After a long, hectic and sometimes dramatic summer, life has blissfully resumed a little bit of normalcy, and some of the best of it is the Frayed Edges. We were only three today; Deborah is, of course, in Texas (the link to her blog is on the left, but I know many of you know her and her blog!), and Hannah was home with her girls today. They are finally in their new house in Harpswell, where we’ll meet next month.

So today, Kate, Kathy and I met at the new Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor. Maine is made up of many, many peninsulas, harbors and bays carved by the receding glaciers, resulting in lots of rocky, forested coastline. These Gardens opened to the public this year, but clearly have been years in the making. The picture above is of the visitors center, with an arbor on the left. The more formal gardens are near the center, becoming more “wild” with distance, with lots of cool sculptures throughout.

First we got together for a brief chat in the cafe (inside the curved walled part of the center), then went for a long walk/stroll, while Kate and Kathy letterboxed (you’ll have to ask them about that…). There were SO MANY wonderful shots, that I have photos for many blogs, so am going to skip most of the photos today. One I’ll share here is looking up through the center of the arbor… I love all those angles!

And here are Kate and Kathy in the Meditating Garden.

I don’t do that… I’m always too busy and life is too crazy for me to manage to sit still long enough, and I’m glad to say I’m not alone… Kate too is living life on “more than full”. The hardscape in this place is amazing!

Kathy’s birthday is in late August, so we had gifts and lunch in the cafe. Here’s the birthday girl enjoying Hannah’s gift (books about decorating, since Kath and hubby will be…yipppeeee lucky me!… moving down near me in a few years):

And here she is opening mine (more about what that is during another post later this week):

And instead of delectable pastry treats, I said I’d make a little cake instead, so Kathy who loves the sea got a little Maine Seascape of a cake:

And in a small miracle, Kate took a picture in which both Kathy (who always looks good in photos) and I (who almost always look awful in pictures) both look good! It must be the wonderful company:

And finally, a bag of fingerling potatoes –grown by Kate in her own garden and joyously shared with her Frayed friends… and potatoes may be one of my favorite foods on earth, even more than…well no…. not quite…. but nearly as good as chocolate!

And oh yeah…the beautiful details extend even to the Ladies’ Room, which had two of these lovely little moss-scapes:

In other words, it’s the first day of school! Moms across Maine are celebrating today. Jan and I are extending that to tomorrow when we are finally going to meet for coffee in downtown Camden at Zoot–we’ve been trying to get together since school let out. Hah!

Of course, since it is the first day of school, there are the requisite back-to-school photos. First, Joshua was up at 6 to be at school by 7:15 (starts at 7:35) to go off to Camp Kieve for four-plus days (they come home Saturday), an 8th grade ritual. How did he get to be in 8th grade already? Anyway, here he is:

Then, Eli’s school starts an hour later (he’s in 4th this year…next year for 5th on he’ll be up early, too!). While I was dropping off Joshua, his sleeping bag, and box of bandages and meds for the week, Eli got up and dressed. At 7:52, out we went to the bus, with the dog-beasts in tow. Eli, of course, had to hold (Pig)widgeon for his pics:

And here is Widgeon doing his Stitch impersonation (as in Lilo and Stitch….there is no way the animators for that movie didn’t have a pug.. I mean color him blue and add a couple extra legs and he’s Stitch!):

While out, I snapped a picture of something that isn’t too rare this year:

Yes, it seems fall is coming early. I have high hopes, since they say the best fall colors come from warm days and nippy nights, and that is what we are having. We still have the fan on in the room, but are sleeping under sheet, quilt and duvet.

And then you find odd stuff in the notch of the trees when you go to snap a close up of the reddest low-down leaf around:

Gee….wonder how that got there?

And if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days…guess why? I’ll be in my STUDIO! What a miracle! Time for art (and in this specific instance, getting my journal quilt done before it is due!). WOOOOOHOOOOO!

