the deep moans round with many voices

FYI, am still in Minnesota, on Star Island in Cass Lake. Vacation is wonderful and I am enjoying it greatly, despite the minor inconvenience of our internet service still being borked so I am reduced to using my phone as a mobile hotspot. (Dad was able to get through to CenturyLink yesterday, and they restored our phone service but not our internet. Apparently the internet restoration can't be done until Tuesday, and will also require a new modem which Dad asked them to send to Aunt Jan in Virginia since she will be the next person in the cabin after we leave on Sunday afternoon.)

We've done some useful chores around the cabin, solved one simple puzzle, and are working on a second puzzle that is both NOT rectangular and is actively hostile to humans trying to engage with it. *wry* But we will triumph nonetheless!

Minor annoyance: I got my period this morning. I didn't expect it until next week, so I hadn't brought any supplies aside from the three pads I always keep in my tote bag. Fortunately Dad had a couple things he also wanted to buy in town, so we made a brief shopping run around noon and now I have both pads and tampons. (I already had ibuprofen. I always bring ibuprofen when I travel, for various and sundry reasons.)

Nick and I left the island today and are now at his house in the Twin Cities. We left at 4pm, had dinner at The 502 (the restaurant attached to Chase on the Lake in Walker), and then continued south while Mom and Dad returned to the island for one more day.

I have checked in for my flight tomorrow, which involved some annoying faffing around with the FlyDelta app since Nick doesn't have a printer and I therefore needed an electronic version of my boarding pass.

Tomorrow I will do... I dunno, something or other for dinner in NJ. Thursday morning and afternoon are wide open, after which wedding stuff commences. Thursday evening is bachelorette party, Friday afternoon is mani-pedi appointment, Friday evening is wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, Saturday morning is hair styling appointment, Saturday afternoon is wedding, and Saturday evening is reception.

Then I drive back to Ithaca on Sunday, probably leaving around 3pm because heck if I'm getting up early after all that.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go trim a cracked toenail. :(

It turns out that my family changed the plan and then I think my mom and my brother both assumed the other had told me of the new itinerary, when in fact I had not been informed at all.

In summary, rather than Nick meeting me at the airport and me spending an afternoon and night in Minneapolis, Mom met me at the airport and we drove straight up to the lake. Nick will arrive on Saturday.

I am not complaining! Extra lake time is a good thing! But it was a little confusing, you know? *wry*

What I did yesterday was mostly snooze in the car en route to the airport, get a bit lost trying to find my way through the correct security checkpoint (Newark Airport currently suffers from highly inadequate signage), snooze and read on the plan, and chat and listen to a podcast en route to Cass Lake, and have really delicious homemade BLTs for dinner.

Then I slept about thirteen hours because I NEEDED SLEEP.

Today I have: read, forwarded work email to Mr. Geniality, sat on the dock to read some more, overheard part of an antiracism Zoom event Mom is attending, and read a bit more.

Tomorrow I may venture a hike. This evening, our plan is to tackle the 1000-piece Monet garden painting puzzle I brought. We got the edge put together last night (I had saved all the edge pieces in a separate bag, because that was the one part I managed to finish at home before life (and my lack of adequate table space) interfered), but the rest will be fiendishly difficult because Impressionist painting lacks the clear edges and shapes that one tends to rely upon when reconstructing a picture.

Tomorrow I may also venture some writing. I am hoping to get somewhere on a couple stories this week, since I won't have my job always in my face and I have also begged off from a bunch of church stuff for the very good reason that I am ON VACATION, dammit. I have already missed a Zoom meeting this evening and I feel no guilt whatsoever.

Vacation is nice that way. :)

Quick update:

Saturday we had blueberry-cranberry muffins and soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, which was lovely. (Nick eschewed the egg for something else, since he only likes eggs raw in cocktails or as a baking ingredient.)

Sunday was slow. I did pretty much nothing? Aside from reading and a tiny bit of writing, obviously. It was very chilly and we did chicken a la king for dinner (with champagne cocktails for happy hour beforehand) instead of the Father's Day steaks we initially had planned.

Today we had pancakes and sausage for breakfast, which was also lovely. We did some laundry, and then Mom, Dad, and I took a walk before the two of them headed briefly to the mainland to do a bit of shopping. For happy hour Dad grilled the weird sausage-stuffed-mushrooms Mom bought from the local grocery on sale a few days ago (they were pretty good!), and then we had steak and baked potatoes for dinner. I had a salad; the other three had coleslaw, which I despise.

In other news, I continued to plonk away a bit at writing, and progress through reading three books at once. The writing went a little better once I figured out where I'd taken yet another wrong turn -- namely, I needed another character in a certain scene, so I had to back up and adjust my setup, which necessitated an interstitial scene which is semi-useful in letting me do a bit of character work and build tension in a couple directions -- but it's still ultimately going to crash into a necessary action scene and I still don't want to write it.

I think I will end up and then, and then, and then-ing the scene in question just to get the logistics pinned down, after which I can go back and fix up the prose and internal monologue/emotional reactions and stuff. *sigh*

This was meant to be a silly crossover. Instead, it's turned into a bit of serious worldbuilding in one fandom, with an incidental crossover element and a character arc. I do not understand my brain. *deeper sigh*

Anyway, tomorrow's plan is for me, Nick, and Dad to collectively cut down a smallish tree on the bank and make it disappear so thoroughly the Forest Service won't realize it was ever there. :)

And now, to bed, because sleep is delicious. :DDD

Thursday was another slow day of mostly doing nothing, though I did pitch in to help Mom and Dad haul a tabletop up from the dock and then figure out how best to get it to fasten securely to our existing (too small for large family dinners) table. I ran a load of laundry, and then we left just past 4pm to run a couple errands and drive to Walker to eat dinner at the Boulders, where we met Nick who'd driven back up from the Twin Cities after some inconclusive work toward untangling his medical insurance thing. (He has set some relevant processes in motion and now has to wait for other people to get back to him. So basically phone tag, but with physical letters. *sigh*) And in the evening, after getting home, we had champagne cocktails and played multiple rounds of Hearts, because that's what we do as a nuclear family. :)

So far today I have been poking a little at a stalled story, and I think I've finally untangled all the bits where I was shoving down a misguided path and am ready to move on to new material. Unfortunately, said new material includes an action scene. I don't want to write an action scene today. Why do I do this to myself?

Also, Verizon has decided we've used up our data plan and dumped us into safe mode, which is annoying since we don't have an internet provider on the island anymore (we used to use a satellite dish aimed east-northeast toward a station on the mainland, but they either went out of business or decided the island wasn't worth the expense) and have to use our phones as mobile hotspots. What this means is that I can load text-based pages, but anything image-heavy is a no-go, to say nothing of gifs or videos. *headdesk*

Oh well, that means I have more time for reading actual books, I suppose.