More Changes Ahead

This morning, Anita Joy's children came to Lake Ottawa to move her out of her campsite. Besides moving the trailer, they had to pack up all her plaques, lawn ornaments and flowers. That must have been something to see, but I wasn't there. I had business here in Seymour so I left early.

Once Anita's spot was vacant, Gary moved our camper there because we will be camp hosts until September 30.  There won't be many campers at all, so the job should be easy, plus we will have the only electrical and water hookups. The cell phone and wi fi connections won't be as good though. We'll likely have to go to the other side of the park with our computers so I can get this column out.

I had other things to do in Seymour. I picked up our mail, returned books to the library and got some groceries. I Skyped with Wade and found out the second volume of Black Coffee Fiction is nearing completion. I have to write a description of my section then I am done. Wade and I thought we would be held up when Colorado flooded leaving our partner Betty stranded in the mountains, but wonder of wonder, her little part of the mountains did not lose electricity or Internet service. She is working on clearing a flooded basement, but took time out to write the ending to her latest Porpoise McAllister story and post it this after noon at Black Coffee Fiction. http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/09/just-another-obsession_20.html  The book is right on schedule.

Wade is doing a book signing at an Arkansas library. A local teacher there is talking about using our short stories for the yearly forensic contests.  That strikes me as a wonderful idea so I am going to be talking to teachers here in Wisconsin about the project. Bit by bit, our stories are being read.

Late this afternoon, I had to drive into Appleton to do some errands, the most enjoyable of which was making the reservations for my February trip to Kauai, Hawaii.  Kiwi Kay of Kiwi Travel is wonderful at finding bargains. Gary is paying for the trip so we had him on the phone. After talking it over with Kay he decided it would make sense to extend what would have been a one week trip to eleven days and to upgrade from a two star hotel to a five star hotel.

So instead of moping through the winter, I will have Hawaii to look forward to.

Reading and Clearing - This and That

FOR SOME REASON THIS DIDN'T POST YESTERDAY, SO READERS WILL GET TWO TODAY.

Tisha forwarded an e-mail from one of my grandson's teachers:

"Saw Evan running down the hallway today and asked him to walk. His response was, 'I would, but I have a really good book I need to read.' When he came back through I asked him what he was reading and he told me the Tale of Despereaux. Glad he's enjoying reading!" 

A couple of weeks ago, his reading teacher caught him hiding and reading a book under the one the rest of the class were reading. "I've read that one already," he said. 

That's my Evan. I always tell Tisha his daddy and his grandma were exactly the same so there is no hope. Gary says the same. Readers are readers and there's naught to be done about it. 

***
I just came back from Anita's campsite. She gave me the "blue book" of instructions for camp hosts so that we could handle things until the 30th when we leave. Then she surprised me by saying she wants to come back as camp host next year though she thought Gary could have half the summer.  He says that will be fine, but really, we can't plan anything for sure until we hear from the big bosses about what they want done. No plans will be made until 2014.

***
We met the campground manager, Trenton Thomas, yesterday. He runs Lawn and Snow Removal Maintenance and takes care of campground from Black River Falls to Watersmeet to Iron River.  He and I chatted about music. He, too, plays the piano and even has a music degree but found, like me, that earning a living from music is not easy. He composes, plays and sings Christian music.

His website is http://trentonsmusic.com

Future Plans

Today, Trent from Lawn and Snow Outdoor Maintenance stopped by to see us.That's the company that is in charge of taking care of the national forest campgrounds in the Ottawa National Forest.  He said his territory extends from Black River Harbor to Ishpeming to Iron River. Next year he will be cutting back to just two of the campgrounds at Golden Lake and Lake Ottawa.

Anita is retiring as host here after 30 years. Even before that she and her husband Sully camped here.  Her children are coming to help her pack and move her camper on Friday. At that point, Gary and I will take over as camp hosts until September 30.  There won't be much to do since we are the only campers left but we'll keep an eye out for troublemakers, clean the restrooms, collect the registration slips, and answer questions. This is a trial period, because we may be the campground hosts for the entire 2014 season from May 15 to September 30.

I like the idea because we can take turns being in charge. Gary knows he will have to be in Illinois part of the time to take care of probate issues. I will have to go down to Seymour from time to time as we prepare the house there for sale.

We know the campground gets busy in July but the June and August are a lot quieter and of course in May and September we'll have the park to ourselves most of the time. The other night Gary and I were sitting at the edge of the lake looking at the Milky Way spread out above us. We spotted a light across the lake and finally figured out it was a night fisherman.

"How dare they!" said I.  "And on our lake!"  For at this time of year it feels like the five hundred acre lake is ours.

Tonight, I went over to Anita's camper to sit by her fire and let her reminisce about the years she's been here. She said she would be back in a week to make sure Gary had his camper set up properly and make sure we were doing everything we were supposed to do.  After thirty years, she feels like Lake Ottawa is hers.

