Hey there. I'm not dead. Like so many of you, I'm having a busy (and fun!) summer. Instead of just telling you what I've been up to, I'm telling my stories in pictures this time. On each page, you can click on the thumbnail to see a bigger version, and then use the arrows to navigate through all the pictures. The little descriptions I wrote will appear on the page with the bigger picture as well, but it's the same text as on the thumbnail page in most cases. Here's hoping nobody posts these pictures to bangable.com like they did before! I ended up taking that picture off my server because the jerk kept posting it and it was screwing with my stats (and thus costing me money).
At the beginning of the month, Eric and Stacey came to visit. It was the first time we've all been together since Jim and I moved back to New York, about three years ago! We've seen them both individually, but not together. So it was a lot of fun, even though it was super hot the weekend that they were here. We went to the zoo anyway, so there are animal pictures in this set. [Note: These pictures were deleted to save bandwidth -- Kim in 2002]
Two weekends ago, I went to Toronto for MBTV con, a gathering of some of the Mighty Big TV writers. Sadly, I was one of the few there who hadn't recently been laid off. I got to meet some new people, and hang out with old friends. Sarah gave me a ride there and back, which was awesome, because we got a chance to talk (shit about everyone else -- kidding!). We both stayed at Tara and Dave's lovely home, which was also nice. I had a great time overall, and could have easily spent another week there! It was exactly the break from work that I needed. Here are the pictures from that trip. [Again, deleted to save bandwidth -- Kim in 2002]
On Friday, I went to the State Fair with Mary, Terry, Stimp, Stimp's brother Mikey, and our friend Chris. It was a hot, hot day, but we managed to hit all the essential State Fair moments and then some. No Clinton visits this year (unlike years past), but I think a good time was had by all nonetheless. Here are those pictures. [Guess what? These pictures are gone too. -- Kim in 2002]
And finally, on Saturday, my dad's family had a party. My cousin Steve lives in Colorado, and he was home visiting with his wife and son. Also, my cousin Josh lives in Maine, and he was home along with his girlfriend, Jess. So for the first time in quite some time, all of my cousins were there. It was a great time. I found out that the family farm has been sold, which is kind of sad, but a family bought it. The wife of the family grew up about two houses down, then married and moved away. She wanted to move back and be closer to her parents. So I'm happy that it's going to a family that will probably enjoy it and live there for the rest of their lives! I took one last trip out there to see if there were any last-minute things that I wanted to take, and found a box full of my Aunt Marion's day planners. Each day she recorded her daily events like, "Played bridge with so-and-so" or "Larry, Judy, and kids came for a visit in the afternoon." It sounds really boring, but it's a fascinating look at what her life was like, and I have from 1976 to the present. So I'm glad I got those. Anyway, here are pictures of the family gathering. I gotta warn you -- most of them are of my cousin's kid, Jordan. But he's pretty cute. [Also gone. -- Kim in 2002]
So that's my month of August! I don't have any big plans for Labor Day, but the following weekend Jim and I are going to my grandparents' cottage on Keuka Lake, and the weekend after that, Mary, Molly, and I are going to Boston for the weekend. I love fall and I've really been looking forward to it, but I can't believe that the summer is almost over!
Yes, it's the long-awaited (by about three people, probably) vacation entry. For those of you who don't know, Jim and I spend a week in the Adirondacks with his family each summer. Click on any picture to see a bigger version.
These first two pictures I took with my wide-angle lens, so the clouds and stuff on the edges of the image are all distorted. I thought it looked kind of cool. Anyway, this is the place that we stayed. The views are looking straight out from our beach, and then looking to the left. We were in kind of a cove, and that white boathouse was on the point of the cove. It worked out pretty well because, due to the cove, motor boats and jetskis didn't really come in very close to our beach, giving us a little bit of peace. I've never been on a jetski, and I'm sure they are very fun to ride, but man, are they annoying.
