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We had a great time at the beach, hanging out in the little beach cottage, eating cereal on the screen porch, etc.

I didn’t touch a computer all week, for the first time since 1996. To maintain my Ridiculous Geek status, I helped Lydia to swim in the ocean using an orange Pelican case as a flotation device. An orange Pelican case with a video iPod in it, just to make things interesting. After an hour of splashing around in the waves, submerging the case and sitting on it, clubbing sharks on the nose, etc., the inside of the case was clean, tight, and dry. Whew! My near-religious faith in Pelican cases was justified.

We’re going to plant a vegetable garden in the back yard. It’s gonna be awesome. We’re turning our attention to the yard, now, which needs plenty of help. Like we have to cut the privet hedge down from twenty feet, for example.

To prepare, I’ve started reading William Cobbett‘s 1818 book in which he tries to introduce gardening to the American gentleman farmer (“at a dollar a day, the work needed to turn the earth [in your 150×300-foot garden(!)] should last forty days, costing forty dollars…” — Cobbett, like many from the Old Country, was excited about the potential of All That Space, I guess.) Kate continues to read Beverly Nichols, as well as modern books that are actually of some use.

Also, we need to build a fence to keep the rabbits out. Fortunately, we live near Longwood Gardens, which is of course a really amazingly incredible resource for garden projects of any kind. Kate, Lydia, and I made a bunch of trips to Longwood’s Idea Garden. We have frequent-visitor passes, which makes me feel like a big shot: “stand back, tourists, we’re here to evaluate the squash! Pint-size pumpkin inspector coming through, move aside all you day-trippers!” I really like Longwood’s varmint fence, so we made lots of measure drawings.

An exterminator came out to look at our porch columns, which we thought might have carpenter ants living in them. They did. Did they ever. This was one of those times when natural remedies wouldn’t have sufficed to correct the problem, unless “natural remedies” means “building a giant, purifying fire and burning the porch down.” When he sprayed, thousands of ants came boiling out of the bases. Ick. No tea parties on the porch for a while until the Talstar is gone.

I’m a marathon runner now, too. My sister and I have been talking intermittently about running a marathon together with my dad, who has run Boston many times. And my great-grandfather C.D. Young was a track athlete, apparently, and took a fake name to decrease the spread on him (track and field was a gambler’s sport back in the day, I guess.) So from now until April 2007 I’m going to work on excercise and getting down to my fighting weight, and then I’ll be Officially Training for the Portland Marathon in October 2007. Being a dedicated athlete is awesome; I feel focused and relaxed after only, let’s see… 22 hours of being a marathon runner, now. Great!

Oh, and my Ultimate Water Gun article came out in MAKE 07, on page 111, with a teaser slug on the cover. It hits newsstands on 8/21. Hurrah!

We came back from vacation (which was wonderful, but more on that later) to the sad news that my stepfather Robin Staebler has died of cancer. It’s not unexpected, but it’s much sooner than expected, and I’m very sorry to lose him.

Robin (who Lydia called “Grumpy”) was a bastion of macho in the Baldwin family. He was a medic in Korea, and was a special-forces doctor in the Canadian services — once presiding over an experiment where soldiers were stationed for six weeks in the arctic circle, then immediately dropped by parachute into the steamy jungles of Vieques, Puerto Rico (the soldiers needed a lot of salt to stay hydrated, but were otherwise fine, except that the curling was terrible.) My cousin Max Alexander, ex-magazine editor and card-carrying back-to-the-land-er, used to ask Robin for advice on all kinds of subjects from geting ice off the roof to tractor care and the million other subjects that Maine-ers need to know about.

Robin was also a nerd’s nerd. He had a cave full of ham radio equipment and a pickup truck carrying forty feet of army-issue self-tuning powered radio aerial. However awesome my gadgets were at the time, Robin’s were awesomer, and he used them constantly. When I was thinking about my time-travelers almanac and how to calculate standard measurement when you’re stuck in the past and don’t have access to the platinum SI standard measures (because they don’t exist yet, naturally), Robin came up with the idea of using naturally-occurring minims, like the smallest mercury-drop possible (assuming that surface tension is a constant.) If he had been born in the 1600s, I’m quite sure that he would have been a Royal Fellow, except the kind that’s out their in the far corners of the earth doing science and knocking heads.

He was a remarkable, very intelligent man, and he is missed. Here’s a link to his obituary.

We’re going to be at the beach all week, in Jamesport, New York, which is somewhere exactly right here, with Genevieve and Francesco and Samson. That’s a good trio of names for weeklong beach companions.

We’ve stocked up on suntan lotion, Lydia has new flowery flip-flops, and I’ve got my beach reading picked out. In addition to plenty of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ian Fleming, I can’t wait to re-re-reread “Swallows and Amazons.”

Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, will not drown.

I’m going to be completely offline all week, which is making me a little dizzy. In a good way! Hurrah!

We’re back from NYC, where I spent a week in a 16th-floor training room bathing in the glow of a Proxima projector learning Adobe Flex 2, and Lydia and Kate did the following:

• Visited every playground with a fountain south of 23rd street
• Were told by a mommy at one of the playgrounds in conversation that “the playgrounds are crowded, yes… it can get very cutthroat. But that’s good for them.” (!!!)



• Went to the Central Park Zoo and patted the polar bear on its fuzzy rump as it went swimming by (well, from the other side of a pane of thick glass)
• Visited many yarn stores and quilt stores
• Took the subway all around NYC (and every time LBY went down into the subway, she’d look up and say “Let’s go to York!”)
• Ate breakfast and lunch in the lobby of the Giraffe hotel, and danced there after dinner when the piano lady was there (she was happy to take requests, but “Old McDonald Had a Farm” doesn’t seem to be right for a crowd of Spanish businessmen and emaciated photographers with expensive haircuts and open collars.)
• Rode the carousel in Bryant Park ten times in a row — on the bench, on the frog, on the bunny, on the horse, on the bench again, etc.

I’d get a picture message every 20 minutes or so with what was going on. It was great, great, great fun to see Kate and Lydia knocking around the town having adventures. Lydia liked the food, too — we ate dinner in Mexican Radio on Lafayette while watching downtown hipsters getting private kung fu lessons in that little triangle park there, at Blue Smoke where they are going for the young-parent demographic and brought us a pig cookie to be decorated and baked, at the Mermaid Inn where we found out that MICHELLE STERN IS GOING TO HAVE A BABY YAAAAAY! (Sorry, Michelle, if that’s a secret), and at Dos Caminos, where Lydia repeatedly demanded that Genevieve accompany her to the beach RIGHT NOW.

And we had lunch at the Noho Star, and we rode the train, and Kate discovered that having a stroller means that no taxi will pick you up ever (I couldn’t believe this; we had to hide Kate and Lydia behind a minivan while I flagged the cab, then bring them out once I had the door open), and there was lots more too. It was a fun trip!