Wednesday, July 8, did indeed turn out to be a gorgeous Ahmic day. It began 
auspiciously enough with a pancake breakfast eaten under overcast skies. After this feast, Diane and I swept and vacuumed the main cabin. Much of the rest of the morning was taken up with various maintenance activities, consisting of everything from cleaning the Wigger’s porch to scraping crud off of a guesthouse doc, but I must admit that most of the morning and afternoon are a complete blank to me.
Sometime during the afternoon, the owner of the peahen was located and he arrived at the camp with a hastily-constructed trap for the animal – basically a large wire cage which had been jury-
rigged with a mousetrap (on the outside of the cage), which supposedly would be triggered by the bird tugging at some grapes inside the cage, causing a stick to be pulled out from under the cage door, thus trapping the peahen (alternately known as Francis by the women in the camp and Cher by me) and allowing her to be safely transported back to the farm where she belongs.
This, of course, did not work. After watching it for 30 minutes or so, I decided to go for a walk and the bird’s owner decided to leave the trap overnight and go home.
I didn’t see anything overly interesting on my walk, which led me down Langford Lane to the Billy Rouse camp; but did take a number of road shots. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with roads, but I am. Deal with it.
Upon my return from the walk, I trudged to my boathouse home with the intention of taking a nap. Don Peddie had other ideas. I became aware of these when he came charging towards the 
boathouse, saw me on the balcony, and screamed, “Get your biggest lens and come with me! There are loons on the lake!”
Being an old loon hand, I wasn’t overly excited, but Don was; so I decided to humor him. Good call on my part. He’d found two adult loons and a chick – something I haven’t seen before. I learned later that there were actually two chicks, but I only saw the one. That was enough for me, and I ended up taking about 80 pictures of the three birds. We then screamed back to the camp, where Don exchanged me for Julie and took off again, apparently opening a new “Peddie Nature Cruises” company or something.
After the loon excursion, I ran into Cy and T, who were just about to hit the tennis court – something I’d wanted to do since last weekend, so I horned my way into their game. We played several sets of Canadian doubles (rotating 2-against-1); and, for the first time that I can remember, I actually won. Final score was 4 for me, 3 for T and 2 for Cy. My plan is to never ever ever never ever let T forget it.
Flush with my victory, I ran to the main cabin to fulfil my duties as assistant cook for Karl. He didn’t really need my help as he threw together a fantastic creamed corn casserole to go along with a very cool “salad” (tomatoes with mozzarella slices, basil, oil and vinegar), and the main course of chicken breasts grilled in the big green egg. For dessert, he came up with grapes mixed with sour cream, which were topped with cinnamon, brown sugar, and triple sec. Good stuff.
After dinner activities were fairly tame. The ladies worked on the puzzle for a while before a game of team cribbage broke out. I spent the evening getting my butt kicked in Dominion (an online card game).
Then it was off to bed for us all, where we fell asleep listening to the laughter of the loons.
Next up: Thursday!
TWD