If you can't score a lobster in the next month or so, I'm sorry. I ate them all.

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 A couple of weeks ago, we packed up the family and headed to Maine. Even though I've been at work and traveling again since returning, I'm still enjoying the fantastically chill post-Maine vacation & relaxation buzz. Though that also could be the large quantities of melted butter I consumed with my lobster rolls.

To accommodate the family, dog and relatives for a week, we rented a house on the coast south of Boothbay.

I don't know how the heck we found a place on short notice that had its own private beach, but I'm going to chalk it up to clean livin' and excellent karma.

Every day, I would wake up to this view out to the ocean. 

A short walk down the hill would get you this.

Since we were kind of in the hinterlands, I kept telling the kids to keep their eyes out for Moose. A moose. Mooses. Moosi. Whatever.  We did not see any moose. I was disappointed. I did, however, see a lot of smaller wildlife.

The absence of large fauna might have been due to us bringing our own. Maggie came along for the week. She seemed to enjoy it. 

The kids definitely enjoyed it. The Critter and I tried to eat all of the seafood before the week was over. Fish? You bet. Lobster? Surely. Clams? Pass mine to her, please. Her standards are lower. I draw the line at bi-valves.

As much as The Boy enjoyed the beach, on the other hand, he insisted that I pick up and inspect any shell he found to ensure there was nothing alive within it before he'd handle it. 

I respect his sense of self-preservation. 

We were joined by my step-mother, and her lovely friend Batty. Batty's real name is Betty. But she told us a story about a little girl calling her 'Batty', and I will forevermore call her this. (I did ask, and she said this was ok.) A classier and more game pair of ladies, you could not hope to want along for any adventure. That's Batty on the left.

Most days were spent toodling around the Maine coast, or thinking about what to eat next. Or toodling around while thinking of what to eat next. But we managed to squeeze in a little time for games. Like staring contests. 

Did I mention we ate a lot of seafood? If you're anywhere within the New England area, figure out how to detour through Wicasset, and get yourself a lobster roll. Holy crap, that's a lot of lobster. And you'll notice that there's no mayonnaise, only a small tub of healthy, wholesome butter. Because mayonnaise comes from the Devil. And butter is straight from Heaven.

And Red knows that. 

Mostly, there was just a lot of relaxing, and enjoying the company, in as peaceful environment as you might wish. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd put this week in Maine someplace just above "perfect"

