Summer Icetime

Maura has now been on summer vacation for a week. It hasn’t been the most exciting week for her. I’ve been busy and we haven’t got the money for long adventures. She has many plans for the summer but had nothing for the first week except the beginning of her summer skating.

Ice skating isn’t a traditional summer activity but skating will be a big part of Maura’s summer this year. She started on Thursday with her very first private skating lesson with Jenny, one of her favorite instructors. Maura began learning the program she’ll skate in her first competition, the Halloween Classic at the Rockland Rink (where she takes her lessons). She has until October to get ready.

The competition program is something entirely new for Maura. Until now she’s been focused on learning new things on the ice. Now she has to perfect what she already knows. She will be skating at the lowest, pre-Alpha level initially so her program has to demonstrate the most basic strokes and moves in skating. To do well she’ll not only have to do them correctly, but do them with style. Maura seemed to understand what was required when I watched her taking her lesson. I’ve rarely seen her concentrating so hard. Often the details seem to escape Maura but last Thursday she was clearly thinking about even the fine points of her form. Even to my unpracticed eye it was clear she has some work to do but she has plenty of time. I’m looking forward to the first time she gets to skate to her music. It will be fun to see what she does with rhythm.

Maura needs to skate more than just on her lesson days if she is going to do her best. I plan on taking her to the rink every chance I get. The Rockland Rink has open skating on Tuesdays so I took her to the rink to practice her program and cool off on a warm day. Even I didn’t mind being in the cool rink. Usually I shiver and endure it for Maura. It’s much more pleasant there in the summer.

Father’s Day

Maura gave me a wonderful Father’s Day this year. She got up early to make me breakfast and in the afternoon we took a family hike. In the evening I got one of my favorite desserts and we all watched a movie together.

It has become a family tradition for Maura to help make breakfast on Father’s Day. She had her mother’s help but in the future I expect she will do more of the work herself. We have the same tradition for Mother’s Day, except that I help Maura and her mother gets to relax. This year’s Father’s Day breakfast was spectacular. Maura and her mother made a puffed pancake with a berry topping. Most of the berries were Massachusetts grown strawberries from Stillman Farms. We’re now in our fourth year participating in Stillman’s CSA and we’ll be enjoying their fresh produce until October. The local strawberries are the best I’ve ever had. They are small but very sweet. I look forward to them every year and I’ve never been disappointed yet.

In the afternoon we took advantage of the perfect weather to take a hike. We hiked in Bare Cove Park, in the neighboring town of Hingham. We had a nice hike through the woods and along the shore of the Weymouth Back River. There were lots of people near the entrance walking their dogs, but the trails further from the parking lot were nearly deserted and for most of the hike we had the place to ourselves except for the wildlife. Mostly we saw chipmunks and gray squirrels, both of which are everywhere in Southern New England. We spotted birds as well. A flock of marsh birds feeding in the salt marsh occupied our attention for a while but with our limited birding knowledge we weren’t able to identify them. Even without knowing what kind of birds they were it was pleasant to watch them moving as one when they flew from place to place in the marsh.

Later, after dinner, we all settled down to watch our family movie. Dessert was still baking in the oven. The movie was the extended DVD version of The Return of the King, so we planned on taking an intermission. Generally we won’t let Maura see movies based on books unless she has read them, or had them read to her. I had just finished reading The Return of the King to Maura earlier in the week and she was excited to be seeing the movie. She had already watched the first two in the series and heard the first two books. We all enjoyed the movie, though Jennifer and I had forgotten just how long it is. Maura got to bed a bit late. I didn’t worry too much about it. She had school on Monday but it was the last full day. I didn’t expect she would be doing anything very important. She certainly wouldn’t have any homework.

We enjoyed our dessert during an intermission at the end of the first DVD. Jennifer had made pudim, a Brazilian custard, for me. It’s been one of my favorite desserts since I lived in Brazil for several years during my childhood. I don’t get it often but it never fails to please. The sweet treat was a great capstone for a wonderful day.

The Wax Museum

As the school winds down and Maura prepares to third grade her school work focuses on big projects and fun. Tomorrow she has her big fieldtrip for the year, a trip to Plimouth Plantation where she will learn about the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors. I expect she’ll have a good time, too. There was no call for parents to chaperone this year, so I won’t be going.

Yesterday was another of Maura’s end of school year activities. For their big end-of -ear project the students in the third grade did book reports on biographies and presented their reports on posters which were displayed in the gym. Then they dressed up as their historical subjects and answered questions that they had prepared in advance.

Maura chose Pocahontas as her subject. Her poster told the familiar story of how she saved the life of John Smith, helping the first English settlement at Jamestown to survive. It also told how she later married another Englishman, John Rolfe, and traveled with him to England where she died, leaving behind a young son.

