A ghastly looking version of myself in Maine
In Bradenton, we get fog from time to time. I’ll wake up in the morning to find slightly reduced visibility, and then by mid-afternoon things will clear up again. Tonight, however, I find myself in Maine, and they have an entirely different definition of fog. When we arrived in Rockland, Maine today, the ground was dry. Three hours later, I couldn’t even see all the way up to the next sharp curve in the hilly road, let alone around it.
The day started mundanely enough, waking up in Massachussetts and driving to Maine to stay with some (very distant) cousins of my grandma’s. Rockland is a really quaint town, with a harbor and old houses and buildings, but also a good smattering of newer stores, restaurants, hotels, and the like, apparently being something of a tourist town. Our relatives here are an older couple (the husband, my grandma’s third cousin, they think, served in the Navy in WWII) with a nice house on a hill, where I’m currently sitting up in a guest room, tapping out this post while the rain taps away on the windows and the lights flicker periodically (immunity to power outages is always a nice perk to working on a laptop). There’s no internet here, so I’ll be posting this tomorrow. In fact, it’s entirely possible that I’ve found the last remaining piece of the United States without some wireless network to be found.
The great book of genealogy
In any case, the day was relatively uneventful, aside from meeting some distant relatives and exploring an amusing town. We got to take a look at a truly monumental volume of geneology, which traces our family tree clear back to some relative from the 1600s. I also got to go outside and make some photographs after dark, which turned out pretty nicely once I put myself in and light-painted myself in. Along with the fog, the ghostly light painting made for an awfully spooky atmosphere. The fog really was thick, too: after probably fifteen minutes outside, I came in and found my camera and tripod covered in perspiration, and the outsides of my boots looked as though I’d been tromping through puddles, rather than grass.
Now it’s late, and it’s raining, and it’s just about time to sleep. I would have had this typed and gotten to bed a good half hour ago, but I just had to break the blinds trying to figure out how to secure them down. There’s sort of an odd system rigged up here, with two eyelets on either side of the windowsill, and a string tied at one eyelet, going up and through a bar at the bottom of the blinds, and then down and through the other eyelet, where one can pull the loose end to bring the entire bar down towards the windowsill (and, I finally realized, tie the loose end off on a little metal spool at the bottom).
While I was trying to figure out how to secure it in the down position, however, the line came loose from the eyelet it had been tied on to, and came flying out the other end. It should have been pretty straightforward to reattach, except that I couldn’t thread the line all the way through the narrow metal tube: it always got stuck at the end. So after a good half hour of searching for anything I could use to weight the string that would fit through the tube (I found nothing), I finally realized that I could just pull the ink stick out of a pen. After all, the ink stick is specifically designed to slide down a narrow tube. I tied the string on to the business end of the stick, got it through the tube, and finally solved my little conundrum, after wasting far too much time. And with that accomplished, and this post more or less finished, I think I can finally rest.