This is obviously Jim, and I think I took this on our first day there. The cottage we stayed in (with Jim's parents, and Jim's brother and sister-in-law) was really nice. It was the first year they have rented it out, and boy did we luck out. The cottage was up on the hill, with a nice seating area with a picnic table and some chairs right outside. Then you went down the steps and there was a deck with built-in benches, a table with an umbrella, and some more chairs. It's definitely the nicest place we have had in the four years we've been vacationing there. It was total luck, because Jim's parents rented it sight unseen when the other place we were supposed to rent got sold in the spring, and the new owners decided not to rent at all this summer.
We had a little family of ducks that stayed on the float out in front of our cottage. It was a mother and three babies, although they were more adolescent than babies, I guess. They didn't quite have all their feathers yet. Anyway, this picture is the mom and two of the babies. One of the babies liked to go his own way, and at one point, Jim's mom was all worried because we hadn't seen him all day, but he showed up later. We had a great time enjoying the antics of the ducks. Another time, they were hopping up to roost on the float, and one of them had a little trouble getting up. Jim's mom was about to swim out there and help it, but it finally made it. It was like the little engine that could. There were plenty of other gangs of ducks in and out of our area throughout the week, too.
While we were on vacation, Jim's father's family had a big family reunion. Many of them live near where we were staying, and they have this big reunion every year, but Jim and I had never attended before. I didn't know any of the people there (except Jim's immediate family) but neither did Jim really, so it worked out okay. This picture is Jim's nephew, Noah, checking out some baby. I still don't know whose baby it is, but Noah was cracking me up because he was fascinated, and singing little songs and such to the baby. Also, I like to take pictures of Noah because he has such bright red hair. There were a lot of people at this reunion with red hair -- at least I know what side of the family Jim gets his coloring from! It was weird to look around and see all these people who looked so similar to various members of Jim's family. There was one little girl who was a dead ringer for Jim's sister at that age.
As you can see, I took a lot more pictures of various dogs at the reunion than I did of any family members. I still don't know who these dogs belonged to, but they were just wandering around. I totally fell in love with the little black one, which is why there are three pictures of her. Jim liked the yellow one that he is petting in the last picture best. They were all really good dogs -- there were tons of kids running around and the dogs stayed really mellow and just hung out and let people pet them.
We got in the habit of taking a walk every night after dinner to work off some of that "I'm so full I think I'm going to die" feeling. One night, we went for a walk through the woods, and the light coming through the trees looked extremely cool, so I took a picture. Jim didn't think it would turn out, but it did! I was very excited. I try really hard to take great nature photos, and it rarely works out. But I'm really proud of this one. We didn't see any deer on our walk (possibly because Jim's sister brought her two dogs with us) but other family members reported seeing plenty of deer, especially in the morning. Since I don't roll out of bed until mid-morning anyway, I guess I missed out on the deer. I did, however, get to see the stars, but I don't have a good enough camera to take pictures of them. I tried, but they just came out black.
Speaking of morning, Jim took both of these pictures before I got up in the morning. Clearly, he's a better nature photographer than I am. I think I take better pictures of people though, so it all evens out in the end. I was really impressed with both of these pictures, especially how he got the sun to look so cool. Anyway, these two pictures look a lot better than the two I took up at the top of this page. This is the kind of beautiful weather we had almost every day that we were there. It was incredibly hot and humid for the first three or four days, then we got some rain, and then it cooled down. I was actually disappointed when it cooled down, because it wasn't really hot enough to make me want to swim anymore, but it did make it a lot more pleasant to just sit outside, and definitely made sleeping more pleasant.
One day, Jim's brother took all of the kids (except Noah, the smallest one) out fishing on his boat. Jim's mom spent the afternoon playing with Noah, and I just thought it was the cutest thing. First, they spent some time playing in the sand, building sandcastles and digging holes. Then, they got matching tubes and floated out in the water for a while. On an earlier day, I was swimming with Noah, and he decided that we should pretend to be whales. We were brother and sister, and we had to pretend that we were lost and then we would find each other, and he would climb on my back and we would swim around like that for a while. It was pretty fun, I have to say.
