Ann Leary, author of The Good House
Author of The Good House
Last night my friend Jane and I had dinner on the patio of the eyesore. When she left, I took this photo:
Yes, the lake house is finally finished and we’ve been spending every available moment there. Would you like to have a little look inside the kitchen?
This is the view from the kitchen table:
We gave Denis a paddle board for Father’s Day. Last weekend our friend’s beautiful daughter Ava took it out for a sunset paddle:
The next day this handsome fellow gave it a try:
We had a lovely Thanksgiving. My mother was here, as well as my sister Meg and her family and, of course our daughter Devin and son Jack. Dev also brought along two friends from school, Doug and Claire, who live on the west coast which made it even more fun for us. The kids arrived on Wednesday night and we all began discussing the next day’s meal. I informed them that I had plenty of everything except dessert. Claire and Doug said that they had planned to bake an apple pie but hadn’t gotten around to it, what with all the college studying and all. I told them that I had also planned to make an apple pie or two and had bought all the ingredients but hadn’t gotten around to making them yet. After we all agreed that apple pies are the best of all pies, in fact, we all HATE any pies that are not filled with apples, we started bragging about how adept we all are at baking apple pies. That is when we decided to challenge each other to a bake-off.
Can we talk about the Real Housewives shows for a minute? I know that many of you don’t watch the Bravo series that began with The Real Housewives of the OC and has branched out to the Real Housewives of New York, DC, Atlanta, New Jersey and, most recently, Beverly Hills. I confess that I’ve never gotten into The Bachelor or any of the other hit reality shows, but I;m addicted to these housewives.
I have decided to post photos of our little lake cottage. Remember the little fixer-upper I was telling you about?
Well, here it is:
This is the view from the terrace:
There’s a simple garden out back:
And a little something that Denis sculpted:
He admired the way I was drying my ass when I climbed out of the lake and so he told me to freeze and then he quickly chiseled my image into a slab of marble that was lying around. Then he built the little brick portico…
I just wish Devin’s college was a little closer so we could see her more. It’s been ten days since she left, and so far I’ve only been able to visit her twice. Also, Denis visited another day for lunch. Oh, and she’s here right now. Her classes were cancelled for today and, well, do you have any idea how hot her dorm is? She called and explained the heat situation and we urged her to hurry home before she expires from heat stroke. People die all the time in dorms from the excessive heat, I’m sure. I just don’t think it’s talked about enough. Oddly, she wants to go back today. For the weekend. What on EARTH could she want to do on a boring old college campus on a hot weekend, when she could be home watching us argue about air-conditioning and how much to feed the dogs?
Yes, We’re still practicing the skateboard and ball.
Why must we we work so tirelessly at these difficult and dangerous tricks? Because we know that some day, some glorioius day in the not too distant future, we will be asked to appear on this show:
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.
Though I have been having problems loading photos from my regular camera onto blog, I am able to load iPhone photos. I really love the quality of the iPhone photos so it might just be the official camera of the Ann Leary blog from now on.
Can we have a contest to come up with a name for this blog once and for all? Winner will get both of my books and Denis’s book signed. I don’t usually offer D’s book but I’m desperate here.
In the meantime, here are some photos I recently took.
Okay, I am seriously about to throw this laptop out my window. I can no longer load photos that I take with my camera because the software I lost when my hard drive died, is gone. It’ll never come back. In its place is a new version of the same software and it just doesn’t work. I just can’t get the stupid thing to work.
Oh the photos you could be seeing! Remember when this blog was a glorious place, alive with color? Remember the perfect simplicity of a sun-dappled leaf? The amber sunsets? The porcelain snowscapes? Tim?
Sigh.
It’s cold and grey here in Connecticut today, which makes it a perfect movie day. Two hours ago, I tuned in, as I always do on rainy Sundays, to TCM and was delighted to find a movie that I have never seen before. It was Light in the Piazza, starring Olivia de Havilland.