Parents were invited to come see the wax museum, which was the name the school gives to the display of posters with their costumed presenters. I went to see Maura in the Pocahontas costume that her mother made for her. She looked very cute in it. She did an excellent job answering the three questions she had prepared and written on her poster. She also answered  a few other questions people asked about Pocahontas’s life, showing that she had learned about her subject, not just memorized a few facts. She even managed to answer some of them in character. I was very impressed with her presentation and I’m proud of her.

Dinner and a Race

Last Thursday I took Maura into Boston to watch her mother run in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, her first road race ever. Before the race I took Maura to dinner using some money I had been given for my birthday.

As usual when we head into Boston we took the T from Quincy Adams station. We parked on level 2B in the garage. Someone always asks the question on the way home—2B or not 2B? It’s part of our ritual when we travel by T.

Maura and I left the subway at Copley Square and looked around for a restaurant. My first choice had closed since the last time I had been by so we went with my second choice, Fire and Ice, one of Maura’s favorites.  Fire and Ice features a buffet of raw ingredients that are cooked to order for you on a large grill. They always have a good selection of things to choose from, including meat and seafood, accompanied by a variety of sauces. The precise mix of ingredients on the buffet changes every day so the food is never the same from one visit to another. They almost always have shrimp though, which makes Maura happy.

To accompany our meal Maura and I had Lava Flows from the bar. A Lava Flow is a mixture of strawberry daiquiri and pina colada. Maura, of course, had the non-alcoholic version. I would have been happy with a touch more rum in mine.

After dinner we walked down to the starting line for the race, on Charles Street, by the Public Garden. We watched the start hoping to see Jennifer but could not pick her out of the crowd of 12,000. Once the last racer passed us we headed across the Public Garden to a spot near the finish line. We got to our new spot in time to see the leaders go by. We clapped for the first few hundred finishers, until they started coming in too close together to clap for each one. We did manage to spot Jennifer as she went by near the finish because the pack was not as thick as it was near the start.

Jennifer did fairly well for her first ever race and we’re proud of her. She finished around 7000^th (out of 12,000). Her time for the 3½ mile race was approximately 39 minutes.

After we’d seen her pass we went to our rendezvous point and met Jennifer to head home. She collected her stuff and we headed home. Because the race hadn’t started until 7:00 pm, the earliest that the City of Boston would close the streets for the course, it was a late night for Maura but it was fun for us and a big achievement for Jennifer.

Maura in Vermont: Camping, Morris Dancers, Art and Cheese

Over Memorial Day weekend Maura, Jennifer and I went camping in Vermont. We stayed at Fort Dummer State Park, just outside of Brattleboro. The trip was strain on our family budget but worth it. Everyone had a wonderful time. It certainly helped that the weather was near perfect, with only a few drops of rain, plenty of sunshine and none of the storms that the forecast had suggested were possible. We loaded up the car and headed for Vermont first thing on Saturday morning. We arrived well before check-in time but our campsite was ready so were able to unload, set up camp and head out to enjoy Brattleboro and its environs. We walked around Downtown Brattleboro for a while, window shopping and exploring art galleries and visited the local yarn shop (Jennifer knits).

After a break for a picnic lunch we headed out of town for the afternoon. We headed north on Route 5 through Putney and Bellows Falls and looped back through Grafton down to Route 30 which we followed back to Brattleboro. Mostly we drove and enjoyed the scenery but we made a few stops along the way. In Putney we stopped at Basketville, a large basket shop selling baskets from all over the world and displaying basket animals in the rafters. The shark was particularly impressive. It is about life size. In the same building was the Putney Mountain Winery. Jennifer and I tasted some of their wines and Maura got to taste their non-alcoholic cider. All the wines were made from local fruit and there was an interesting variety. Our favorite was the Apple-Maple wine. We purchased a bottle to enjoy later. A little further down the road we stopped at Harlow’s Sugar House to pick up some locally produced maple syrup. We bought grade B, with a stronger maple flavor and darker color than the grade A dark amber we buy in the grocery store. It doesn’t make sense to bring syrup from home to Vermont. In Grafton we stopped at the Grafton Cheese Company shop. We sampled cheese and decided we would purchase some later at their Brattleboro location before we left Vermont on Monday so we wouldn’t have to worry about keeping it refrigerated in camp.

Back in Brattleboro we watched the morris dancers perform at the annual Marlboro Morris Ale. Morris dance teams were in Brattleboro from the local region and from as far away as Vancouver, Canada. The Morris dance is an English folk dance often danced at festivals in the spring. It involves complex figures and athletic moves. The dances are accompanied by live music and the teams include musicians. The dancing was fun to watch and to listen to. Jennifer and Maura enjoyed it so much that we’re already talking about going back to see it again next year.

