Now that I have completed my EMT course and my kids are headed back to college, I only have volunteer EMT duties, two books that I’m writing, a book trailer to edit, a political fundraiser to plan and host, 6 animals to feed/train/groom and a husband to feed/train/groom, so, as you can see I have a lot of idle time on my hands. I don’t idle well. I must move forward or I begin to get all clogged with anxiety and self-doubt and eventually I stall out. So, I have a very exciting new project to help me fill up all the spare time. We have purchased a little house on a lake and it needs some work.

It’s a little investment project.

A little fixer-upper.

First, “house” is a rather generous word for the structure that we now own. It’s a boat house that looks a bit like a trailer home. Here is a view of the downstairs. Someday there will be a kitchen here:

I know, just stunning, isn’t it?

But, just out of the range of the camera, to the right, there is a big garage door, which will someday be a series of French doors. When you look out from these doors, you see this:

Here’s the view from upstairs:

It’s tiny. I’ll show you the exterior later, after we have alarms installed. You can’t just go showing your trailer to the world without taking precautions. Somebody might hitch it to the back of their truck and drive off with it.

We’re very excited about the lake house. The kids like to water-ski, I like to kayak and plan to relearn how to sail and Denis likes to skate.  Holly likes to sit on the deck and pretend that she’s on board her very own yacht:

(i carry it in my heart)” e.e.cummings

Maybe it’s because I had a bit of a rough time becoming a parent in the first place. Maybe it’s because, for reasons that defy conventional laws of probability or psychology or even the luck of the draw, my husband and I have been blessed with two wonderful, beautiful, wise, caring, funny, creative, hard-working ….oh, enough. Suffice it to say that we have two great kids and yesterday we dropped the youngest off at her college and it was a very exciting day for all of us, and also a little sad.

Dropping her off isn’t the best way to describe what happened, as it sounds like we sped past, slowing down just long enough to deposit her and her bags at the curbside and then raced off. In fact, we drove there rather slowly and got lost, even though it’s not a terribly long drive from our house.  We were just all a little nervous, I think.  And we had formed a sort of caravan which always makes for a tricky drive.   Devin and I led the way (she drove, I gave bad directions), followed by Jack in one car and Denis in a third car.  It’s not that she had so much stuff, it’s just that that we all wanted to take her and then afterward, we were all heading off in different directions.

We finally found the school, and as we drove through the gates and all the welcoming older students cheered hellos and guided us to her dorm, I saw a slow, confident smile come across her face. She was driving.  I think that was important, that she drove us into her new life – an adult now, she our guide, and we her temporary passengers.

I thought about the first time she drove off down our driveway without me. I thought about the first time I left our older son, Jack, with a babysitter for the first time, and then about the day we dropped him off at college. It feels, when you first leave a child, like the ground drops out from beneath you for a minute, like you’re suspended, floating in space; the umbilicus that once anchored you to something solid and real, severed, once again, leaving you grasping for something. A hand-hold, I guess. You can’t help but think of the little hand you used to hold.

Well, it was what what they call a “bittersweet” time, yesterday.  A young woman who has worked very hard to learn enough facts and information to be admitted to her favorite college is going on to learn who she really is.  So, we helped her get started. We helped her set up her bed and her room. We accompanied her to the office where she received her meal card and then we had lunch with her in the dining hall and talked about how nice her roommates seemed.  Her brother set up her alarm clock and ran out to get her a power  strip and other dorm necessities that we hadn’t thought of. Her father, full of nervous energy, helped people move stuff, asked people if they needed help moving stuff, then moved more stuff.  I helped her make her bed.  Last week,  she and I had bought one of those foam mattress pads and a quilted mattress cover.  We put these on the hard dorm mattress and covered them with the sheets we had bought. Then we hung her clothes, decorated her bed with cheery pillows, placed her framed photos of her friends, her dogs, us, on her dresser. And then there was nothing left to do.   She walked us to the car.  She said goodbye.  Then she turned and walked into that big brick dorm. The dorm is quite imposing. The entrance is arched and fortified with massive slabs of carved stone, like the gateway to a fortress or a cathedral, and even though the doors were propped open, we couldn’t quite see inside from where we stood, though we tried.  I wanted her to look back as she walked away, and I didn’t want her to.  She didn’t.  She walked up the steps and through the great doors and then it was time for us to go.

I usually love to blog when we go away, but I didn’t take my laptop with us to Bermuda, so I’ll provide a tidy summary now.

