Bayview RARA

After a nice Labor Day weekend at the Port Wing Fish Boil (50th) and dominating the Fall Festival 5k and 10k races, we like to head east to Bayview Lodge for some R, Action, R, and ...  Bayview Lodge is located on Presque Isle Lake in famous Presque Isle, Wisconsin.  It is the lake of Steve's youth.  Grandparents John and Della Brissee had a place there and reside there now in the boneyard.  It's a sentimental, pristine oasis of Northwoods splendor.  It has become our place to go, and chill, on an annual basis.  Time hasn't changed things much there as you can see via the photo gallery.  We manage to fill the too quick days with lots of Actionpea activities in a slow, easy mode.  We run, eat, fish, and cocktail in  a classic style.

Two weeks, next year ???

Sound and Fury?

It's a serious wind blowing through the screen porch.  The ever-skittish Kismet's ears are perked up, and while she appears to be sitting calm as the Buddha, inside you can tell she's lit up like a radar showing the incoming storms.  There's something just on the other side of the screen that's creak-creak-creaking in the wind, and somehow it reminds me of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is talking with the fortune teller and looking into the crystal ball, and outside the storm is brewing and building.

Maybe I'm overplaying it.

This happens here, you know.  You think some kind of massive superstorm is rumbling your way like a crazed, relentlessly advancing sky army outfitted with lightning bolts and tornadoes, and you go outside and look at the weird, green clouds bubbling up out of the west, and then ... nothing.  Well, nothing as spectacular as you imagined.  Just a lot of rain, and maybe some hail and whooshy wind.

It's a little disappointing, actually, but when the left brain kicks in, you realize it's probably for the best.  Tornadoes tend to leave a lot of badness in their wake.  Big storms with big winds and big hail can be destructive in a big way.

I think it's because I've watched too much TV and seen too many smash 'em, crash 'em movies (which I admit I kind of like).  I want lots of sound and fury, but in the end, I'd like it to signify nothing.

Is this thing on ?

Hi, It's Stelvis.

It's 3:30 am do you know where your thoughts are ?

Old guy syndrome dictates nocturnal ramblings. The brain turns on and the thought machine starts...

This has been happening since the start of the big project. This week the French doors go in, something to appease the city inspector. It's 2 stories of monolithic whiteness. The roof looks good, soffits pretty, and trimboards nifty. I like the Tyvek siding, the Hardiboard can wait.

It's getting nigh on time to crack into the existing house and kick some *** !

I'm quite excited , wifey = nervous.

Yet, there are marathons to relay, fish to catch, and Summers to savor before it goes away. Better to slow down and appreciate warm days and sunny porch time.

We've got plenty of time...

Anticip ......... pation

It's goofy, I know, feeling amped up about a run.  But it's a long run.  Very long.  I'm ratcheting up the marathon training, and tomorrow will be my first 20 mile run.  21, actually.  The marathon is the Whistlestop on October 11th (www.whistlestopmarathon.com), and it goes from just east of Iron River, Wisconsin, along a rail-bed-now-recreational-trail to Ashland on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay.  The trail is all crushed limestone, going through mostly forest and a little farmland, and in October it's beautiful - the leaves are changing, the air is cool and dry, the trail is isolated and the race small enough that there's a marvelous quiet to run in.

But tomorrow's run is strictly urban, though it will feel like country in some spots.  I'm running from Lake Minnetonka along the LRT southwest corridor (another converted rail bed) to the north end of Lake Calhoun, then south to Lake Harriet and east along Minnehaha Parkway to Minnehaha Falls.  There I'll meet up with our running club, the Minnehaha Marathoners, for our annual Lake to Falls pizza picnic.  It used to be that many club members ran from Minnetonka to the falls, but we're all getting older and things don't work as well as they used to.  For old time's sake, I thought I'd renew the tradition at least one more year.

I run alone and without music.  There are a few of us purists out there.  Not that one way is inherently any better than the other - I've run with music and loved it.  It's sort of like heroin, I suppose, or cable TV.  Once you start, you can't stop.  I'd just rather not be dependent on something with batteries that could run out and spoil my run, and I don't like to carry stuff with me, generally.  But mostly I like running without people and tunes because I like the connection with my body and the world around me.  I like hearing the loons when they call each other around the lakes.  I like hearing the cardinals and trying to find the spot of red in the trees.  I like the sound of the wind through the tall poplars along the trail.  In the winter, I like the crunch-squeak of my shoes on the snow.

So tomorrow is 21 miles, followed by pizza at the picnic and Cliff's cookies, and a rest of the day filled with well-earned lying around.  And a cocktail at cocktail hour, of course - strictly medicinal.

Our Porch

Nearly 10 years ago we bought our humble, antiquated abode.  There are some changes going on.  And it seems those changes will keep going on until hell freezes over.  But there are a couple things about this hovel - it may be 100 years old this year, but some of that old stuff is pretty good.

Like the porch.  The porch was an add-on or a revamp of a more primitive open porch.  Somebody had a lot of mosquito bites and put screens in, and now we find ourselves enjoying the setting sun and cocktails, just like our predecessors.  We found the house by sheer luck.  There was a FSBO (for sale by owner) sign in the front yard that Steve just happened to see.  The timing was awful - Nancy had just graduated and had a major education debt with promising career prospects, but we had no money in the bank.  Fortune or rash judgment smiled on us and we got the place for what now seems like a song.

Now that the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, we still think we made a good decision, because the porch rocks.  The addition on the back may eventually turn us homicidal, but as long as we're on the porch, we're like The Buddha.  At peace.

Sound and Fury

There's nothing like a good, old-fashioned midwest thunderstorm to rattle your eardrums like no woofer ever could. We, having never actually experienced a tornado, are of the school of idiots who run outside to see what's going on when the tornado sirens go off.

They went off last weekend while we were a couple hundred miles away in Rhinelander, and the forewarned tornadoes destroyed a a huge swath of the town of Hugo east of Minneapolis.  They went off again tonight, but the storms were contained and non-rotational.  (Every Minnesotan is an amateur meteorologist, in case you didn't know.)  Nonetheless, they dumped lots of dime-sized hail, which pelted the monkeys on our welcome mat, and when they continued to produce rain after the setting sun broke through the western clouds, they created a beauteous rainbow in the eastern sky.

MacPeas

It's been a ridiculously long time since our last update. The winter was so long and relentless that any creative spark was doused by the cold and snow. Mostly we curled up and napped, went to work when we had to, and ate a lot. Now the sun is warm enough that we're crawling out of the den, squinting into the light, and thinking it's time to get busy.

So we went out and bought a MacBook. This may not help us get off the couch, but at least Steve may find it a little easier to get online. We plan to tie a rope to our old PC and use it as an anchor when we go fishing in Rhinelander next weekend.