How was Memorial Day weekend for you? I spent mine doing stuff like this: In case you're wondering, that's pretty much what I'd rather be doing at any given moment of any given day. This was especially welcome after the past few weeks, weeks that have consisted mainly of one big shitstorm, both literally and figuratively. One of the cats crawled into a cold air return and we spent 8 hours' worth of our Saturday trying to dig him out from beneath the floorboards, and when we realized that wasn't going to work, Melinda had to take a hammer to the walls of her brand new house and smash out a cat-sized hole so we could get him out of there.
Then Marc lost his job at the World's Most Evil Coffee Company. While I don't want to get into specifics, the reasons for the dismissal were a face-slap reminder of the kind of senseless bullshit that can be perpetrated upon service industry employees, and indeed went a long way toward proving that the World's Most Evil Coffee Company is just that. Y'all know damn well which company I mean, and I'm serious when I tell you that if any of you patronize the World's Most Evil Coffee Company ever again, you had bloody well better not let me find out.
The good news is that he gets to collect unemployment for a while, because even the State of Ohio is on our side. They sent us a letter that said "no reasonable person" could be convinced that his dismissal was justified. For once, I'm willing to give this bizarre state a little credit. Now if someone down there in Columbus would come to the conclusion that no reasonable person could be expected to believe that the state's schools are funded fairly, and that our governor isn't a big gap-toothed dufus with no discernable evidence of a soul, we'd be getting somewhere.
Moving on. About a week after the firing, there was a huge thunderstorm, and the combination storm/sanitary sewer that equips my office building backed up and flooded about two inches of good old-fashioned raw sewage into my office, and I spent the next week saying words and phrases like "pathogens," "airborne," and "I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna sit in an office filled with" to facilities managers who truly seemed bewildered by the fact that I didn't want to spend 40 hours a week in an office that by the end of the week had begun to sprout black mold. In the end, they agreed to replace my office carpet. I'm displaced at the moment, waiting for the carpet to be installed, and sharing an office with good-natured coworkers who pretend not to mind that I sneeze approximately 7,300 times a day.
So it was with great relief and joy that I hopped in the car with Laura and Steve over Memorial Day weekend and made our annual trek to Jen's parents' house near Rochester, NY, where we spent three days eating highly caloric food, drinking all manner of libations, playing with alpacas, strolling the shores of nearby Lake Ontario, and, on the way back, taking a brief jaunt into Canada to make my yearly duty-free stop. Here are some photos, all of which were taken with my brand new camera:
So it turns out that a low shutter speed combined with lack of tripod makes this sort of thing happen. That UFO-like cluster is actually the moon.
Fires are good for sitting around.
Lake Ontario is worlds nicer than Lake Erie, because unlike Cleveland, Rochester hasn't spent hundreds of years dumping hideous industrial pollutants into its lake and trying to make everyone believe that the dumping of hideous pollutants is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Again with the niceness.
So nice, in fact, that even the algae is pretty.
Nice enough, even, that Laura thought she should shove her whole head underwater.
We found this hunk of driftwood, and when we stood it up, it totally looked like a deer head. Here's our friend the deer looking longingly out to sea. Or out to lake. Or something.
Steve, skipping stones.
This sign was hanging on a park kiosk. So, um, I guess we found us.
Here's half an alpaca head.
To see the rest of the pics, go here.
posted by Kate at 3:40 PM link/comments