We let loose our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world

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Holy flaming jumps, Batman - I'm running!
A couple of months ago, our one-time friend Julie posted on Facebook something along the lines of "Hey, I'm doing this fun little event called the Warrior Dash, which promises to be a fun day outside in the sunshine and fresh air. You should check it out!" We love Julie. But clearly she must have said something to trick us. Running is such a very un-Grady activity. The Warrior Dash is half 5k run, half obstacle course. I hate running. Mostly because it's such a dreadfully dull & monotonous thing to do. You want to catch me? Sure. At least that way something interesting will happen. I used to run a lot, because the Army made me do it, and I do admit that I enjoy that self-righteous "Sure, I can have an extra helping of deep-fried chili and jalapeno potato balls with extra butter sauce, because I ran today" feeling. But that's about the only thing going for it. On the other hand, breaking it up every few hundred yards with some fun kind of stunt ('Climb a wall!' 'Walk across this plank!' 'Jump through these tires!' 'Crawl under this barbed wire!' 'Jump over fire!') sounded like maybe, just possibly, this Warrior Dash idea had something going for it. And then, at the end of the race, they promised everyone a fuzzy viking helmet. And beer. Ok, we're in. This is us before the race.
See how clean we are? Note the smiles on our faces? I went out and bought that special "wicks away the sweat" shirt, just for this race. In the weeks leading up to the run, I told myself I should probably get outside and try and do something vaguely physical. Other than the occasional short burst across the driveway when I dropped a still-full diet coke can, I hadn't really run with a purpose in a couple of years. Sure, in summer months, I do some fairly physical stuff from time to time, mostly comprised of picking up buckets of chicken crap and hauling them to the compost heap. But I didn't want to completely embarrass myself. When I mentioned this to my loving Bride, she laughed. She's been working out twice a week for the last 6 months, with a trainer that used to be on the Irish Olympic Luge team. The smack talk was running pretty high in our house for a while. Which meant that despite the discomfort and frequent assumption of the fetal position until the nausea and the quivers passed, I kept waking up early to get in some rowing before work or went for an occasional run through town. Nothing serious. Just enough to remind me why I hated running, and to make me feel like I wasn't going to have to be carted away in an emergency vehicle somewhere along the race.
They forgot to tell me about the mud. It had been raining for most of the two weeks leading up to the race. The course is a winding track up and down (mostly up) hills through a wooded area. The mud was occasionally up to my knees and constant. There was risk of slipping. There was much falling over. There were occasional shoes sucked off of people's feet by the deep, clenching muck. There were ponds of the stuff, viscous and treacherous. This was not what I had trained for.
As a consolation, though, it wasn't what my beautiful, smack-talking Bride had trained for, either. And when the mud was up to my calves, it was up to her knees. Ha! Her bet with me was that while I might finish first, she would find me at the end a quivering mass of pale flesh, lying in a pool of my own exhausted sick. At which point she would lord over me and do the dance of Warrior victory.
Not only did I beat her, but I managed to do it without needing to seek medical attention or be unwillingly hospitalized. I am proud of this. OK, sure, I managed to come home with a dozen or so scrapes and cuts and a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my ass from sliding down a long muddy slope, only to discover the hard way that there was at least one rock in my path. But I won! My time was a fairly respectable 52 minutes - 1,765th in our day's heat of more than 5,400 racers. (The winner was a 20 year old whose mother obviously did unnatural things with a cheetah in her misguided youth. He finished in 25 minutes. Bastard.). My lovely bride finished in 1:19. She told me later that she was trying to be careful and avoid things like falling as she went through the woods or down hills. That rather un-Warrior-like behavior cost her the family bragging rights until next year. The Warrior Dash is muddy, long, exhausting, muddy, treacherous, muddy, bruising and muddy. I highly recommend it. Next year, we're getting a group together to run. Bring on the mud!
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It might be springy.

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The snow has retreated to isolated pockets in my yard, and the sun is staying in the sky a few minutes more each day. If not for these signs, I might not have believed reports from other parts of the world that it really is edging towards Spring these days, despite what the calendar tells me. With Spring comes a renewed interest in being outdoors at the Grady ranch. I've got a list of things to get done that grows by the day. I've had twelve yards of poop delivered to my garden, as a kind of wake up call to the dirt. Twelve cubic yards of composted manure, for those who may not be able to do that kind of mental calculation, equals about one dump truck full. Or, the perfect instant-hill for kids to play King of the Mountain on. I did not tell them they were playing King of Poop. Because it amused me more to keep that secret. This is what kids are for. A cubic yard of topsoil weighs about a ton. Manure, yard for yard, weighs a little bit less. Either way, it's a big pile of shit. And I'm looking forward to spreading it around pretty liberally. In a few weeks, there will be a dozen new chicks arriving to replenish the flock. We've gotten in the habit of infusing some new blood each spring, as we seem to lose a few along the way. The tremendous amount of ice and snow this winter caused the lean-to shelter outside the chicken house to collapse, and one of the smaller hens flew out through the resulting hole to "explore." She didn't survive the expedition. And, sadly, my favorite hen of all died of terminal anger. Or something. She was really a very pissy bird. She was the one chicken that would back-talk when you went to collect eggs, consistently broody, and all of the other chickens were a bit frightened of her. I enjoyed her personality. Rest in peace, angry bird.
There are seeds stacked and ready togo, I've broken out two of my four hoes already in a sort of pre-spring fit of 'damn the snow - I'm going to dig today' fit of optimism. And we're having some work done on the kitchen to prep for the new stove. I do so love this time of year.
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