Ben and Penny

Ben and Penny have been spending lots of time together, and are building a nice relationship, although Penny still sometimes expresses her love for Ben by jumping and biting...


Hanging on the couch in Ben's room...


Today we went out to the campsite that I used this last weekend while camping with some friends...Ben and I were planning on camping there this week, but it's been rainy and yucky and that's still going on...we got rained on a couple of times while we were there...the good news about all of the rain that we've been getting is that there are gazillions of blueberries...some of which we harvested this morning...


Penny watched Ben and I walking around and picking the tiny fruits for a minute before she wandered over and asked for one...once she tried one, she was crazy for them, and actually started to use her teeth as a blueberry rake, as can be seen above...


She and Ben scouted for good spots, darting here and there in the woods at the edge of the campsite on Little Green Pond, each suspecting that the other had a better site...very few berries (relative to the number that we saw...and picked) made it into the mug that we were using to gather the tiny blue treats...


By the end of our berry-picking outing, they had both perfected their methods...Ben looked for huge clumps of berries, having little patience for singletons...Penny chomped on whole branches and then pulled away, stripping the leaves and berries into her mouth (as can be seen above); after which she would spit out some of the leaves and swallow everything else...


They had a fun time comparing results, and eating the fruits of our labors, while tromping through the woods during a couple of downpours...


During one of the rainstorms, we all went swimming in Little Green Pond, after which Penny ran back up to my car to take a nap (strangely managing to get both seats in front equally wet) and Ben asked me to set up my camping hammock...I did so, without the fly, and he loved it, it rocked him gently in the wind that was coming off of the pond at us...he took a little rest while I read down by the water for a while...


He loved the comfort and openness of the hammock, and wants to go hammock camping in the future...

Penny and Ben are sharing the couch in Ben's room with me right now while we enjoy some of the zany exploits of Scooby Doo and the Gang...

A fun day in the rain...

Ben and I noodled around on our own today, running various chores, and had a fun day...we started off by laying claim to a campsite on Little Green Pond for a camping trip that I am planning with some friends this weekend...it rained some of the time and was sunny the rest...


We set up a screen-house and a few chairs and tarps to establish a presence in our site...we also explored the awesome site and pond a bit...Ben and I will be back after my friends have gone for a night of camping, just the 2 of us...


It has a nice sandy bottom, and a rope swing, and was filled with little swimming and scuttling things for 5 year-olds to chase...


Yup, those are 2 loons about 20 yards past Ben...they were fishing and talking the entire time that we were there...


It looks like a nice little pond to do some paddling on, and a nice place to spend a night out in the woods, close to home...


After setting up the camp, in a limited way, we stopped off at the Fish Hatchery, and Ben fed some of the monster Landlocked Salmons in the tanks...that one on the right wanted to forget about the fish-kibble and eat Ben, but I stopped him with a well-timed photo-flash in his beady little eyes...

We ent home to dry off, then went to the library, and out to lunch, and then over to Lake Placid to play at the exquisite playgorund at the elementary School over there, before coming home for some Chinese food and then a soccer game...a full and fun day in the ADKs!

It's good to be the King!

Ben and I went up to Plattsburgh yesterday to see a movie and bask in the glory of the big city...our first stop in town was Burger King...of course...

Ben likes Burger King more than McDonald's because he feels that their chicken tenders the King produces are superior to the nuggets served by the Clown...he also favors the apple fries over the apple dippers...


He is a good King, hard but fair...


He was excited when we started talking about the movie that we were about to go see..."The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor"...

After the movie, we did a bit of shopping and then drove home, exhausted by the long and action-packed movie...

Power Outage Date

Muz and D had Ben over for dinner and a sleepover the night before they left, and Gail and I took advantage of the opportunity to have a quiet date-night "in"...this was during the Rubgy Tournament Weekend in the Tri-Lakes, so a dinner out was not going to be ideal...rugby and romance goes together like Spam and Champagne...

The only downside was that as soon as we got home with a couple of rental movies and some dinner fixings, the power went out...bummer!


We shifted gears, thanks in large part to Zombie Squad (a disaster readiness and charity organization...their motto is, "if you're ready for a zombie outbreak, then you're ready for anything!"), and continued with our date-night despite the loss of power...we surmounted the first hurdle by cooking on the grill outside, and keeping the champagne chilled in a neoprene scuba-suit...




The movies that we had rented provided a more serious challenge, but one that we were up to...I bought a power inverter from Amazon (link) that plugs into the lighter socket in my Element to create usable power in the house through the use of an extension cord coming in through the window...

Through some awesome coincidence, one of the movies that we had selected was "Cloverfield", a movie about a spectacular disaster that takes place in NYC...


My Honda Element was pulled up to right under the window, the inverter produced ample power for the movies (we ended up watching 2 using the power from the inverter/Element combo), it used almost no gas in 4 hours at idle, was quiet, didn't overheat, didn't require lugging around, and provided its own shelter from the rain that fell during the movies...AWESOME!


The little inverter is a clever invention that certainly proved its worth that night...we joked about not even knowing if the world had ended, as long as we had this thing, and even planned on using it to grind and brew coffee in the morning (but the power went back on at about 11pm)...

A trip down South

2 days before Muz and D left the ADKs for this summer, we took a trip down South, to Olmstedville, and Hornbeck Boats. D has been thinking of buying a lighter boat for a while, and he looked at both Placid Boatworks and Hornbeck boats, and we came along to help him check them out...


Their showroom is beautiful, and the boats are unbelievable...their lightest boat is 10 pounds, but we tried out some of the bigger ones...


The 12 and 14 foot solo boats in run from 13 to 25 pounds in various materials (they make boats in Kevlar and Carbon Fiber, and hybrid mixes of the two)...they have a pond for trying out the boats, and we all took a turn...


You climb into the boat a little differently than other canoes I've owned/used before, but it works...D focused on 12 foot boats, and I tried out the 14 footers...


Ben tried out the 9 foot boat, and did a really good job in it until, and even during/after he fell out of the boat...he calmly swam to shore, and climbed right back into the boat for more paddling...the salesman had zoomed over to help out in a panic, but Ben was placidly bobbing in the water, and told him when asked if he was OK, "Sure, that what a life-preserver is for"...



I really loved the 14 foot boat, it paddles like a dream, weighs almost nothing (25 pounds in its heaviest setup), tracks very well, and can hold me and a bunch of gear or a boo...I tried it out because my Old Town solo canoe is getting a little long in the tooth, and the replacement cost for it is pretty close to what I would end up paying for a Hornbeck...


Ben had fun in the boat, and is excited at the prospect of paddling more next summer...


D ended up taking a Carbon Fiber canoe home...it's 12 feet long and weighs around 13 pounds...


On the way back, we stopped in Long Lake to play in one of Ben's favorite playgrounds in the ADKs...he loves the climbing wall particularly...


Muz bought Ben a cool moose-camo t-shirt which came in handy, as all of his stuff was wet from his Swim at Hornbeck...we ate twice in Ben's favorite restaurant, "Woods" (really "The Long Lake Diner") that day...for a second breakfast on our way down, and lunch on the way back to camp...


Muz and Ben shared a root-beer as a part of our awesome lunch...everything was really tasty!