More of a White Pond, really

I forget how soothing bus travel is, even with fellow passengers: the whistling man (four bars of a random tune every minute and a half), the clot of chattering teenagers ("Julie peed for somebody, or somebody peed for Julie, but that only happened once"). I watch the pretty towns and hills scroll past, I read, I let things settle in the snowglobe that is my head. Adirondack Trailways took me to crumbling Binghamton, where I spent a couple of hours dodging thunderstorms and taking pictures of failed industry—mostly failed pictures of failed industry, alas, due to the cloudy sky—and Short Line took me to White Lake for the weekend.

zorblak and his family had invited me, carpenter, eclectic_boy, crystalpyramid, and the Peter W. family to stay in their lakeside house, for swimmin', grillin', and gamin'. It was a remarkably pleasant weekend (for me, at least), despite the night I spent sleeping on the sewage leak in the basement. ("I thought it had been cleaned up!" protested zorblak in the morning.) On Friday, we collectively worked on puzzles (a nifty pseudoku and both kinds of crosswords: standard and cryptic), stayed up late discussing How To Fix SWIL, and—once Peter stopped doing his Godot impression—walked to Candy Cone for delicious roadside ice cream. (I ordered vanilla soft serve with white chocolate chips, which was remarkably boring to look at, but sure tasted good.) And the sky was full of stars.

I spent Saturday afternoon in the water, exploring the murky green lakebed with my goggles and watching Peter's friend Mary's pug paddling around in its life preserver—a pugboat, if you will. There was even a cute teenager in a bikini to divert me: Joe's fourth cousin Raya, who has a sharp mathematical mind and will be attending Bowdoin in the fall. (Apparently, nobody in Joe's family got the memo about my sketchiness.) We had an excellent cookout with Joe's extended family in the evening, and after dinner a bonfire in the backyard. eclectic_boy fixed the telescope that had gone unused for several years, and found for us Jupiter and two of its Galilean moons, which I'd never seen—bare pinpoints of light precisely 180° apart around the sand-colored disk of Jupiter, like the hands of a clock set to 6:00.

In the morning, Joe's mom made fantastic scones for us all, and then I was back on a bus heading home.

( Cut for trip pictures! )

Up yours, Origen!

Here's a thing: the postal codes for St. Jerome in Quebec all start with J7Y.