This is a little late, since our second Christmas (Rockland) was eight days ago, but this pesky work thing gets in my way sometimes.

The Boxing Day snow we had early in the week was all gone, so we had another brown Christmas, but it was still nice weather to wander around Rockland. I went downtown at least once every day – I just love walking in Rockland and browsing in store windows (and occasionally buying things).

The “tree” on the left was near the public boat landing and is great. If you look closely, the entire tree is made of lobster traps, the decorations are lobster buoys, and the star is clearly an ironic statement.

On our Christmas II Friday, we waited until the afternoon to open gifts, so I was able to wander downtown in the morning. The sun was warm, but there was about a 15 m.p.h. wind that caught your attention when you came around corners. We all had lunch at the Brown Bag bakery (which I recommend), and then went home and opened gifts. It was a nice time. Mer got me an awesome gift – a Spiderman shrink figure that grows in water! Actually, she did get me one of those, but the really cool gift is to go see a one-man show where the actor does all three of the good Star Wars movies in 1 hour all by himself. That should be grand fun. The other one-man show that I have seen, MacHomer, was a tremendous show, so I have high hopes for fun in February.

I like gift giving (and gift getting, too), so it was an enjoyable two hours of good company (we don’t rush these things). The tree on the right is a bit of anticipation – it snowed on Boxing Day II as it did on the real Boxing Day. Since I find the real snow on the tree to be charming, I used a temporal anomaly to bring it into my blog about our second Christmas.

As hinted at (or directly stated) above, it did snow the next day – about 3 inches or so. It was very pretty. Mer took the opportunity of a relaxed Saturday to go get her hair done in downtown while I ate at the Rockland Cafe. The Cafe was a little greasy for my tastes, so I liked the Brown Bag better. Both locations carry whoopie pies, so feel free to check them out for comparison’s sake.

We left Sunday morning and had breakfast at Moody’s Diner, which was excellent, but we were too early to get our favorite whoopie pies. Who knew whoopie pies would not be ready by 9:00? We then swung by to see one of Mer’s friends from college who lives in Brunswick near Bowdoin College. If you are in Brunswick, check out the Little Dog Cafe in downtown – it is run by Mer’s freind’s husband. We then got on the road for home about 12:30.

So, a great time. I do love Rockland, and I do love Carleton and Leona’s house. I look forward to going back and winning more Skipbo!

I tend to let small things go over vacation, like shaving. I think I last shaved 5 days ago, but it may have been more. I suppose I’ll clean up for work tomorrow.

Since we had a total of 30+ hours in the car, we had a lot of time to listen to our Teaching Company CDs, Classics of American Literature. We usually alternate the CDs with a music CD so that our brains do not go numb; Mer also has the problem that she “spaces” because she starts thinking about how to teach the work we are learning about. So, over the course of the vacation, we managed to get through eighteen 30-minute lectures (there are 84 lectures in all). These lectures covered:

– 2 lectures finishing 4 lectures on Moby Dick (Melville)
– 2 lectures on Benito Cereno (Melville)
– 5 lectures on Walt Whitman
– 3 lectures on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe)
– 5 lectures on Emily Dickinson
– 1 lecture starting 5 lectures on Twain, this one covering Tom Sawyer

The lectures are great – I recommend the Teaching Company highly. This lecturer (Dr. Arnold Weinstein) is unpretentious, and he takes the authors on their own terms – he presents the works largely from how the author and the author’s contemporaries would have seen the work, while still working in modern views without undermining or attacking the work. He has done a really good job. My personal take on the works we heard about:
– Moby Dick – an important work (it may be THE important American work) that sounds ponderous (long book, difficult vocabulary, and long, complex syntax). I enjoyed the lectures, but would probably not try to tackle the book.
– Benito Cereno – These lectures were fascinating. I cannot say much about the book without giving the ending away, but I am intrigued by this work. I recommend it, although I have one warning – there are some race issues that are not handled in modern ways.
– Whitman – I alluded to this in another post. I liked Whitman’s city poetry, but not much else he did. I probably will not bother to read any Whitman (I am not a big poetry fan, in general).
– Uncle Tom’s Cabin – These lectures were great. Weinstein went to some lengths to put the book in its historical setting. He also defended it against accusations that is an unsophisticated book. I may try to read the work. Fun fact of the day – according to Weinstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the second-best-selling book in the English language, after the Bible.
– Dickinson – I was not familiar with Dickinson’s work. I really liked it. She is very odd, and writes a lot about death, but I really liked her stuff. It is packed with many meanings, and seems simple at first listen. Nice stuff. I would like to learn more about her poetry. I may try to read some of the best-known works, but what I would really enjoy would be to hear more lectures on her work.
– Twain – Twain is one of my heroes, so I enjoyed the introduction to Tom Sawyer. I am really looking forward to the three lectures on Huck Finn, which is one of my favorite books.

In addition to the Teaching Company lectures, I did manage to go through about 10 lessons of my Rosetta Stone Italian program. I like the teaching style – it seems to be working well. I just am impatient, and I want to speak Italian NOW. Level 1 Italian has about 90 lessons, so if I can stick to a good schedule, I should be done with Level 1 in the late spring.

On the all-important front of Maine team skip-bo, the girls rallied mightily on Friday – they won 3 straight, and the boys only avoided the skunk by winning a close fourth game. That tied the vacation series all up at 4-4. Everything came down to the Saturday show-down. The boys won the first game handily (whooo!). The girls then crushed us the next two games. We refused to leave things in that state, so we played a fourth game, which we won. The series was all tied up at 6-6! It was late, but we HAD to play the tie-breaker. The girls leapt out to a huge lead, but against great odds the boys rallied valiantly to take the lead. The nail-biter game came down to this: I had one card left (a four) and Leona had two cards left. I could not play out, so the play passed to Leona, who drew many cards (I think it was four). She got what she needed, so she played out and the girls won. 13 games of skip-bo played, and the difference was ONE card (and a pretty easily played card at that). I told Leona that it was a bonus Christmas gift to her that Carleton and I let her win.

We made is safely back to Ohio after our tour of Rockland and East Livermore, Maine. We managed to put over 2,000 miles on the car. It is about a 15-hour drive from New Baltimore to Rockland, so we break that up over two days. We did do the whole thing in one shot once or twice, but the in last two hours of those drives I started seeing things that were not there and started muttering directions to myself. Mer decided this was not the most restful start to vacations, so we have split the drive the last several years.

Our kitties were most happy to see us – so much so that they all took turns waking us up, starting around 5 a.m. It was still really nice to be back in my bed – you mu-sings readers who are still on the short side of 30 will not understand that, but you really get used to being in your own bed. Also, most people do not spend lots of money on the guest beds, so they tend to support my back less than my normal bed. End of old-fart-sounding rant.

We are going to try to shorten the holiday rotation; for the last nine years we have rotated Florida/Chicago and Ohio/Maine (to try to see the scattered family). We’re going to see if a two-year rotation of Chicago and Ohio/Maine will work for everyone. Since the only people we see in Florida are Mer’s parents (who just retired and are thus mobile), we’d like to skip that so that we get to Maine and get to stay home more often. I know most folks would not be happy about swapping Florida for Ohio and Maine, but I’m not most people. I am less than impressed with central Florida – I only go to see Dale and Carlene, so I’ll be quite happy to have a fair shot at some snow for Christmas.

Anyhooway, I’ll try to update the Maine happenings shortly, to try to cover what was missed while I was computerless.