera bag which is cushioned, probably kept me from breaking a rib.  First to hit the ground was the camera lens, then camera, then camera bag, then me on top of it all.  You see, I keep the camera out so I can have it ready when I see something great like a butterfly or bird or moth or deer or fox or....

These little goslings were in our yard this Spring.  

Back Home In the Mid-Atlantic

It's good to be home in the Mid-Atlantic. 

This is a new blog about our renewed life here. I stopped blogging one particular blog after the 2016 election and also got off Face Book. I started another blog but a lot of it was angry ranting and raving. And I also began to be afraid of retribution so I stopped again. 

I wished for a typewriter, something I could click away on, off-line and unreadable by anyone but me. I bought one but it needs work and I haven't gotten to that yet. Besides, I like adding pictures to my entries.  I wrote in journals, several different ones for different themes. That's nice but I'm such a fast typist and I love being able to fix and rewrite. This blog represents a new start. It's a way for me to move forward in these times of open anger and polarization. I don't want to focus on that but I can't ignore it either. I will not live with my head in the sand. But I can not let divisiveness and hate consume me. 

I will manifest positivity, my vision, my love of adventure, of a variety of choices, of nature and the arts. But I will also bear witness when necessary. There is pain and corruption and hate and it affects our planet and life on it. I acknowledge that many people try to do the right thing from their perspective, from their background and experiences, and we can't and don't all agree what that is. I also know that many people are all about taking care of themselves and having more and newer and better despite the cost to our planet or to others. My Mid-West hard scrabble sister-in-law once summed that up: I don't make other people's problems my problems, she said. 

But now we are back in a part of the country that I understand. Not the South.  Not the Mid-West.  We are closer to several major cities.  There are pockets of hate here, yes, but it doesn't seem to be as unified, all consuming as other places we have been in the last few years. I feel safer here. I feel safe in places where gay people can live openly and be celebrated and where I can walk among lots of Black and Latino people going about their business and where I can hear other languages or accented or broken English spoken. I love diversity of people, of thought, of food, eco-systems, the arts, books...