Here and there

Toilet convention in Sister Bay.
Agenda: New flushing standards.

Spent a few days in Door County, and another couple days up -- way up -- at our friends' cottage in Three Lakes. When you do summer things after Labor Day, everyone is gone and the rates are great.

We did our first actual touristy thing in Sister Bay -- assuming that going to Sister Bay at all is not touristy -- by signing on to an evening sailboat ride. We did not sail -- we sat while the two-person crew sailed. The boat was a ketch? Sloop? Cutter? I think it was a windjammer, if google is any guide. Two masts with big sails, a smaller foresail and a jib. Lots of ropes.

It's been a jerky-jerky summer, with its funerals and vacations. In recent days I came to crave my sad, quasi-productive routine. On a good day, I'm up by 7:30 or 8 -- late by working standards -- eat a little breakfast, comb through the Times, crab about the state of the world, and then sit down to write something -- anything. Whatever seems to be working. Then I do the actual paying work I might have, and when my mind punks out I organize my room, pay bills, and go for a bike ride. It's pretty good, and I'm grateful.

So here's a blog-related update -- I should have done this long ago. There's a new little box on the first page, on the righthand side. The label says: Follow by Email. If you put your email in that box, you'll get get an email notification when I put up a new post. Just in case anybody cares.

Here's the best single sentence I read in the paper this week:

"Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?" 

                                                                           -- Kamala Harris to Brett Kavanaugh 

I just wonder if, say, men telling women they can or can't get abortions isn't a little like some future government of women telling men they have to get vasectomies or that they can't get them. Reproductive rights! 

Kind of a grab-bag, this one. 

Gwen coils the ropes.

She smiles pretty well. Me, not so much.