Today started out slowly and stayed that way, to a large degree. Then again pretty much the whole goal here on the coast is to not hurry. Once again by 7:30 the sun was shining in the skylights, so it was time to get up, eat breakfast, shower, and start a load of laundry. It’s a measure of how slowly things go that I started the laundry about 9:30 and didn’t finish it until after dinner tonight. Then it was time to putz around the house doing some minor straightening up and even playing a few rounds of kenken – my first this week.
At about 10 Hutchisons & Associate arrived – Liz, Vera, Vida, and Paul O’Day (Paul is the associate). They had to be imported for beach biking, since Tim is now too strong and fast to be held back to the slow pace of the mother, and Dave would prefer not to do it at all. We headed out to the beach bike rental place and got there and out on the beach around 10:30, which was perfect timing. It was our first beautiful day today – chilly, but sunny and not too windy. The kids headed off down the beach at quite a clip, while Liz and I peddled sedately and yacked up a storm. Liz is still recovering from chemo and radiation, so we had to go slowly and take a many breaks – absolutely perfect. It has been years since beach biking has not been an endurance race, and I must say I vastly prefer the chat-and-pause version. We got back to the bike place around 11:30 and went to Icefire, the glass blowing place, but they weren’t on fire. It seems that they have a seconds sale every labor day weekend, and shut down a few days in advance to prepare. So we went to the Bald Eagle coffee shop instead (tea for me, Italian cream soda for Liz) while we waited for the young people. They showed up about 12:10, looking quite pleased with themselves. Tim managed to flip his bike twice, Paul once – and Tim made it all the way to the carriage road at Hug Point.
Once we were all together we took off for Warren House pub, one of my favorite places. They open at noon and we got there around noon-twenty and were able to get two tables next to each other on the deck. They have a sunny beer garden, as I’ve mentioned before, but we had minors with us. Unlike last time we took a large group there, this waitress wrote down all the orders and there was no confusion about who had pea salad and who had chips. I had half a bbq pork sandwich and a cup of the very interesting spicy peanut chicken soup (which had no peanuts), and could have easily eaten a whole sandwich. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and conversation, and it was nice to be out in the sun – even if it was a little too warm when there was no breeze.
On the way home I completely miscalculated the tides, and dropped the young people off at Hug Point, thinking they could walk home on the beach. Although it was almost 2 hours until high tide, we were already cut off. So after a while I went to get them, and met them on the road. So they all went down to the beach at our house. They threw a lot of rocks into the water and seemed to have a good time. The adults stayed up and chatted. We tried to be on the deck but it was too cold, so we came inside and taught Liz how to play pepper. While she was learning I won a couple games, but once she figured it out that was the end of my winning. We played a few hands and then Vida came up, so we taught her to play too. (Vida is Josh’s age) . After a few more games we were ready to move on, and it was time for bananagrams. We played four or five rounds – Liz and I traded off winning. She and I could have kept playing forever but it was clear that Dave and Vida were flagging. Vida was very creative – one time she made almost all animal words – and both Liz and Dave habitually make longer words than I do. But in banangrams it’s not the size or complexity of the words, it’s how fast you can make them.
The visitors headed out around 4, and I had a short relaxing period and then headed to the kitchen to make dinner. Yes, tonight was our only non-breakfast meal at the house – fruit salad, cheese, salami, and a loaf of marsee baking take-and-bake bread that I picked up at Zupan’s last Wednesday. The real challenge to cooking in this house is that there is only a tiny patch of free counter space – maybe 12” wide by 15” deep, maybe smaller than that. The kitchen table is really too low to stand and cut up fruit at, and also this year it has a real cloth tablecloth on it, rather than the plastic ones of past years (We prefer the plastic ones – we like being able to just wipe up crumbs, spills, and other general messes). So the first 15 minutes or so of the cooking time was actually setup time – finding the cutting board and the bowl, figuring out where to put them, getting the trash can positioned, setting up the jambox to play the cooking music I wanted.
One thing we did this year was bring knives for cutting the fruit up as well as a bread knife, and it made a huge difference to be able to cut the fruit instead of bludgeoning it to death. Here’s what was in the fruit salad: peaches (yellow and white), dark cherries (lapins and sweethearts), and yellow watermelon from the Portland Farmer’s market, mangoes, blueberries from our bushes at home, pluots, bananas, apricots, the juice from an orange, and some brown sugar. With it we had two kinds of English cheddar, brie made from goat cheese and Columbus dry salami. The only thing that was not completely successful was the bread, which had been in the fridge and should have been brought to room temperature before baking, so it was a little underdone in the center. If it had been cooked correctly it would have been very good – certainly better than anything we could have gotten locally. Our wine match was not perfect – we remembered it as being sweeter than it was – but very tasty nonetheless, a rose from Gaga Winery in California. We don’t remember much about the wine, but we do remember that there was baseball on a large screen TV in the tasting room while we were tasting it.
It ended up that tonight was a perfect night to have stayed home from a sun-and-moonset perspective. We bought the fruit for the fruit salad on Saturday, and on Monday I needed to make a best-guess estimate of when it would be ripe so we could make reservations for the non-home nights. The bananas would have preferred last night, the mangoes could have waited another day, but we needed to go to the Stephanie Inn last night to make sure we got the Chief Chef, so tonight was the night. And we were amply rewarded with the best sunset we have seen in years. There seemed to be a thin band of clouds on the horizon, but it turned out to actually be about a half-sun above the horizon, so it just made a dark band across the setting sun. We watched it all the way down to the horizon, but oddly there was no green flash. Dave got the dishes done around the sunset, and then we had a brief game interlude (farkle) before Tim wanted to go watch a TV show. Tim hasn’t watched any TV while we’ve been home, so we took a break. Also it was time for the moonset – a thin crescent, only a few days old, setting so far to the south that it went down vertically. The clouds had come up on the horizon by then, so it sank into them and ended up looking like a very strange bright orange tongue of fire in the distance – if we’d come out and not seen it setting, we would have been hard pressed to know what it was.
After Tim finished his TV show it was time to finish our farkle. When we paused, Tim and I were tied at 7,050 and Dave had 7,900. Given quite a bit of bad luck, when th e game ended some 3,000 points later (for them) I still had 7,050. See why farkle is not my game? It apparently wasn’t Tim’s game either tonight, because even though he was first to 10,000, Dave got 3,000 points in two rolls to win the game – we think he was using virtual cowhorns and intentionality. Tim immediately requested pepper – remember, last night he won 3 games in a row – to salve his wounded ego. Alas, it was not to be. He tried out a new strategy that involved picking up pretty much every card someone threw down in front of him, and it was not a success. Dave won twice in a row. Then Tim won. Then Dave won two more times. Do you notice a name missing from the list of winners? Yes, indeed. I did have one very good moment when I thwarted Dave’s going out on the red 6 with my piddly red 1, and I’m hanging on to that as my shining pepper moment. Then I made them play bananagrams, which Dave would have won if he hadn’t picked up a Q as his last tile. Victory, as Tim would say. At last.
That’s the end of the day, time to read by the fire and listen to the waves. Dave is also glowing with his success at the game table.
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