Once again, an August weekend

Wheeling down Highway 401, listening to Neil Young, his guitar either whimsical and plaintive or like a horde of demented bumblebees, as he rips through the litany of classics on disc 1 of Decade. I'm on my own this trip, as Mrs. Ricardipus and the kids have driven down to Kingston ahead of time. I spent the last Wednesday in July breaking the back of a forty-plus hour consulting project, and the three-hour drive is a welcome break. Sharing the car with a couple of Ikea mattresses, some miscellaneous things for the annual cottage trip, and a budgie, this is maybe the first time I've driven any appreciable distance on my own in ten years or more.

This, of course, enabled by the still-reasonably-novel situation of having two cars, a first for us. Mrs. Ricardipus, driving her iPod-enabled Honda Civic, still with that "new car " smell:


It is shiny.

and me, in the aging Mazda Protege. Which has but a CD player, meaning that I've got a perfect excuse for trolling through my music collection, including that of Mr. Young and his Crazy Horse compadres.


The grill is slightly bent. I didn't do it.

Opinions vary among the smaller members of the family as to which of these is best described as the "stinky car", by the way.

The cottage trip was its usual self, with the addition of a family of friends who haven't been able to make it in recent years. At its top, ten adults, six kids, six automobiles, three inflatable boats, a canoe, and a sailboat. Oh, and seven fish, tying the record from two years ago.

While on-and-off rainy, there was enough sun and heat for plenty of swimming, and the rain and clouds made the lake and sky particularly beautiful, at times:


Big sky, big lake.


There was mist one morning.

And there was the usual selection of flora and fauna to look at. I've been trying for years to get a decent shot of a dragonfly, and I think this might just be it.



So there you have it. A mainly relaxing, occasionally hectic, and thoroughly satisfying long weekend on Desert Lake. More photos, if you will, are in the cottage set.