Toodles, and I’ll be back….eventually <grin!!!!!>

Sigh…. art and quilting seem far, far away as summer winds down. I’m REALLY looking forward to six days from now when the boys will be IN SCHOOL! In the meantime, Eli has begun soccer and found a moth (way back in June) that we wanted to ask if anyone knows what it is. We got slightly distracted by Joshua’s accident and hospitalization, then Paul’s surgery (they are all on the mend… in three months Joshua will be fine and Paul will still be mending….). Anyway, does anyone know what kind of moth this is?

And here is Eli in his very first soccer games–this is during the second game up in Hampden on Sunday; Eli is on the far right in light blue shirt:

and here he is, the kid in the foreground just left of center:

and on the far right, sorta behind the boy in purple and to theleft of the dad with the red backpack:

and he also got to play goalie, and had a couple of great saves, and only let through one goal:

Now…off to the last SeaDogs game of the summer.  I miss making art and sewing!  SOON……

OK…. you take beauty where you find it.  Last night it was spam in  my e-mail in-box:

and preening, dancing on the basepaths,
XIV. Franz Josef Land: The Amazing Drift of the Tegetthoff  The surge of swirling wind defines
Your red cheeks radiant against the wind, The edge of that other square cut from the right
Yes. You’d want that said, (if you Glimmering of light:
Homeward into the howling woods, although  Only a fox whose den I cannot find

A google of “The Amazing Drift of the Tegetthoff” brought me to this Wikipedia entry on “spamdom”, which it defines as real words / phrases used to fool spam-catchers so as to allow the spam “sales pitch” (for Adobe, viagra, whatever) to get through.   Who cares….   It could be interesting to do a quilt challenge to illustrate a particularly beatiful bit of spamdom……

Can’t you just see a young buck, prancing on a light dusting of early winter snow, the moonlight streaming down through the bare birchtree branches, glinting off the crust of ice….white lines quilted and swirled in among the trunks of the trees howling the winter in (to steal a line from a favorite song by Makem and Clancy, written by Michael Peter Smith called “The Dutchman“.   Here are the lyrics.  You can hear clips at either Amazon or iTunes).

Anyway…just another bit of flotsam from my life…..

Joshua’s girlfriend Kristina comes from a lobstering family, and at least one day a week during summer works on the boat. As a major treat she brought us FOUR lobster. Now, I haven’t had a whole lobster since I was on a vacation in about the mid 80s, and haven’t fixed one since I was in grad school in 1982 (and then I just took them home from Boston to California and Mom cooked them). Well. My squeamishness about raw meat products (I won’t touch raw chicken, and Paul has to do the turkey until it is at least half-cooked) did me in. Here’s what happened:

We set the bag of lobsters (they spent the night inside a bag in the fridge…Paul said when he opened the door in the middle of the night to get something to drink the bag moved….) into the sink since it was drippy:

Joshua picked up a lobster for us to see:

I couldn’t bring myself to pick one up, even wearing rubber gloves. Somehow, awkwardly, I managed to use tongs while wearing gloves to pick one up and transfer it:

Into the pot—fortunately no banging on the sides of the pot (which I have heard…shudder) or screaming/hissing:

The look of the steam/vapor, however is totally cool. I don’t know that I can ever use these photos for a quilt tho…too traumatic.
By the second round of boiling (pot fit 2 at a time), I couldn’t even manage with gloves and tongs, so Eli did the courageous honors (or is it dastardly deed?):

Then, he decided to be cute:

Here are two of the lobsters, truly dead and red, in the sink:

We had to call Kristina and ask her how to get them open. Answer: pull off legs and claws. Grab head and tail in hands and twist apart. Gut. Shell. Eat. That’s when I lost it. I couldn’t do it. Joshua was able to pull off the claws and legs from one, but wouldn’t gut them. I couldn’t. Paul’s shoulder is bad and he only has one hand these days (the rotator cuff surgery thing), so he isn’t able to do it, though he would if he could. So we now have a king’s ransom in the fridge, boiled bright red, intact…. if I can get someone to gut them for me, I think I can get the meat out, but who…… I know. I’m a wuss. I don’t care. I can’t kill and dismember and gut. Sigh. I may have eaten the last lobster tail of my life nearly 25 years ago.  And I feel guilty about such a wonderful gift, and not being able to live up to it.  Anyone wanna come gut my lobsters?  I’ll be more than happy to share  the meat….