Catching up

I don't know why there has been such a gap since my last post. I haven't been any busier than usual. But it has been a week! This is the week Brendon was at camp. It turned out to be a good experience for him. He called home - called Katie - the first two nights, but not again. Jim and Mary picked him up Saturday morning, and said he was in a very good mood and well-prepared, all packed up. He was very positive in his report. It turned out that he was one of the few just gay people there - over half the camp was trans. His cabin was all trans guys, except him. It must have been a very interesting camp!

Group portrait of Pride Camp.*********** Coming home from Owl's Head on Monday morning, we met Phil McKean at the Rising Tide Coop in Damariscotta, ME for breakfast. A very nice Coop, for sure, and they had a hot bar for breakfast. We sat at a table outside under cover and had a lovely visit while we ate. Phil is renting out the Cushing house for the rest of the summer and living at the McKean cottage in Friendship.

Rising Tide Coop.*********************************** Another feature of the week was a special meeting of the GCC Council, open to everyone, on Thursday night. About 30 additional people came, and there was a very full, passionate discussion. It is confidentiial, so I won't report on it here. But it was important for the future of our church. This was also the week we nailed down a date for work to be done on the car, and made arrangements for a rental car. It will start tomorrow, and we will have a rental car for the week. The coming week is the one that the cabin is rented at Oxbow Lake in the Adirondacks, and we have discussed the possibility of going there with Brendon. I'm not sure what is happening in that regard. Savanna is still doing reasonably well, but the big news is that Fisher Home is closing at the end of the month, for H-VAC renovations, and Savanna will probably come home, possibly with Fisher Home Hospice being in charge of home care. That is going to be a huge change, and probably not easy, maybe even very difficult. But there are no good options. John and Cynthia are going to Grand Manan during the last week of the month. This is also the month of the Marlboro Music Festival, but we have not been able to go at all. Quite a change from last year! This has also been a week in which I received a proof copy of the book I am having printed at Bridgeport National Bindery - An Untold Story: Frederick Barnes Tolles' Unpublished History of Colonial America and the Story Behind It. It is beautiful to look at and to hold. It's in Vermont and I am in Massachusetts, so I can't take a picture. But I will. Meanwhile I have been working on organizing a DVD that will accompany it - in an envelope glued inside the back cover (this is a hard-cover book) - containing almost all of Prof. Tolles' articles and book reviews that are listed in the book. I thought it would be nice for family to have easy access to those articles. Otherwise, they would have to track them down in a large academic library, which they would be unlikely to do. So, I have been busy. But no excuse.