The rest of the kids got to go fishing. I thought this picture perfectly encapsulated their personalities. Andrea is pretending to drive the boat and posing for the camera. She loves to have her picture taken and always comes up afterwards to see the pictures on the LCD screen. Zoe is looking around to see what everyone else is doing, and if she might be missing something important. Stephen is just sitting in the back, taking it all in. Cooper is totally distracted and trying to look at the fish they caught. Cooper loves bugs and salamanders and stuff. He's such a boy. We had a little disaster shortly after this. The kids got to decide if they wanted to eat the fish they caught or let them go. Cooper wanted to let his go, but he also wanted to keep it in his net for a while so it couldn't swim away. Jim's brother eventually let the fish go free, but Cooper wasn't ready for that to happen, and no amount of explaining to him how the fish would die if he didn't let it go would work. Cooper has a lot of "casualties" among the animals he catches and observes.
It wouldn't be a Durr vacation without a lot of card-playing. Here, Jim's dad is playing gin with the help of Stephen. You might think I'm kidding about the "help" part, but I'm totally not. Stephen is a little card shark. He beats most of the adults. For his birthday, Jim and I gave him Harry Potter Uno -- he seemed to like it quite a bit. I actually didn't play much cards this vacation, but I think that's because the weather was so nice that I spent most of the time reading outside and swimming. I can't really complain about that! The other thing that cracks me up about this picture is that Jim's dad's hair is so neat. That never happens. He must have just woken up from a nap and combed his hair or something. Usually it's sticking out in ten different directions.
Zoe and Andrea were covering themselves in sand and mud for some unknown reason, so I tried to sneak over and get a picture of them. Andrea saw me, though, and they posed for this one. I'm still not entirely sure what the reasoning was for covering themselves in mud, but now that I think about it, I guess you don't really need a reason! It actually looks kind of fun. I think Zoe's bathing suit used to belong to Andrea. You get a lot of that in Jim's family -- Noah will be wearing pajamas that look really familiar, and I'll realize that it's because Stephen used to wear them, and then Cooper, and now Noah. Hey, nothing wrong with hand-me-downs.
I really like this picture of Jim and his dad. That's all I have to say about that.
Jim's dad celebrated a birthday while we were on vacation, so Jim and I picked up an ice cream cake at the grocery store. The kids were all very excited to help Papa blow out the candles, except Cooper, who I think was in a bit of trouble for not eating his dinner or something. I'm not sure where he was, actually, but he did show up later. The way we work it is that one family is responsible for each day's meals. I made fajitas on my day -- just cooked up some chicken and beef, grilled vegetables, and cooked rice and refried beans. It went over pretty well, so I was happy.
Noah had a great time eating his ice cream cake, although I think more of it ended up on his face than in his stomach. The cake had these little candy sprinkles on it, and you can see them stuck around his mouth. I just noticed in this picture that Noah may have inherited the Durr ears. Or maybe his ears are just growing at a faster rate than the rest of his head. I kid because I love.
The setup that we had this year, with the non-kid-having people in one cottage and the kid-having people in another worked out great for me. I enjoy being around the kids, and as kids go, they are really cool. But I don't have kids of my own for a reason -- I don't really want to be around them (especially five of them at once) twenty-four hours a day, especially when I'm on vacation. We still don't know what we are going to do next year. We'd like to go to the same area, but get cottages that are a little closer together -- they were kind of far apart. And the cottage that the kid-having people stayed in was kind of a dump, so I wouldn't blame them for wanting to get a nicer place. Jim and I keep pushing to go back to the original lake we stayed on, because it's much smaller and doesn't allow motor boats. But since it's much smaller, it's also much harder to find rentals.
I leave you with two more pictures that Jim took in the morning. Apparently, there was mist on the lake, but it didn't come out very well in the pictures. They still look cool. One of them is currently in use as my desktop. I wish I could live on a lake year-round. I don't know that I would want to live in the Adirondacks, because it's too remote. I always wonder what happens if there is an emergency in the winter and the roads are impassable. But I wouldn't mind living in the Finger Lakes or something. If only it weren't for Jim's pesky job. I can do my current jobs from anywhere, but then again, I do need a decent phone line and cable television, and even that's not available in some areas.
So I guess it will just be vacationing in such areas for a while longer