Some General Pictures to set the scene
"The Big House." Still under construction inside, but everybody finally lives there.
The Playhouse, where WendiLou holds her daycare, "Skip to My Lou."
Friday
A sign in the Belfast Co-op Café, where we ate dinner prior to the contradance.
Quena, getting ready to go into the Belfast "Flying Shoes" contradance, played by the magnificent Nightingale. A truly wonderful dance it was. I got to meet a bunch of Quena's dancing friends, taught somebody the delightfully silly interlocking-elbows-nose-holding swing (I am hoping he will pass it on), and iced my shins all the way home.
Saturday
Saturday is English Muffin Day in the Salman house, meaning fresh, homemade sourdough English muffins -- absolutely delicious! I got the recipe, and Wend even gave me some sourdough starter to take home, so I can make my own!
The view from Mt. Wallamatogus, commonly known as Togus Mountain for short, which is right behind the house. Quena and I hiked up and picked wild low-bush blueberries on Saturday morning. They're tiny, but delicious!
The "gravel pit," a lovely pond where Quena and I took a bath (complete with biodegradable soap and shampoo) in the afternoon after our hike. It was chilly but not too cold, so we could actually stay in and swim a bit. Oh, and there were very cool frogs and a turtle in it, too. :)
After our hike and swim, Quena and I baked rhubarb muffins, then went to an outdoor potluck party hosted by the family of a friend of hers, who live on a truly wonderful farm with a huge garden and horses and pigs and goats and the most beautiful brown cow I have ever seen. There was music and frivolity (and lots of pies), and Quena and I had a highly enjoyable cross-step waltz on the grass, uphill and downhill and around the food tent.
Sunday
After a breakfast of sourdough blueberry pancakes, Quena and I braided our hair and Bella's, and the three of us went to Blue Hill Park. We were going to go blueberry picking in the afternoon, but it rained, so we took a nap and had a lovely evening at home instead.Monday
Quena had to work on Monday, so I went into Blue Hill with her to wander while she worked. I went for a lovely walk up the road toward East Blue Hill, wandered around an old cemetery, discovered the Marine Environmental Research Institute (MERI, which is a lovely cheerful acronym), and found some library books to check out for Bella.
I had lunch with Quena at the co-op, and spent the remainder of her work hours in the cafe, because it had started to rain again. A couple of Quena's friends came in and we all spent about half an hour trying to figure out if there's a way to sew together 6 square faces of a cube in one continuous, non-overlapping seam. We couldn't figure it out, and we think it's not possible. But if you can figure out how to do it in fewer than four separate threads (non-overlapping), please let me know!
Monday was sushi night, because Reuben had caught a bunch of crabs that day. He and Eliza came over with the crabs, which we boiled and prepped outside in the drizzling rain (that's me in the black apron), and Royce and LouAnna came over and we had a wonderful sushi party in the tiny "cafe" kitchen. Delicious!
Tuesday
Tuesday morning we spent around the house, prepping the front entryway for laying bricks. Then Quena and I went to various small towns to check out thrift stores, and had a smoked seafood pizza for dinner at BarnCastle. Unfortunately, it was dark and rainy, so I didn't get any pictures of the place, because it was really cool - not called BarnCastle for nothing! :)
Wednesday
Quena had to work again on Wednesday, so I stayed home to do some exploring. I went back up Mt. Wallamatogus, played with stones, and found a gigantic patch of blueberries. I was wearing a small purse to carry my camera, and ended up putting my camera in my pocket and filling the purse with blueberries because I couldn't possibly leave them behind. :) When Quena got home we made a blueberry-rhubarb crisp, which was delicious.
Thursday
Thursday held more Blue Hill wanderings while Quena was at work.
This lovely little bakery was attached to a bookstore. I had gone into the bookstore and noticed that the used book section was located in the bakery. When I got there, the baker was offering another woman a free croissant that was improperly baked (in a too-hot oven, so it was dark and crispy outside and somewhat gooey inside). I was grinning at his explanation, and he saw me and said, "You're smiling over there, do you want one as well?" I said "Of course!" and the three of us spent the next several minutes munching croissants and talking about Oregon and Shakespeare and other things. I also found out that the baker knew Quena, because he used to work at the co-op (and because Quena knows everybody in Blue Hill). So that was fun.