I'll do my best by having coffee and tea for the campers. We'll save old newspaper and flyers to help campers light their fires. We'll make sure there's plenty of toilet papers. I'll tell stories.

And when the season is over I'll be sure to have more to write about.

Oven Baking

We have a stove in the camper but during the hot days of the summer we did our cooking in the cook tent on my decades old propane stove.  Now, however, the weather has turned cold so we are cooking inside to help keep the camper warm.

I began my career as a cook in my youth in the old farmhouse on French Road south of Seymour. We had a gas stove then and I was used to it. After college I had gas stoves in my apartments but by the time I moved to Seymour I had electric stoves.  The houses I bought in came with the stoves as part of the sales agreement. So for over thirty years, I had electric stoves and hated them. They took too long to heat up and after the cooking was done, they continued to be hot, heating the house when I didn't want it heated.  

I turned more and more to the microwave to cook most everything.

Now I have the gas stove in the camper.  I get up in the morning, turn on the stove and in minutes, have hot water for my tea and a burbling coffee pot for Gary.  Yes, we have a microwave in the camper, but to use it, would have to turn on the generator outside. Not something I want to do when the temperatures are near freezing. Indeed, the microwave never runs all that well on a generator, so we won't use it until we have an electrical hookup. Most national forest campgrounds are too rustic for that.

Tonight, we decided to have baked potatoes and salad for supper. That is when we discovered that neither of us knew how to bake a potato in an oven. For decades, our baked potatoes were done in microwave ovens. How should we set the temperature? With no cookbooks on hand, we finally looked up the instructions on the internet.  

Is that pathetic or what? Probably, but boy, were those potatoes good. When we finally find our new home, I am going to insist on a gas stove.   

To Bessemer and Back

With the rains over, we were greeted with a cool but sunny day. It was not a day to go swimming or canoeing but it was a good day for exploration. We headed west to look at campgrounds along Highway 2 and north almost to the Porcupine Mountains. The fall colors are just beginning. The sumac is red, the oak leaves almost brown. The maples are touched with yellow, orange and red. In about ten days the fall show will be at its height.

Gary had found moose calls on the Internet and at every campground he gave his best imitation of a female moose in the throes of passion, on the theory it would bring in males. I told him he was playing a dangerous game that could prove very painful.  We stopped at Imp Lake and Marion Lake campgrounds. The roads were sometimes bumpy so we made notes of places he would rather not pull a camper.

At Watersmeet we stopped at the forest service visitor's center. The Upper Peninsula's Ottawa National Forest rangers were having a meeting with Wisconsin's Nicolet-Chequamagon National Forest rangers. We wondered what that was about. I mentioned to the clerk that the Ottawa forest could sure use some decent trail maps. I stopped to look at a map of  Watersmeet and learned that three water systems meet at this point. Some rivers flow into Lake Superior, some into the Wisconsin River and the third group go to Lake Michigan. We know many of the rivers but I never knew where they began and where they went.

We had lunch at Big Mama's Grill at Watersmeet. I had pot roast soup which was perfectly lovely on a cool day. I am going to try to replicate that at home.

At Marenesco, we turned north to take a look at Lake Gogebic, one of the biggest lakes in the Upper Peninsula. We took the loop to the east that wound around through forests. These were deciduous forests so we were getting more color.We stopped at a boat landing to look at the huge lake. Too large for a canoe, Gary thought.






Right after the boat landing, we surprised a coyote. He quickly disappeared into the brush. At Bergland  we were going west again on Highway 28 until we came to Wakefield and then on to Bessemer where we stopped at the St. Vincent de Paul.

When I came north from Seymour the last time, I left a load of clothes in the dryer that included my blue jeans. I've been making do with summer slacks but that it is getting colder, I needed to buy jeans. No point in spending a lot of money, I found what I needed for $2. Gary found a Bubba cup that keeps hot beverages hot and cold beverages cold. He had two of them already but this one fits in the car's cup holder. His total was 50 cents.

On we went to Ironwood on Highway 2 to the Michigan- Wisconsin border.  I stopped at the Michigan visitor's center to ask where one could procure hand dipped ice cream. The woman at the desk said she knew just what was needed. She told me to go to the Northland General Store in Wakefield on our way back to Lake Ottawa. I would find Michigan's finest ice cream there: Jillberts.  We began to talk about our favorite flavors.  Mackinac Island Fudge, she said.  Zanzibar, said I. Turtle, she said. Amaretto, said I.  We were salivating. She reached under the counter and handed me a buy one, get one free coupon for the Northland General Store.  Gary said I was lucky to find someone who could speak fluent ice cream.