On our second day we started with a hike. It turned into the low point of our trip. We hiked on the Retreat Farm trails on the outskirts of Brattleboro. The trails were nice but the clouds of mosquitoes were so thick that they drove us out of the woods, despite the heavy application of insect repellent. We retreated to camp to rest from our ordeal, and then went out again after lunch.

In the afternoon we visited the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center where we enjoyed their current exhibitions of contemporary art. After that we drove the Molly Stark Trail, Vermont route 9, through the Green Mountains to Wilmington, where we did some more window shopping. Along the way we stopped at the scenic overlook on Hogback Mountain to enjoy the view looking out on three states. Then it was back to camp for a bonfire, dinner cooked in foil in the coals and s’mores, which we have to make sometime on every camping trip. In the morning we broke camp, packed up and headed home, stopping before we left Vermont to buy cheese at the Grafton Cheese Company in Brattleboro as we had planned.

Writers Without Borders

Last week I had two major accomplishments. The first was to successfully apply for unemployment benefits. That was an exercise in patience. I called the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance phone number and then waited on hold for what seemed like hours before an agent could take my call and process my claim. Once I got off hold things were much easier. The woman who interviewed me was polite and efficient and seemed genuinely helpful and friendly. To tell the truth, I expected nothing different. My experience with employees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at least the ones I’ve dealt with on the phone, is that they are usually very helpful, if somewhat hard to reach. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I try to be pleasant in return.

My other accomplishment was to start a writers’ group. I’ve felt for some time that I need a support group of other writers willing to give my work a critical yet sympathetic eye in return for my own considered opinion, when asked for, of their own efforts. Now that I’m seriously considering writing for a living I’m also interested in sharing leads on work and tips on the business side of writing. In the end it doesn’t matter how good you are if nobody reads you or at least pays you.

The meeting went very well for an organizational meeting. We met around a booth in the seating area of my local Whole Foods Market to discuss our aims and goals. I came prepared with agendas and some speeches since I didn’t know who might show up. I also brought my sidekick, Maura. She says she wants to be a writer someday and it won’t hurt her to get some ideas about what writers do (besides write of course). Four of my writing friends showed up. Two were colleagues from Borders; two were old friends from other places. Everyone had known Maura since she was very small and no one minded when she put her two cents in, which she did very intelligently. We all reminded her to wipe the chocolate smears of her face from the chocolate gelato I bought her as a treat.

We’ll be meeting again in another week. I’m looking forward to it. I won’t be bringing Maura to the next meeting, which will be in the evening, but I will bring her to future meetings. She wants to share her work. When I do bring her to another meeting and she does share her work I expect her to listen to the critiques she gets. Maybe I’ll ask her to write a post for this blog and have that critiqued by the group. I’d love to see her write a Travels with Daddy post someday.

2011 Boston Kidney Walk

Last Sunday Maura, Jennifer and I walked in the 2011 Boston Kidney Walk at the Franklin Park Zoo. We, or more accurately Team Captain Jennifer, raised $400 for the National Kidney Foundation and we had a very enjoyable visit to the zoo. Thank you to everyone who sponsored us in the walk.

Sunday was a gray, misty day and threatened rain but it held off actually raining until we had finished the three mile walk around the zoo and were returning to our car. On the way we had a nice easy stroll and a fun visit to the zoo. Maura at age eight still gets excited by watching animals and her young-at-heart parents do too. It was a chilly day but warm enough for the animals to be outside, except for the giraffes and the gorillas. The highlights of this visit were the peacocks, the budgies at the Aussie Aviary and the ring tailed lemurs in the Rainforest Pavilion. The peacocks were running loose throughout the zoo and were displaying their gorgeous iridescent tails, though there didn’t seem to be any peahens around to impress. At the Aussie Aviary we purchased a seed stick to feed the budgies and they flew down and perched on Maura’s hands while she fed them. The troop of lemurs has two new additions born at the end of March. The baby lemurs were really cute scrambling on their mother’s back and holding on as she jumped through the branches in their habitat.

More important than having a good time, we did our part to help the National Kidney Foundation help people suffering from kidney disease.  According to the National Kidney Foundation one in nine American adults suffers from chronic kidney disease, though many don’t know it. Many of the sufferers will eventually face kidney failure and a kidney transplant or life on dialysis. Among those with kidney disease are my mother, who has had a kidney transplant, and me, who may someday need one. We walked in honor of my mother, and of my father, who donated her transplanted kidney. I ask that you consider supporting the National Kidney Foundation, perhaps by sponsoring a walker or joining a team in your local Kidney Walk. Chances are you know someone, a family member or a friend perhaps, who also suffers from kidney disease and will thank you personally for your efforts. You have my thanks already.