First, Bermuda is very close to New York. We arrived in Bermuda in less time than it would have taken us to drive to Cape Cod, so you would think that Denis and I might have ventured there at some point in the last couple of decades, but we haven’t. Denis had never been to Bermuda before this trip. I went to Bermuda once, when I was in ninth grade. It was my first trip outside the United States and so I have always thought that my memories of the island’s beauty and tropical splendor were probably wildly inflated as they can be, by the limited perspective of my youth. I remembered walking off the plane and being dazzled by the warm salty air and the blue sky and the turquoise sea that had appeared, from the sky, to lap at the runways of the little airport. I went there with a very fun friend whose family used to live in Bermuda and we ran around with all her old friends to little island discos at night and were served pina coladas and all sorts of other frozen rum drinks because the drinking age there at that time was apparently 13.

Anyway, I sort of thought that returning to Bermuda would be like what happened when I reread Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as an adult. The first time I read The Fountainhead I, a) fell in love with Howard Roark, b) determined to become a writer and c) developed a lifelong crush on all men working at construction sites. I was in the tenth grade at the time and, well, I just thought Dominique and Roark were insanely cool and sexy with their radical idea that brilliant men should be allowed to rape beautiful women and build skyscrapers however they damned well pleased. I felt that Dominique and Roark and I were kindred spirits. I hated traditionalism with them. I denounced pretentious building facades with them. I pretended that Roark was raping Dominique with them – knowing all along that she wanted him to give her the comeuppance she so richly deserved. When I read it again, as an adult, I have to say I was a little embarrassed for my younger self. I used to rave about this book. It was one of those books that I carried around with me, along with volumes of collected poems by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath so that people would understand that I was a  young troubled genius. Just like those authors had once been. A young troubled genius who doodled pictures of ponies and puppies in the margins of the pages.

So I suspected that I’d go back to Bermuda with my jaded, somewhat wiser and more-travelled adult perspective and wonder at how I had been so enchanted by the island. But in fact, the island is enchanting, I had been right. It wasn’t like rereading The Fountainhead at all. Bermuda is beautiful. The houses are beautiful, the trees and gardens are beautiful, the people are beautiful and the beaches are unbelievably beautiful.

You can’t rent cars in Bermuda. All tourists must either ride in cabs or drive mopeds, which is what we did. The first day, on the way to the moped place, I said to Denis, “Let’s not get two, let’s get a double. We can pretend we’re in the movie The Deep. You be Nick Nolte and I’ll be Jacqueline Bissett. Only I’ll wear a bra.” Later, I said, “Actually, let’s pretend we’re in Easy Rider. You can be Peter Fonda and I’ll be Jack Nicholson.” When we saw the tiny scooter that we would be sharing I said, “Let’s pretend we’re riding on something that grown-ups would ride. Something that doesn’t look like it was taken off a merry-go-round.”

Meg, her husband Mark, Denis and I swam, ate, payed tennis, scooted about the island and on our last night there, some old family friends who are Bermudian, took us out on a sunset cruise on their boat, which was beautiful.

We’re back from our vacation. It was wonderful, but because of upcoming EMT exams (took one this morning, don’t know results yet), I spent most of the time on the beach taking practice multiple choice tests. As a result, I’ve found that the multiple choice format has replaced my former methods of thinking and communicating. Worse, I view everything as a “scenario” in which a certain protocol is required. Here’s an example taken from a real-life incident that occurred in our house this morning. Let’s see how you do:

You decide unilaterally that it is too warm in the house. You know that your kind but fragile wife loathes air-conditioning, but you have a bit of perspiration on your forehead. The thermostat is in the room where your dear wife is lying supine at her bed-desk. What is the proper course of action?

a) Beg the wife’s pardon, and gently ask if the temperature may be lowered. When she snaps at you that she’s freezing and if you want to be cold maybe you should have married Sarah Palin, you humbly ask her forgiveness and slink out of the room
b) Tell the hag that she’ll have plenty of heat where she’s going to end up, and crank the a/c.
c) Walk by the thermostat and distract her by asking if she heard a puppy yelping outside. When she leaps to the window, crank the a/c.
d) Just turn up the a/c. When your back is turned, she’ll lower it. Then just turn it back up. Never say a word but spend the day repeating these maneuvers, silently cursing each other under your breath.

The man and woman pictured above:

a) Are married
b) Are siblings
c) Really might be cousins (mothers have same maiden name)
d) Decided not to delve too deep when they learned of shared names. Kids ended up looking normal, so what’s the big deal?
e) Most of the above

While not studying, I spent my time on vacation:

a) Whining
b) Eating
c) Worrying
d) Slowly spiraling into a state of diminished mentation in which I became convinced that I might have talent as a visual artist, producing works such as this:

Two of the four people in this photo repeatedly humiliated the other two on the tennis court. Can you pick the winners? For extra credit, can you identify the losers by name? (Hint: Identify them correctly by adding a comma and then the word loser after their names)

For double extra credit, based on photos, can you guess where we went?

