Yeah, baby! The moon was HUGE over the Rouse’s boathouse last night!
Okay…of course the picture over there is photoshopped. I think it looks pretty cool anyway, and it is indeed made up of two photos that I took on Monday night. The shot of the moon was actually sort of fun. I set my camera to the “bulb” setting, which means that the shutter will stay open for as long as my finger is on the button. In order to cut down on vibration, I also used a remote shutter-release cable; and to cut down on the vibration caused by the shutter itself, I turned off off the lights in the boathouse, held a magazine over the front of my camera’s lens (camera was on a tripod), opened the shutter, waited for several seconds (in order to let the shutter-caused vibrations stop), and then quickly moved the magazine away from the lens and then back in front of it (picture Matthew Brady taking pictures during the civil war). It took quite a few attempts, but I finally started to get the timing down, resulting in the fairly clean moon image that I used for the above manipulation.
You’ve got to admit that it’s more interesting than the actual shot of the Rouse boathouse, which came out like this:
Anyway, back to the narrative. Monday did indeed start out to be sort of a blah day, weatherwise. It rained in the early morning (before I was awake) and then turned quite cool. Cy, “T,” Karl, Diane, Don and Julie decided to head to nearby Huntsville to do some shopping and act like tourists. I opted to hang out at Camp Ulvik, largely because I slept until nearly 10 and the old folks were ready to leave by the time I made my way to the cabin.
After treating myself to a hot shower (because of the cool air, I couldn’t convince myself to jump in the lake), I walked for about 45 minutes with my camera, hoping that some enterprising wild thing would be out and about in the overcast day. The only thing I saw were mosquitoes, who happily ate away at my ears, neck, hands and any other exposed skin they could find. 
When it started to rain, I headed back towards the camp probably more quickly than I had to, considering the fact that my camera was quite safe inside a plastic bag.
I spent most of the rest of Monday afternoon sitting on the Wigger’s porch and chatting on my computer. The old folks got home shortly before cocktail hour (the hour or two preceding dinner), and Don happily started a fire in the main cabin’s large fireplace. When I say it was “cool,” perhaps I should define what I mean. It was in the high 40s. A fire was quite welcome.
Dinner, put together by “T” and Julie, was barbequed pork ribs, leftover chickpea stuff, and some sort of salad; and was – by and large – not bad. I have this thing about messy food, though: I don’t eat much of it. It’s too much work, much like peel-n-eat shrimp. So later, after the old folks had all gone to bed (no cards or anything Monday, due largely to the fact that T’s sister and brother-in-law showed up after dinner), I sort of gorged on peanuts while playing on my computer and listening to Chicago Public Radio. I did this until the fire had died away and mosquitoes began invading the main cabin, then headed to my bug-free boathouse, where I slept like a brick.
Tuesday was warmer than Monday, but the rain really arrived. “T” and Don went out fishing after breakfast (I was invited, but really didn’t feel like getting soaked), and the skies opened up while they were gone. I spent the morning playing on my computer and looking at pictures while Karl looked at his fantasy baseball stats and the ladies in the camp combined their efforts on the jigsaw puzzle (which is currently about 85% done, but is still incredibly difficult).
The happy fishermen got back by noon or so – drenched and fishless – and Don immediately got to work building a fire. Since I still had no Canadian money and since the rain showed no sign of stopping and since it was getting extremely crowded (and, might I add, LOUD) inside the cabin, I decided that a drive to Parry Sound was in order. Actually, I decided that a drive to anywhere was in order, and originally started towards Burke’s Falls and/or Huntsville before literally turning around in someone’s driveway and heading the opposite direction to Parry Sound, which is located on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.
The village of Parry Sound (birthplace and current hometown of Bobby Orr for the sports fans among you) is dominated two things: a town dock and a railroad trestle. The trestle is the longest in Ontario (something like 1,700 feet long) and celebrated its 100th anniversary last June.
The town dock is a public dock run by the Parry Sound chamber of commerce and can accomodate just about any size boat. Anybody who can afford the docking fee can dock there and it’s not uncommon to see a normal ski-boat moored with a $10M yacht on one side and a tall ship on the other. The dock is also the point of departure for about three different cruise companies, all of which take passengers out among the thousands of islands in the Georgian Bay, stop for lunch at one of the islands with a restaurant, and then come back. In the last 20 years or so that I’ve been coming to Ahmic, I’ve taken these tours three times – twice on a tugboat called “Cambrian,” and once on a larger cruise boat named “Island Princess.” I prefer the tugboat, but kind of hate to waste an entire day out on the bay.
The village of Parry Sound itself is, unfortunately, rather hokey. There’s an excellent used book store there – I spend an hour or so there every time I visit the village – and a couple of touristy knick-knack stores, but (I remembered this too late) Huntsville is an infinitely better place for picking up souvenirs. The weather was pleasant enough, however, so I spent most of the afternoon hanging out on the dock, visiting the book store and sifting through the aforementioned tacky stuff before heading back to Ahmic. Upon arrival, I fired up the computer, caught up on Facebook and chatted with a friend in Macon while Karl and Julie threw together some truly amazing hamburgers along with something that I assumed was beet greens, but have since been informed was actually Swiss Chard (never heard of it).
The sky during dinner indicated that Wednesday might be a beautiful day.
For whatever reason, last night’s after-dinner activity became “Inside Vermont Politics,” the game wherein “T” and Karl throw out stories about anything local to Vermont and Di and Cy and Don and (to a much lesser extent) Julie attempt to comment on those items before “T” or Karl loudly change to a completely different subject. It is a common game, often played at Ulvik, and I admit that I’m not very good at it, as it contains very little of interest to me. 
So I hung in there for only an hour or so (Julie didn’t even do that much, as you can see) and then waddled to my boathouse to, once again, have a wonderful and restful sleep.
More tomorrow or Friday.
TWD