We got our ice cream then backtracked north on Highway 28 until we reach Highway 64 south so that we could see the other side of Lake Gogebic. This time we stopped at two state parks and one county park, but we came to the conclusion that they would be too expensive and too busy in the summer.

And so we came on home on Highway 2 seeing dozens of wild turkeys and many deer. We made it back to the camper as the sun came down.

Tonight, I will sprawl out on the bed in this office, doing sudoku puzzles as I slowly drift to sleep

I still have not seen a moose.

Cold but We Have Books

With rain all day and now frost warnings for the evenings, we are reading up a storm.  

I just finished Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, essays by David Sedaris. Sedaris is funny but what I found annoying is that he covered topics I was considering for this blog, only better. I've been journaling longer than him, yet he wrote a definitive account of diary writing that I can't beat. I was planning on writing a post about little old ladies who go through fast food places dithering about what they want to order than poking around in their purses for exact change oblivious to the dozen people in line behind her. Sedaris already wrote an essay about that. His thoughts on American tourists match mine. So there are three blog ideas I had scribbled in my my Storytelling Trails and Tales idea book that I can now cross off. 

I'm in the middle of Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan. Aslan was interviewed on the Fox Network by some pundit that had obviously not even gotten past the introduction. It is a wonderful look at Judea of the first century, written from the non-Biblical historical sources. The book is 296 pages long but the last 80 pages are notes, sources and bibliography. You can't catch Aslan, a renowned scholar of religion, on his facts. 

For lighter reading, I have Courting Trouble, a mystery by Lisa Scottoline, which is on CD. I've been listening to that on the car radio.  There's also the second book in The Bartimaeus Trilogy, The Golem's Eye, by Jonathan Stroud.  

I have several books on the Nook for night time reading. My Nook is back lit so I don't have to have a light on which would disturb Gary.  But so far, I've only gotten through a few chapters of Queen Lucia. I sleep soundly when camping.

I continue to work on crossword puzzles to help my memory but I can't say either Gary or I are doing all that well in the memory department. Today he forgot his cell phone at an Iron River eatery and we had to go back for it.  I have to remind him about his blood pressure medication. 

I may have forgotten something, too, but to tell the truth, I can't remember.

Upcoming Projects

Anita, our campground host, liked Yesterday' Secrets, Tomorrow's Promises, my romance novel, but thought I should write a Christian romance instead and gave me one as an example. There are a few problems with that, one being that I am an agnostic and another that I don't ordinarily write romances.  I wrote this one back in the 1980's as a money making venture. While it never sold, I got rejection letters from editors who encouraged me to re-write the thing and submit even more. I never did that.

Which brings me to the third problem: I seldom repeat anything. I hand stitched a quilt once, a thing of beauty, but I've never had the least inclination to make another. I once knit a mitten but found knitting so boring I never finished the other. So one romance novel is all I had in me and once I self-published that, I was done. I don't even read romances! So I will return Anita's book unread.

People often have suggestions as to what I should write so I've finally printed out a sheet to hand out with my ongoing projects to show them I am far too busy to undertake anything new.  This is what I have scheduled:

October, 2013 --  Black Coffee Fiction, Volume 2 with Wade Peterson and Bettyann Moore. I've already written the stories so Wade is finishing up the work on that.

January, 2014 Going Down from Gairloch, fiction based on my adventures in Scotland and England. Not a romance, a true novel, it's about decisions that change our lives. I am on the third draft of that, and plan to have the book done by the end of November with final editing through December. 

Spring, 2014 Jake Dog and the Four Cats, non-fiction about my beloved Australian Shepherd. I have a a few of the stories written but there's still a lot to be done.

October, 2014 Another Black Coffee Fiction collection, so I have about eight more short stories to write. I still have to pick out the subject. This year's section is about a small Midwestern town where people are always dying, sometimes in grisly ways.  

January 2015 A collection of seriously depressing Christmas stories for people who don't like the holidays, again, taken from the Black Coffee Fiction blog. I have around eight done but will need another dozen. They are very funny, believe it or not. I may not publish them until November of that year to sell for the Christmas season. 

Spring, 2015, a novel based on the stories of my great aunt Mabel about homesteading in North Dakota. Very serious stuff about tuberculosis, death, rape at the beginning of the 20th century.

And somewhere in the future, my memoirs, mostly about travel around the world. I might do a collection of columns from Storytelling Trails and Tales, too. And of course, the yearly Black Coffee Fiction collection. Add to that a storytelling tour here and there and camping in the summer, possibly working as a campground host. 

So sorry, Anita, no Christian romance.  

Beds

Because Gary was back in Wisconsin picking up a new bed for me, I had to sleep in his bedroom here in the camper.