Okay, I think I’ve figured out how to post pictures on iPad. First I must tweet them. Annoying but in the meantime have found a favorite new way to waste time. it’s a drawing app. No more flip cam. I’m drawing from now on. Portrait of husband to follow.

Lordie bless, isn’t that Denis Leary a looker, though?

Click here if you can’t see the video above.

Canal Street Sunset

This weekend I was in Manhattan, attending the final show of Denis’s Rescue Me Comedy Tour, which was being taped for a Comedy Central special.  Very funny show with Denis, Lenny Clarke, Adam Ferrara and Whitney Cummings.  I had seen Denis, Lenny and Adam before, of course,  but had never seen Ms. Cummings perform and she is HYSTERICAL.  You might have seen her on Chelsea Handler or Conan or heard her on Howard Stern, but if not, you will see her on something soon because she is going to be very famous.

And my recent interview with Julie Klam, is now available on iTunes. I’m not sure how to link to the exact interview but this link should bring you to iTunes and you can scroll down to my show.

And my EMT course is winding down. Tons of homework and studying. National and state certification exams are soon.

Denis has been on the Rescue Me Comedy Tour this month, so I haven’t seen much of him.  I did, however, see him on West 57th Street the other day.  Yes, I was driving, but it was perfectly safe. The law is against using cellphones when you drive. It’s fine to be making a short film while driving in rush hour traffic, everybody knows that.

If you can’t see video click here:

Well, there was a bear on our front lawn this morning.  I was in bed, so I didn’t get to see it. Denis was outside having a smoke, enjoying the fine spring day, when suddenly the dogs whipped past him, barking madly.  Denis padded barefoot after them, across the damp lawn, and then he saw what he fleetingly  thought was a black horse. It wasn’t until it turned to stare at him that he understood that it was a bear.  Most of the time, we humans are in predator mode, but I guess when you’re armed only with a cigarette and a coffee mug, wearing nothing but a pair of tattered briefs, your body goes into a self-protective/prey (and praying) mode when you meet a large black bear.  Denis said he was frozen with fear.  Exactly like a deer in headlights.

“Why didn’t you grab the camera?” I asked.

“I couldn’t move.”

“But the camera! The blog!”

“I couldn’t even breathe. It was very close.  And big. I thought it was a horse.”

Apparently, after sending Daphne and Lulu into a crescendo of shrill half-bark/half-screams (backing away from it all the while with tails between legs) the bear casually strolled across the lawn and disappeared into the woods. He or she (annoyingly, Denis also didn’t bother to sex the bear) was following a trail that I ride on my horses.  If that bear had such a terrifying impact on my dogs and man, I can’t imagine what it would have on my horses, who fear pretty much every mammal besides man, dog and cat.

I think a lot about what I will do when and if I come across a bear while riding in the woods.  My horse will throw me in the bear’s path and gallop off – that’s a given.  So I’m trying to sort out whether the rolling up in a ball and protecting my tender underbelly is the right move or running at the bear screeching like a witch in an attempt to scare it away (or at least confuse it enough to buy me a little time) would be wiser.

Okay, I’m going back to correct the quizzes now.  Had a busy graduation weekend.  Dear daughter graduated and then she went off with her classmates to various parties and the last we heard, she and the rest of the senior class were migrating north to Vermont, bearing yearbooks and beverages and tents, like some kind of boisterous bedouin tribe who can’t quit each other just yet.   We haven’t seen her since Saturday.  But this weekend, we were all here,  all together and it was a wonderful, wonderful time.

And today, a bear decided not to eat my husband.

Life is good.

I had a full day.

I was up with the dawn because the puppy needed to go out and the animals all needed to be fed before I headed off to be on a television show.  I was co-host on Better Connecticut with Scot Haney again today and I couldn’t possibly have had more fun.  Here’s a clip that I was able to lift from the web.  I was given a DVD of the entire show and would like to figure out how to load clips from it onto the blog, because we had a woman celebrating her 102nd birthday on the show and she was amazing.  She was beautiful and bright and lighthearted and she had hand-crocheted the most intricately worked lace doilies for us.  I just loved meeting her. She was born in 1908.

Then I came home and had some fun taking photographs of animals enjoying the galley of my friend Julie Klam’s forthcoming book, YOU HAD ME AT WOOF.  My favorite of the photos is this:

That’s my friend Jenny Carolan’s dog Rugby, above. He is quite the character, as you can see.  I also like the photo below:

Okay, this is the best:

Alright, my favorite:

And then I went riding and found that I could videotape our silhouette – our shadow, on the grass, climbing up and down the hills with us.  I could have done a better job editing. At one point we were cantering quite fast and I had to mess around with the reins. It was a beautiful day for a ride. Hope you like the video.  If you can’t see the embedded video, click here.