After Quena got off of work, we walked to the base of Blue Hill Mountain (which was a hike in itself!), and then up the mountain. It was lovely, and hiking up it barefoot was very satisfying.
The view from Blue Hill Mountain. If the picture were big enough, you would be able to see a bare patch on the top of another hill in the distance -- that's Mt. Wallamatogus!
I just liked this tree, with the leaf in it. It looks like some little wood-witch spirit standing guard over the path.
This was just a really cool bit of path that was mostly comprised of tree roots.
Us, in a roadside mirror on our walk back into town.
Thursday evening we went out to Quena's friend Jess's house and spent the evening cooking and eating and chatting with her and another friend, Kiera. We were going to watch a movie, but never got to it. :} Jess has a fantastic apple tree, and sent us home with bulging bags of delicious apples.
Friday
On Friday morning we drove to Schoodic (pronounced "Skoodick") and had lovely rocky beach adventures. Quena discovered that she could skip stones better left-handed than right, which was quite exciting. We then went and had lunch with Quena's friend Andrew, who told me how to make homemade yogurt, and who had rows upon rows of beautiful onions drying on his garage floor. It was very inspiring.On Friday evening Quena and I baked two apple pies and a bunch of apple turnovers with the apples that Jess had given us (we only used about a third of them). WendiLou made yummy pizza for dinner, and then Quena read Harry Potter to me while I packed.
Saturday
Saturday was once again English muffin day, so I had a lovely breakfast before Quena drove me to the airport. I flew in the smallest plane I've been in yet from Bangor to Boston -- the kind of plane where each passenger has both a window seat and an aisle seat at the same time, and the flight is pretty much full with 16 passengers. It was a very noisy, vibrating flight, but fortunately short -- the woman sitting across the aisle from me said she just thought of it as a nice long massage. :P On my flight from Boston to Cincinnati I sat next to another woman going home to Portland, so we had a lovely chat. Then on my flight from Cincinnati to Portland I ended up (after some seat shuffling when the captain announced that the flight wasn't full so we could all move around if we wanted) next to a very nice man from Boston, and we whiled away a good deal of the flight chatting. It was kind of nice - I don't normally do that on plane flights (usually my flights are so short that I just doze through most of them), but it certainly made the trip more enjoyable and quicker. He was very curious about Portland (he's from Boston), and talking to him about all the cool things going on here made me realize how much I really do enjoy living here. There's just a lot to like about Portland, and it was nice to be able to share some of it with somebody from out of the area.
So, that's my story. It was a wonderful vacation, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks to WendiLou and Tristan for welcoming me into their home, to Quena for sharing her Maine life with me for a short while, to everybody that I danced with and chatted with and got to know just a little bit. And now I'm home, safe and sound, ready to face my daily challenges with a renewed perspective. Hooray for vacations!
4 comments:
Huzzah for Quena-visiting! I wish I could have been there, but it's fun to see and hear about you two having such a lovely time. And Quena's hair is growing out again! :-)
Great pictures! Sounds like you had a wonderful vacation... just what the doctor ordered.
I like your cube-sewing problem. I believe it is impossible to sew all eight edges of the cube with a single, non-overlapping seam for the following reason.
View the cube as a graph: each corner is a node, and each of the cube's edges is an edge in the graph connecting two nodes. An Euler path is a path that goes through every edge of a graph exactly once. Now the question is: For the graph that represents a cube, is there an Euler path? We need one other definition to answer the question. The degree of a node is the number of edges coming out of it. Each node in our cube graph has degree three.
It was shown long ago that a connected graph (and this is one) has an Euler path if and only if it has exactly zero or two nodes with even degree. The cube graph has only odd-degree nodes, and so it doesn't have an Euler path.
So you can't sew the cube together with only one seam! Cool!
I'm not sure whether you can do it with fewer than four seams. I can't think of a way to prove four is the minimum, but it does seem like it is.
For more on Euler paths, see planetmath.
Wow, that is an excellent piece of math trivia. I think I've heard of Euler paths before, but it's been a long, long time. Thanks for explaining it so well, and confirming that we were right! :)
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