I should point out for the curious that Gary and I have had separate bedrooms for years because we both snore ... loudly. It used to be that the first person to get to sleep had a sound night's rest and the other was awake through the roar from nasal passages. Separate bedrooms seemed a better idea.  So Gary has a bedroom with a double bed on one end of the camper while I have a bedroom/office with a single bed on the other end.

The problem with my twin bed was that it was made up of a thin mattress topped by a pair of couch cushions topped by a foam pad. The theory was that all of these layers would be comfortable, but instead, the whole thing sagged in the middle and flopped over on one side making it seem like I was falling out of bed. I dealt with this by positioning my hip in the crack in the center and putting an extra pillow on the side to keep me from sliding out on the floor. I never complained (much) about it because I was used to sleeping on the ground in a tent. Camping is camping, I figured.

Then Gary took a nap on my bed and asked how I could stand it.  He immediately ordered a mattress from Walmart and had it delivered in DePere since there is no Walmart near here, nor, for that matter, anyone that sold mattresses.

He packed up my old sleeping gear to stow in one of his storage units. Throw it away? He never throws anything away. He drove away with it and for that night I slept in his bed. That was when I discovered bliss. His bed held a superb mattress topped with memory foam. He had not one but two soft quilts.When I closed the door to the room, I stayed warm the entire night in spite of temperatures near freezing. My office/bedroom is in a slide that means cold on three walls, ceiling and floor. It is lighter, too, in the mornings, so after 6:00 am I cannot sleep at all.

I slept wonderfully on his double bed. When Gary returned with my replacement mattress, I suggested the new one was so nice he should sleep on that. I would bite the bullet and continue to sleep on his bed.

Before the afternoon was over, he said he had to take a nap and went into his bedroom for two hours, thereby marking his territory. I am thus relegated to my old room.

If I find that no longer suits me, I will join him in his bed and drive him out with some loud zzzzzzzzzzzz. 

Brrrrrr!

Gary went to Seymour early this morning to run various errands including picking up a mattress that he had ordered through Walmart  for the camper's little office bed. When he got there he was shown a large box, but he said it sure didn't seem to be the right size for the mattress. The clerks checked and what he had been sent was a trampoline. Even if it fit in the camper it wouldn't be much good to sleep on.

He complained loudly as only Gary can. He pointed out he had driven 150 miles to get that mattress. In the end, he got a Serta mattress the store was now stocking plus a gift certificate. I'll have very good sleeping when he returns to Lake Ottawa tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the temperature here is plummeting. I can expect frost tonight but I should be fine. There is a heater in the camper but neither of us feel it is safe to have it on all night.  I will fire it up for a couple of hours before I go to bed then figure on getting up in the middle of the night to do it again.

All the campers have left now except for me. All 500 acres of lake are mine and the loons. They are still hanging on. Campground host Anita is in her trailer so I thought I had better go check on her. She is 82. She reports the heater in her little camper works fine but shouldn't I stay for tea and a game of Scrabble?  I thought that a fine idea so we played.  I managed to win by a whisker but she does know a powerful lot of words.If she hadn't had so many vowels I would never have had a chance.

It reminded me of playing with my mother who usually won. Once when she was in the hospital for heart surgery, I thought, "Here's my chance."  I took the Scrabble board to her hospital room and we played a game. It is humiliating to report that even in Critical Care, my mother gave me a "whupping".

I think I had better start practicing if I am to stay ahead of Anita. She wants a rematch tomorrow. 

What to Do on a Slow Day

We had nowhere to go and nothing much to do at Lake Ottawa today.
Gary packed up his van because he's on his way south tomorrow for a couple of days leaving me here alone. Only one other campsite is filled and that is way on the other side of the campground.

I took a long walk around the campground and found myself at the fishing pier. It juts out into this 500 acre lake giving me a good view. There was one boat on the north side and that was it. At this time of year, the lake belongs to Anita (campground host), Gary and me. I sat in the sun on one of the pier benches, far away from the gulls who were enjoying the sun on the other side. We've reach a nice accommodation with the critters. We don't bother them, they don't bother us.

A flock of twelve common mergansers came floating by. It seems it would be impossible for one merganser momma to lay that many eggs, but Gary looked it up on line and found out there could be as many as thirty in a brood. They also have been known to dump eggs on each other. It also could be a creche situation, bird-sitting shared. Who knows what happened here? It could be that they are flocking in preparation for the journey south. Another of nature's mysteries.

As usual, I had no camera with me.

The wind came up this afternoon with sprinkles of rain. I sat inside the camper listening to the howling wind and thought of winter's blizzards. It isn't so far away.

I read a David Sedaris collection and laughed but also cursed out crossword puzzle I'm working on. The "sinister" collection of sudoku puzzles is no picnic either. Am I getting smarter by doing them? It certainly doesn't seem like it.

I'm waiting for a call from Kiwi Travel in Appleton.  Kay is planning my Hawaii trip for me. Come February, another place, another beach.