come see us at our latest location

Our new blog about life in the yurt in the U.P. has gone live! In other words, we're really doing it. Come see Circular Lodgic and read the latest blogs about life simplified (we hope). Thanks for reading!

it's a small world after all and HAPPIEST OF BIRTHDAYS, KATIE KRALL!

Good news from Michigan! Yesterday was yurt takedown day and I got to arrive at the scene after class with the news that the easement would be signed by Wednesday. When I got to campus today, our realtor said the easement is signed and we can close! Thank God. Now we're back to plan A where we drop off the yurt and THEN head home to Minnesota.

As though the universe was trying to give us a sign that it was all going to work out, we got a visitor interested in our Minnesota plates during yurt takedown. He asked about the plates and explained that he was from the UP! I asked where and he said Hancock which is where we are moving! It's a town of ~7,000 people and is the sister town to Houghton which is a similar size. So he made it to Ripton, Vermont, a town of maybe 500. Strange! He was as shocked as we were when I told him we were moving to Hancock this week! Hopefully we'll see Hancock Joel around when we get there!

See you suckers (we miss you very much) on Friday!

The yurt takedown happened although not without some minor issues. Keith and Dan came up to lend a hand, but Ranger Dave hadn't brought us a ladder yet so when I arrived the walls were down but progress had stopped there.

exhibit a: stalled yurt takedown

We waited a half hour to an hour and he didn't arrive, so we started looking around and devising other plans, none of which I approved of. We settled on this setup:

Now if you didn't know it before, now you know my main squeeze is a brave man. Now, we successfully took down the rafters and during the very stressful precarious balancing of the dome ring, all of Bryan's spotters had to step away in order to pull rafters. When we successfully got the ring down, we all hooted and then Bryan fell. It went in slow motion, and I was sure he was going to have a broken something, but HE IS OKAY! Don't worry, Moms, he is okay. He bruised his wrist a little and has a sore hip, but he is okay. He told me not to blog about it, but it was an important part of the story of the takedown and the truth must be told. 

After the guys helped us fold up and pack the yurt paraphernalia we headed to campus for dinner and then to the Duennebiers for a fire. We got to meet Johnnny, Josh's brother AND witness one more night of Marty treatment. He owns the cabins they're staying at and he is literally the most generous, thoughful human being on earth. He even put his dogs away so we could have our dogs there AND offered me a water bowl for them. That's just the tip of the iceberg with this guy. Ask Kate and Josh about blueberry muffins. By the by, if you come to these parts, stay at the Robert Frost Mountain Cabins. For real. He didn't even pay me for that plug. We rolled in to Bread Loaf karaoke at Two Brothers, dropped off Keith, and stayed for maybe 10 minutes. I caught the cold Bryguy had last week and had a very miserable night in the tent and then an even more miserable morning.

On a positive note, we missed breakfast on campus and don't want to unpack to eat at the campground, so we headed in to town to eat at Rosie's and get DayQuil and NyQuil. The guy who hired Bryan was there and they caught up and he bought our breakfast. SWEET!

Rosie's

Fire

Sick

Last day of classes

"Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

One of last night's happenings was going to Our Town which happens to be Alan MacVey's final show after 26 years of directing Bread Loaf's plays. It's the end of an era with tonight's performance.

It's not a lighthearted show, but it's all about how we cannot recognize how beautiful life is until we lose it. Which is pretty beautiful, eh? The play was beautifully done, complete with scenes inside the theater and out, wedding cake at Emily and George's wedding reception (aka intermission), ghosts emerging from the woods, and a lot of tears in the audience. Sigh.

That stood in pretty stark contrast with Middlebury Brewfest which looked more like this: 

  

 Except it was actually a lot more fun than those fake laughs make it seem. I definitely laughed until I cried which was reminiscent of Marble Brewery on Josh and Kate's last night in Santa Fe. Brewfest felt a little bit like the saying goodbye event which made me sad, but we still have Kate's-day-after-her-birthday event, and the yurt takedown, so I'm not getting too sappy yet. So Brewfest resolved itself into avoiding the pile of dog shit that was mashed into the ground, eating food truck hamburgers, and trying to fling beer chips into each other's glasses. Good stuff! There was also this gem though:

Awwwww. That's the Santa Fe crew plus Sean who is the best addition I could imagine. Plus, how stinkin' cute does Bry look in that picture. :-)

I'm gonna miss this gal. Oxford???

