Posted tagged ‘Chatham’

“The best Christmas trees come very close to exceeding nature.”

December 8, 2016

I think the sun went on vacation. Yesterday it rained in the morning and stayed cloudy the whole day though it was warmer than I expected. Today is also drab and gray. I am so glad that I was out for quite a while on Tuesday, the first sunny day in a while. I took the highway down cape but came back Route 28. It was a beautiful ride. I passed the ocean a few times. It was low tide and the water was still. It had a grayish tone. I saw a wild turkey fly. I hadn’t ever seen one fly before. It took a lumbering leap into the air and over a fence. I wasn’t sure the turkey had the height but it did. When I was passing the cove, the only boats moored, other than a single sailboat, were fishing boats. Most needed paint and had nets and lobster traps on deck. They all looked weathered and old. In Chatham, the store where I wanted to shop was gone. It didn’t matter. I really enjoyed the ride.

Last night my house was aglow. The front fence has strands of colored lights. The gate has a huge white star on top with trails of white lights coming from it. The top of the fence to and from the star is also white. Beside the driveway, bare branches on a bush are covered in huge Christmas ornaments. A floodlight shines on them. My deck rail has strands of colored lights atop it. I added bows to the three wreaths, put balls of colored ornaments in the basket on the steps and put my old sled with my ice skates beside the step. When it got dark last night, I went outside and stood on the street to check out my house. It is beautiful.

I did what I thought was quite a bit of wrapping yesterday. Come to find out I have so much more. All of the gifts are now downstairs filling the den and the hall. Maddie, though, is complicating the process by lying on the paper. She looks so comfy I don’t want to disturb her. I’ll probably just use different paper.

Tomorrow I’ll get the tree, the highlight of my Christmas. I love to sit in the living room just to look at it. Its aroma fills the house. I have a couple of new ornaments from Ghana. They aren’t really ornaments, but they’re big, round and colorful. They’ll do just fine.

“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

June 21, 2012

Already it is 86°. I ventured out to get the papers then hustled back into the coolness of my house. Yesterday afternoon I turned on the AC, and by last night the temperature was so low my nose and feet were cold. I couldn’t help the nose but my feet got slippers.

I noticed my neighbors have their screen door in while I  still have the storm door. The paper predicted it will be our usual June weather by Monday, 59° at night, so I’ll wait on that screen just a bit longer.

Cue the Jaws’ shark theme! Two great whites have returned to Chatham lured by the bounty of food, by all those seals lolling on the rocks. The sharks had been tagged last year, and it appears they enjoyed their vacation enough to return.

I just finished a Clive Cussler, easy, breezy summer reading. I knew from page one that our hero, Kurt Austin, would be in harrowing situations and forced to face death at least a few times; however, I knew he would save the girl, as there always is a girl, and triumph over the bad guy, a meglomaniac controlling weather and rainfall in his bid to take over the world. You’ve got to love a bad guy with a vision!

I am of the opinion that summer reading should never be taxing, never really need a whole lot of thought. Clive is the perfect example. You already know the outline of the plot and his heroes are interchangeable, but it doesn’t matter. The books are fun to read. I  heard the summer reading program on NPR a year or so ago and laughed at the comment that every summer at least one book should be about Nazis. I have a whole bookcase filled on my iPad with books like a John Sandford and his hero, Lucas Davenport, a Victorian mystery where ladies swoon, two books about baseball, a James Patterson and a couple of spy/espionage thrillers by authors I’ve never read before-it was the genre that caught my eye.

With the Red Sox on the TV in the background, I spend the evening mostly reading but watching when the Sox come to bat. I’m nice and cool dressed in my t-shirt, my gaudy Hawaiian looking Capri pants, worn only in the house or the deck, and my flip-flops. A cold drink is on the table. The dog is asleep on the couch. It’s a perfect summer evening!


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