Casuistry

“Sydney’s making dinner, but I kind of feel like making something fun.”

(Thus begins the trouble.)

“I need to use up those limes I bought recently, so how about my favorite lime-frosted tea cookies?”

(Those limes will last for weeks.  The mounds of tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers, on the other hand . . .)

“Oh, and making the cookies will use up an egg, too!  Great all around!”

(Speaking of round, the egg in its shell is built to last.  We needn’t even get into the rounding of the female figure that is likely to occur after the eating of all those lime cookies.  And don’t even look to Sydney: he hardly gets two or three before they disappear.)

“And besides, I’m too tired and lazy to do anything terribly useful before the day is out.  Why not celebrate the start of the school year with some delicious cookies?”

(Perhaps a more appropriate celebration to the start of school would be some work on my dissertation prospectus, the second draft of which was begun yesterday and is now being rudely abandoned for the kitchen.  The cookie, it appears, wins.)

Erin

Low’s Lake

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Our camping trip in the Adirondacks went splendidly — much better than we could have expected. I worried that we would have to try canoeing in against headwind. There wasn’t any. I worried that all the campsites would be taken. We found a great one and the neighbouring ones were free as well. I worried that canoeing to Lows Lake in one day would turn out to be a bit much for relatively inexperienced paddlers but we got to our campsite halfway across the lake by around 1pm. And we still had enough energy left over to canoe some more and climb a mountain.

On the Bog River just after starting out:

This is our campsite — or at least the trees in front of it:

Another picture of it from higher up. The campsite is right at the centre of the picture:

Another picture of the lake from the top of Grass Mountain:

A floating island — the light-coloured island in the centre has drifted about a mile east in the last couple of decades:

One of the many loons whose haunting calls echoed across the lake all night:

The sunrise from our campsite:

Sydney

my favourite title of the year

Erin brought the following, rather interesting title on MSN to my attention (it’s the one at the bottom of the image):

Heaven forbid that one criticize a position during a debate! Much better just to defer to the wisdom and expertise of a bunch of silly university presidents and enjoy the pleasantness and safety of a unanimous debate.

For some added entertainment, you can go to the website of the organization that inspired all of this and see how many fallacious arguments you can spot: http://www.chooseresponsibility.org/. Try not to get too sidetracked by the fact that the spelling and grammar on the site suggests that the writers might have been failing to drink responsibly.

Tent: check. Sleeping bag: check!

Between curling up in my new sleeping bag (it’s one of those mummy-style ones, so I felt positively swaddled) and sitting in the tent that was set up in our living room, I’m beginning to feel a lot like an 8-year-old on his first camping expedition.  Childish glee is being spread all over the house.  Sydney’s just hoping it holds up all through the 15 miles of paddling he wants to do each day we’re in the Adirondacks.

Erin

Done

Food for thought

After sending Sydney off to sweat through his oral exams this afternoon I decided to take a walk.  I’ve been feeling a bit like mud on a stick recently, so a walk seemed like a good idea.  After mailing off baby present #4 for the summer, I hit the cute little grocery in the little town near our house.  One mile of walking and you find yourself in a place with organic chocolate, bulk oats, and good cheese.  Intending only to pick up a couple of apples, I found myself looking at a cantaloupe.  I’d been dreaming incessantly about a cantaloupe (yeah, I know, I get on weird food kicks) since Saturday, so the coincidence seemed just too good to turn down.

Of course, even as I was paying for the cantaloupe (and the half-dozen apples, plus a few other things) I was thinking about how much it was going to hurt hauling it home.  Over a mile, mostly uphill, with a really steep climb the last tenth of a mile or so.  Oh yeah, and another part of that mile is a seasonal road that is basically just a gravel trail up the side of a gorge.  Oh well.  I made it and I’m dying for Sydney to come home, tell me all about the exam, and join me in eating cantaloupe.

Erin

Three years down . . . only 70 or so to go

On Thursday Sydney and I celebrated our third anniversary.  Yeah, yeah, for those of you who have been there longer, we know we have a long way to go.  In fact, Sydney and I are in competition to see which one outlives the other: I’m relying on regular exercise and being female, Sydney’s touting his goody-two-shoes, tree-hugging eating habits.  So, competitive spirits that we are, we intend to live past a hundred.  With three years down and Sydney being thirty, we’re looking at 70+ years of marriage left.  Maybe by the end we’ll have figured each other out.

Our celebration was pretty quiet: dinner out at our favorite Thai place.  Since we’re going on a camping trip next weekend we didn’t want to add more travel to a travel-filled summer, and Sydney will (fun fun!) be taking his major exams on Tuesday, so no need to keep him away from his books for too long!

Erin

National Weather Service

I know it has cooled off a bit, but … really?

Great adventures

No, not yet.  Sydney and I are still just roaming around home, reading and cooking and every now and then gardening.  But in less than two weeks we’re going camping in the Adirondacks with our friends Jacob and Kate.  The weekend will include two full days of canoing (Sydney apparently thinks it’s reasonable to expect novice paddlers to cover 15 miles a day, two days in a row) and, if time and energy allow, some hiking and enjoying of nature.  Most exciting for me is the chance to camp for the first time (unless you count the time when my brother and I tried sleeping in a tent next to our house, and I wouldn’t, since that was a bug-filled disaster).  And Sydney’s not breaking me in easy: no established campsite, no running water, no soap allowed, and, needless to say, no outhouse.  We’re going rustic in a big way.

Erin

Slowing it down

In the past few weeks I’ve been frustrated by the way the days have slipped by. Today, however, with a bit more “day of rest” in mind, Sydney and I had a lovely day. After church we dropped by Purity ice cream (church ran late, we had to close up the church, and by then I was ready to eat my seatbelt) and then came home, where we made potato-tomato casserole. This casserole, by the way, is one of the first recipes Sydney made in his adult life, one that he tried out in our shabby apartment the summer before we got married. I think he actually designs his garden with this casserole in mind, ensuring that we’ll have ingredients for it at all times. It’s that good.

We ate the casserole while balancing our plates and reclining in the hammock in our yard. We fed little bits to the chickens (who love digging in the wood chips under the hammock), I read aloud a chapter of an interesting book, and we took a bit of a nap in the sunshine.

We’re now cooking. Yes, I know it’s well past supper time, but I asked Sydney to make a borscht (to use up the cabbage that’s hogging our fridge) and he asked me to try making beet carob cake. You know, like chocolate cake with a bit of beet in it. I’ve seen this recently. We’ll see how it goes!

Erin