 Other news:
Yesterday there was a wedding at the Spirit in Nature trails. We walked there yesterday morning and weren't sure if the wedding was actually taking place or if they were just decorating in The Sacred Circle, so we avoided it, fearing that Nitsa would bound up to the bride and groom in the middle of the ceremony (sound familiar, Mom). Anyway, it was clearly happening yesterday afternoon as we headed in to the Brewfest. That would be a beautiful place to get married. It's got to be up there with Otter Creek kind of beautiful! :-) I'm thinking their reception was at the Ripton Community house where we saw music last month. What a lovely way to wed!

Still no movement on the easement for our land, and the owners have said that we cannot camp/leave the yurt there on our way home, so we have to go all the way to Carlton. Since we now have agreed to deliver my professor's car and guinea pigs to Ann Arbor, perhaps we can stop and see Molly at the rents' house though! That will be fun!

As we were leaving for Brewfest, we pulled the air mattress off its platform in order to dry out our sheets and all of a sudden Bryan kept saying, "Oh my God, Oh my God!" Then I heard a lot of squeaking and got the dogs the hell out of there. Lo and behold, a momma mouse had decided to give birth underneath our air mattress. The air mattress has a sort of bubble texture to it, so there is plenty of room for a mouse to wiggle in their and build a nest quick. I don't know when she got in there, perhaps when we were walking the dogs??? Or in the night? We HAD heard something on the roof of the yurt in the night, but I have a hard time believing she got in there while the dogs were in the yurt. Gross, bu we know she wasn't there long because we did the same thing with the mattress yesterday. Anyway, there she is, totally exposed, perhaps in the middle of giving birth, and we had to figure out what to do with her! She grabbed one baby in her mouth and was trying to crawl off the bed when Bryan put down a box. She calculated for a second and ran into the box. We took her outside to the shed and let her down. She took the baby and went under there. We came back in to the little squeakers who were seriously soooooo tiny and got them in the box too. We took them out there and hoped and hoped that she'd come back for them. I think she did. I'm hoping we didn't just deliver them into another animal's den and that they are happily surviving in a new nest out there. Needless to say we were late for meeting Josh and Kate. It's always something up there at Mooslamoo. That morning it had been waking up at 6:30 to a ten-year-old boy screaming obscenities at his parents as he walked down the campground loop in front of our yurt. That's a fantastic way to start a day! Today it's mouse babies.

err in the direction of kindness

Today's gift was a facebook post from Pam Houston, my favorite author (I think). It was a speech given at Syracuse University by George Saunders. And it is beautiful. It's like he read my blog about "Jake." you should really read the speech.


"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. 

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly.  Reservedly.  Mildly."

Yes. Exactly. 

finals week, snake mountain panoramas, and wild blueberries

I am finished with all my Bread Loaf work for the semester. I have two more days of classes, one yurt to remove, and a lot of packing to do before we can hit the old dusty trail.

While the anxiety of finals weeks still grasps many on campus tightly, it has no hold on me! I turned in both of my papers early which I might decide later was a mistake, but I just could not look at them any longer. Plus, I've got plenty of my own life anxiety going on to prolong that other kind any more.

The neighbor still has not signed the easement which allows us to access our land via the existing driveway. Everyone agrees that he has said he will sign it but is really busy. I'm starting to dream up conspiracies between him and the landowner. What if they got some other offer and are trying to get us to back out? I'm trying to stay calm, but early next week we're supposed to be dropping off the yurt on our way home. Also, we've got a lot of money already invested in health department evaluation fees, appraisals, etc. for this property. Also, we love it.

