Sunday, August 3, 2008

8/3/08 Dessert and Dinner with Randy and Jennifer

Before we played disc golf, we actually met Randy and Jenn at their favorite ice cream place in Turner. Yummy ice cream at a reasonable price. What fun! After disc golf we went to their home in Buckfield for a lovely dinner. We had barbecue chicken and a C family favorite: cabbage salad with baked beans. Now before you turn up your nose at this, all I can say is: you HAVE to try it. It was so good! The subtle differences between cabbage salad and cole slaw: the way you cut the cabbage is important and then you only add mayonnaise, white vinegar, and salt and pepper. No carrots, no spices. I was also informed that whereas you can keep cole slaw to eat another day, cabbage salad must be eaten fresh and there's no point in keeping any leftovers because they won't be any good the next day. The beans were simply Bush's baked beans out of the can. If there was any doctoring going on, I did not see it or hear about it. Then at the table, you put cabbage salad on your plate and then put beans on top and enjoy. And enjoy I did! Until Randy pointed out that Rodney had instructed me incorrectly and that it really should be beans first and cabbage on top. Twist my arm, I had to try another helping and there was a subtle difference, but I like it best the way I had it first.

That beautiful bowl is Jenn's Polish pottery. The plates and other dinnerware were of the same pattern. It's beautiful! And what a great way to end the biggest celebration of them all, by sharing it with family and friends--family for Rodney, new friends for me.

8/3/08 Bogs


Fortunately, Rodney anticipated that the course might be a little wet and encouraged me to go home and get different shoes than my favorite tennis shoes. At first I was thinking of my water shoes that I wear for boating or poolside at public pools. Rodney gave me that look that said, "I don't think that's what you want to wear." He even asked what size shoe I wear because he was going to see if he or one of his brothers might have something I could borrow. But then I remembered my Wellingtons. That, he assured me, would be by far the better shoe for me to wear. Little did I know how right he would be.


The course is already in a bog, so wooden planks to get across wet spots were not unusual any time of year:


But this summer, was even wetter than usual. Here you can see my Wellingtons in action as I retrieve my disc from a water hazard. Fortunately, discs are water proof, and though playing with a wet disc threw off some people's game, my game knew no nuances.

The last time you saw these Wellingtons in my blog, they were brand new on March 9, 2008:

Who knew that one pair of boots could serve two seasons?

8/3/08 Celebration Tour #5: Disc Golf

Whooop! We're done! And what better way to celebrate than to play a round of disc golf!

Well, personally, I wouldn't know since I've never played disc golf before. But I trusted Rodney on this one and we joined Randy and Jenn (a different his brother and sister-in-law than the ones that are moving into the family homestead) at Ricker Hill near Turner (the same place where we picked apples last fall). This is a serious sport. Rodney, Randy, and Jenn all have their own discs. That's plural. Apparently just like golf, you have some you use for distance, others for putting, . . . Hmmmm, I'm guessing this isn't like the Frisbee Golf that we set up at summer camp where we nailed bushel baskets to a tree and bought a bucketload of cheap flying discs at 3 for $1.

Jenn loaned me one of her discs. I had been warned that you had to watch carefully where your disc landed or you might lose it in the trees surrounding the course. Did Jenn really want to loan her valuable equipment to a rank amateur? Won't they rent you a disc or two at the pro shop? Wouldn't that be better. But she assured me it would be okay and we were off. As we were walking out to the course she admitted that she often doesn't go with Randy and Rodney because they're so good at it, but when she heard I was coming and had never played, she decided to come because she knew she had a better chance of not coming in last.

You can see that this course is well-established and well-marked! Here we are at Hole 1 ready for a late afternoon of fun:

Hole 2 has an interesting hazard. It's not a typical water hazard . . . it's a cranberry bog! There were signs warning us that if a disc went in the cranberry bogs we weren't to retrieve it ourselves as we might damage the cranberries. If we notified course personnel, they would retrieve it for us.

Though the clouds were dark, there was enough blue that we thought we could get in a whole round before more rain came. There's been so much rain that the course was a little wetter than usual and as a bog, it's usually pretty wet. The scenery was gorgeous but I can't tell you if the water in this photo (which was near Hole 1) is cranberry bog or just temporary "summer of 2008 bog."

Rodney in action:

Here's an action shot of me that Rodney took. When your disc hits the vertical chains, it typically falls into the basket underneath and that's the ultimate goal. For the most part, it took me twice as many strokes as the others to get to the basket. Sometimes, it took three times as many strokes. But my partners were patient and even gave me pointers on how to improve my game.

This is not an action shot of me, but check out what flew into the picture as Rodney was taking it!

This trio actually knows what they're doing when they play disc golf:

Today wasn't exactly a "Celebration Tour" like our other ones. This one just had more celebrating and less touring, but I think it counts.

8/3/08 the last of the sorting and packing

For five or six weeks now, Rodney's been gathering and sorting through his earthly belongings in preparation for the big move to Oregon. It's been as much therapeutic preparation as it has been physical preparation. It's been pretty therapeutic for me as well since I just went through this less than a year ago. It's been nice to be able to "pay forward" all the amazing help I got from friends in Dallas when I was going through this. Though our stories are different of how and where we acquired so much stuff and the stories have very different plots as to where we went and why, there are many many parts of the stories that are similar. And so off and on, inbetween Celebration Tours and obligations that we both already had on our calendar, I've been trying to help wherever I could as Rodney packed up his life in Maine to start his new chapter in Oregon.

Today was the pen-ultimate chapter of the packing story! He actually finished packing everything into a box that is going into storage here in Maine, got everything given away or thrown away that he doesn't need to keep or take, and got everything organized that is going with him. Give him about two hours to do the final packing and fitting everything into his car and he could leave on a moment's notice. Wow!

You can't tell from these photos, but this is at a stage very close to the end. Rodney's brother and future sister-in-law are moving into the family homestead and farm where Rodney's been living. One of the things they wanted to do before their wedding next Saturday (which will be at the farm) was tear out all the old carpets and take them to the dump before they started cleaning up the rest of the house. Rodney was working on rolling up the red and green plaid carpet in his room when he crawled under the bed to get the last corner of the carpet out. At first I was helping to lift the bed while he pulled the carpet out and didn't really see him go underneath. When I came around the corner and saw this, I knew I had to take pictures!

When we took a break for lunch, we stopped at Hannaford's to dump the change out of the big change cup into the machine that counts and sorts coins. We both made guesses before we went in as to what the value of the change would be. We were both off by sooooo much! Just trust me that those commercials about emptying the change out of your pockets at the end of each day really know what they're talking about.