Our week upstate was good. Shane and I tagged along as Rich and Alana drove up to the lake house near the Thousand Islands on Saturday. Shane's parents arrived later that day, and Jolene (Shane's oldest sister) and her husband Brian, baby son Cody, and their hyper chocolate lab Bear came up on Sunday. We stayed until Thursday, spending time in the rental house's rowboat and Brian's kayak out on the lake, swimming, lounging on the dock, fishing, eating good food, playing cards and doing puzzles. I got some knitting and reading done, too. The lake was beautiful, not too crowded, and there was good fishing. Oh, and I caught a fish -- a lake bass, quite large for my first real catch, though it was still kind of a small one. Shane's dad cleaned the thing, and we ate it grilled the next day. Overall, a great vacation, though the only drawback was the abundance of mosquitoes.
View of dock from the house
Fishing amongst lilypads
On Thursday we rode back to Rochester with Shane's parents. We helped pick tomatoes, green beans, and blackberries out of their enormous garden, and we swam in their pool. After a couple days there, we drove a rental car back to New York City. We had our last New York City diner breakfast as residents the next day, Sunday, before driving the cats to Chicago, stopping one night in West Virginia.
Shane's aunts have a house and a few acres in West Virginia, and while they are on vacation in Alaska for the next two weeks, Shane is housesitting, feeding the two horses, one dog, and numerous cats, and painting and doing other work on the house. Leaving Shane there, I left the next morning on the ten-hour drive to Chicago with Tigger and Bibbo.
Now we are safely installed in the apartment, which I am still having to clean, clean, clean, and clean some more. It's a bit of an old house, and the previous tenant didn't leave it in great condition, so I'm trying to make it livable. Lucky for us, the cats don't seem to mind the cat pee stench that I am trying my best to remove. They lounge about quite as usual.
So, that's it! I will be starting a new Chicago blog, which I will link here as soon as I can.
Ah, New York.... I will miss a lot of things, but it was great to get out and away from the rotten smells, noise, crowds, and chaos that come with the loveliness of living in the city.
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