I made my first trip to camp for the year this past weekend. My younger daughter started Daisy Scouts on Saturday, so she stayed behind with Angela. I took my older one along with me. My father and I went do the MASTC (Maine Antler & Skull Trophy Club) banquet in Augusta on Saturday, so my daughter was looking forward to a private cross-stitching lesson with Nana on Saturday afternoon, as well as the chance to get to shoot her new .22 rifle that Santa had delivered at Christmas. Quite a diverse pair of activities!
The banquet was very interesting, but far too long. They hadn't held it for two years, so they celebrated both 2009 and 2010 together and it lasted around 5 hours. A three hour annual affair would make a lot more sense to me, but it was my first one and I don't know the history and could certainly be missing something!
Saturday evening, I recalled to my mother that during some genealogical research, I had found a Bell (her maternal family) buried in Brooks, the same town where my mother lived for a part of her youth and the same town in which we were staying at camp at that very moment. Mom was shocked! "Cornelius Vanderbilt Bell", I said, to which she immediately responded "Corn Bell?! He lived right across the street from us! But... we weren't related to him!" I assured her that they definitely were related, as Corn and my mother's grandfather were third cousins.
She didn't think her mother knew it, either, and that was confirmed by a phone call to Florida. Most of my grandmother's family came from the Waterford-area, but Corn's family branched off and came to Brooks by way of Aroostook county. Chances are, even if my grandmother had asked him about the Bell relation - they would have determined that they were no relation. Decades later, though, the trail of census, birth, marriage and death records allowed me to piece it all together. After my parents and I talked about it a little longer, we realized that Corn's grandson married a Raven and that I was related to that family from BOTH sides of my family tree. I think it's incredible that my grandmother had no idea how closely she was related to the neighbor across the street! I knew the name of the cemetery where Corn and his family were supposed to be buried and Mom thought she knew which one it was, so we hopped into the car and headed over and confirmed my data.
My mom, my daughter and I ended up spending time in 4 different area cemeteries over the weekend and along the way I showed her some geocaches I had found. I used my phone's geocaching app to find a few that we had not yet discovered, too, which is always fun. The best one was one that led us to a road sign. My daughter quickly spotted a container tucked into the ground at the base and opened it up only to find a note saying basically "Ha ha - you didn't think it would be this obvious, did you?". The actual cache ended up being magnetic and about the size of a button. That was the first time we had found one that had an "impostor" cache. We all thought it was funny, even though the kid was slightly annoyed that she didn't end up getting the find.
We visited with Aunt Minnie and Aunt Mabel on Sunday morning and put out the scout cameras. Hopefully, I'll have some new videos and photos for next week. In addition to my usual camera, and the one my father bought last year, we've now got a third "cheapie" that can only take photos. The white flash makes me a little nervous that it will spook the deer, but we'll see...
My daughter got her target shooting in on Sunday. She took her first shot and missed. I took a shot to confirm that the sights were set up reasonably close and hit. She continued shooting another 12 or 15 shots - never hitting the target and often off by quite a measure. I took some solace in the fact that at least she was NOT flinching at all - her form was fine. We were almost out of ammo and I tried to stay positive even though she was getting a little frustrated herself.
I shoot left-handed and didn't think it should matter as far as the sights were concerned, but I got ready to take a right-handed shot and as I closed my left eye... the problem occured to me. "Are you keeping both your eyes open?", I asked. She confirmed that she was. Then I had her form a small hole with her hands and look at a distant object through it. As she alternated opening and closing her eyes, I confirmed that she is left-eye dominant, as I am. She took her final 3 shots with her left-eye closed and hit the target twice and missed the other shot by just a whisker.
Late Sunday night, we heard the news about Bin Laden. Angela and I took a break from clearing out the DVR and watched Obama's speech. It was a pretty good one, but I wasn't comfortable watching all the young people carrying on chanting and cheering in front of the White House. It reminded me too much of the way so many middle easterners celebrated 9/11. Killing Bin Laden was important, but it didn't feel much like victory to me. He lasted almost ten years, and if he was smart he'll have recorded a recent tape saying that his death was faked by the US Government. That'll throw the whole thing into doubt and he'll "live on" for at least another few years. Maybe not. Who knows. I'm cynical about the whole thing. Kudos to the Navy Seals for completing the mission, but are we safer today than we were yesterday? I'm not so sure.
I should be blogging more often this summer, as I make another attempt at gardening. This time, I'm doing it COMPLETELY differently. I will be trying the Square Foot Gardening method, and I've been trying to go strictly by the book. Building the frames is pretty inexpensive, but the author has you fill your raised beds completely with a mix of compost, peat moss and vermiculite (which is very expensive). What you end up with is basically a custom potting soil, and with each 4'x4'x6" need 8 cubic feet to fill... it took a lot of material to fill my 3 boxes!
Here's a box with the weed block cloth under it:
and here it is filled with soil and covered with the square foot frame:
I'm planning to fill in the other two tomorrow night and we'll probably be planting seeds on Sunday. I let each of the girls plan what will go in each of their 16 squares. The little one is planting mostly flowers, but the older one is very excited about loading up on her favorite veggies. Angela is just planting a couple of marigold squares to help repel pests.
