Greetings from New Hamster

Greetings from New Hampster
Originally uploaded by Trilby.

We're in New Hampshire and it's wonderful. It's wonderful even though I'm spending a lot of time cleaning. And I don't mean just wiping kitchen counters. No, this is big time stuff. Like yesterday I was washing walls. But I was actually enjoying it, in that pathetic way anyone who has ever bought a "fixer upper" would recognize.

So yeah, I can't really call this a vacation, per se. Our house needs a ton of work, but I have family in the area, which helps a lot. My future brother-in-law has done a lot--he made many trips to the dump, and now we can actually get a car into the garage. Which was impossible before. There were two work tables in there, a bunch of old weird tools, an entire hardware store's worth of canned hazardous waste, and a ton of miscellaneous junk. There was absolutely no room for a car, so of course the previous owners parked their cars outside in the yard. Which I'm sure just thrilled the neighbors.

I figure they love us already, if only because we put the car in the garage once in a while.

Also my sister's fiance pulled up the deeply ugly shag ORANGE wall-to-wall carpeting on the stairs, revealing beautiful oak steps--I just wish I had taken a picture of the "before," that's all, because it was so bad I could have dined out on it for years. I'm serious; they were so hideous I could have become the Oscar Wilde of bad interior decoration and never had to cook another meal, damn it. I could just have waxed wondrous witty over my hideous shaggy orange stairs and people would have fought for the chance to invite me to dinner.

Or at least I'd have come up with a funnier blog entry than this.

Instead, you're stuck with my pretty pretty postcard-perfect style of photography. This is New Castle; it's just so damned New England-y and quaint and gorgeous that it boggles the mind. It's like Nantucket without the self-conscious cutesy twee factor (not to mention wall-to-wall New York CEO's wives wearing too much jewelry and those ubiquitous straw hats with the black grosgrain ribbon trim blabbing on their cell phones. Yes, I'm bitter; so sue me.)

When I'm not cleaning house or taking pictures, I'm eating seafood. The other night we ate dinner at Warren's, my favorite lobster place in Maine; it's very corny with the obligatory big-ass lobster sign and a plaque demonstrating various nautical knots hanging on the wall, but the food is really pretty good. I had swordfish and before the entree we all shared shrimp cocktail and fried calamari (which my daughter loved, declaring "It's like chicken and french fries, only more octopus-y.") Today's lunch was at the Portsmouth Brewery where there are many marvelous local beers on tap.

See the pretty boats? I've decided I want a lobster boat. There isn't one in this picture, but I'll upload one. They are SO CUTE. I want a lobster boat and while I'm at it, I also want to join the Portsmouth Yacht Club and have my daughter's wedding there, or at least my son's rehearsal dinner.

Which is completely idiotic of me, because I know absolutely nothing about boats. I am an idiot. But aren't they pretty?

So anyway, I'll be uploading more pictures now that I've figured out my ISP and photo software. Mind you, I take pictures of anything that amuses me, so some stuff maybe needs explaining. And maybe not everyone is as obsessed with lobster boats as I am. So I won't make it all cute lobster boats. Mostly, though.

--P.