My mom came up last week to switch cars with me. I now have air conditioning, but poor Jimmy is sitting in the yard, lonely and waiting to be traded in on my brother’s new truck. I don’t know what I did to earn the luck I had while she was here, but I hope it was fun because it certainly came back to bite me on the ass. Every time something bad happened (flat tire, clogged toilet, sail boat parked on top of my jellyfish net, etc.), she insisted that it was her fault, apologized profusely, and went on and on about how she was sure I couldn’t wait to be rid of her. Other than that, we had a pretty good time. Went to the beach, had an adventure to St. Michaels, explored the limited toilet plunging options available on the Eastern Shore (none of them worked, a plumber is coming tomorrow), and I taught her to change a tire.
The weekend was both relaxing and lucrative. I worked the touch tank at the Bay Country Festival Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights, nearly doubling my upcoming pay check, but since the festival was only in the evenings, the days were free for vegging.
Went kayaking yesterday morning, and by morning I mean 11:30 because Des graciously allowed me to sleep in after forcing me to stay up to cook potatoes for potato salad on Monday night. As we were lying back in our boats, drifting along with our feet hanging over the sides, CK and I decided that we are going to become pirates. We both require our own ship, but we’ll travel together. We’ll use only wind power, and we’ll be the Robin Hood of pirates, stealing only from rich oil companies and giving only to poor nonprofit environmental organizations and out-of-work fishermen. Instead of actually plundering anything, we’ve decided that our goal should be to ruin people’s day and to preach the evil of fishing rigging that destroys the bottom and to stop the killing of sharks for any reason. Des was offered the command of a third ship, but she refused, preferring instead to be towed along in a rubber dinghy so that she can smash jellyfish with her paddle while screaming “aaaarrrrr” at them. CK and I will henceforth refer to her vessel as the short boat, and when asked by other pirates, we will inform them that she’s “a special pirate.” By 3:30, we were sufficiently sunburnt and mosquito bitten with blistered hands and empty water bottles, so we hauled out and went back to our house to grill leftover burgers. We had planned on a badminton tournament, but as we stood around the grill dripping sweat, we decided that our outdoor experience for the day was over. We watched movies in the air conditioning until the fireworks started. Cambridge has a really big display that you can see from the water anywhere in town. We walked to the end of our street and found the most adorable display of small town culture I’ve ever seen. Everyone was just standing in the middle of the street watching.
…and now that I have procrastinated for nearly two hours, I should probably think about doing some work. The method for inducing jellyfish spawning is not going to write itself. Or maybe I’ll wait until after lunch.
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