We're carrying on nonetheless and it's great that we have fun business going on here in the next few days before we hit the road. The preview:
Saturday - Middlebury Brewfest, then Bread Loaf's Our Town
Sunday - work and packing
Monday - Class, then disassembling the yurt with Keith's help (thank God), then Kate's birthday celebrations at Flatbread! Delicious!
Tuesday - both classes, then hopefully one last hurrah with friends
Wednesday - collect professors car and guinea pigs and hit the road

Last night we celebrated my finished papers by eating at Two Brothers Tavern and then having some beers with Keith. I got the hiccups there which lasted until I fell asleep and I got them back during our hike of Snake Mountain today. We hiked for about an hour, came up over a knoll and BAM! We saw this:

What you see is farmland, Lake Champlain, and the Adirondack Mountains. We're pretty damn sure, if not certain, that you can even see Whiteface Mountain, near Lake Placid, which Bryan and I hiked up, and up, and up two summers ago when we vacationed there with the Manns. Pretty spectacular view, eh?

We're hoping to hike another one before we leave that has a 360 degree view.  Also, we stopped at the wild blueberry fields that the National Forest Service maintains and had a few blueberries on our way to our campground duties at Silver Lake the other day:

suppressed desires

THE Bread Loaf Vermont event that everyone talks about is the suppressed desires dance. It is a costume party where you dress up as your suppressed desire. Said dance was last night. As you can guess, this kind of thing is not really up my alley, but being THE event, I figured I should go.

My costume?
I am suppressing my desire to quit teaching to become a river rat, aka a whitewater raft guide. Basically I wore my tomboy-ish outdoorsy clothes, put on my Forest Service volunteer hat, and borrowed a lifejacket from a classmate. People went all out, and given this is Englishland, many were characters from books and plays. When you don't know what someone's desire is, you might get the condescending, incredulous, "You haven't read that? It's in the Canon." Sweet.

The theme was Gatsby, which is confusing, but basically they just decorated the place with that in mind. There were quotes from the book all over, which I should have taken pictures of for my Gatsby-loving students back home. I forgot though. On a mirror in the bathroom it said "Gatsby! What Gatsby?" Love it. While hard to decipher, one guy was dressed as the green light on the end of Gatsby's dock. Not sure how that correlates to his desire...  Bryan dressed up as a Bread Loaf student, which is definitely not his suppressed desire, by wearing his normal clothes and carrying around my books. It made for a confusing conversation piece because the running joke this summer is that everyone thinks Bry is a student. How confusing when they find that the books he is steadfastly leaning over in the library have math in them and are incomprehensible to everyone enrolled here. I think my favorite costume of the night was Minno's, a student from France whose boyfriend is from Montana. She is moving here and is starting the stressful process of trying to get her green card. Bry and I chatted with her for a long time about the process the other night, so when she came dressed as an American, complete with a cowboy hat, flannel shirt, and her best attempt at cowboy boots, it was perfect. Hilarious. After we had our fill of that debauchery we went up to Josh and Kate's to enjoy the most beautiful fire ever. Marty, the owner of the cabins they're staying at, is the man.

In other news, we have a visitor in the form of a falcon that might be nesting on the road in to the campground! We've seen it in the same place on the road three times.

The campground is packed for the first time. It's weird. The dogs do not like it and have proceeded to tell everyone in the campground by barking whenever anyone walks by. Evidently they did this Friday night when we went to see The Shining on campus. More on that in a minute. A woman stopped by on Saturday morning, before I had had any coffee to tell  me that I cannot leave my dogs unattended. Great way to let me know that they had been a nuisance by opening up with that. Since I live here, I will be leaving my dogs unattended, but I let her know I'd be happy to put their bark zapper on. She didn't like that either, but we took them with us everywhere yesterday so as not to upset more people.

Anyway, every week they show a movie on campus, typically a horror movie because there is a horror class (I was too afraid to take it when I saw the Japanese version of The Ring on it. Remember when Katie had that long black hair, people? I'm still sort of afraid she might pretend to be that girl again). This week was The Shining which is the single greatest horror movie of all time and one that my parents let me watch when I was way too young. No wonder I thought my room was haunted for awhile growing up. They show the movies in the barn, projecting the films onto the wall and everyone sits around drinking beers and looking afraid. It's great. Evidently last week a bat was flying around in there during the film.

Yesterday Bryguy and I went to Burlington to see what that's about. It's the biggest city in Vermont and is on Lake Champlain. We walked Church Street, window shopped, and showed off the poodles. We sat in a park for a while and then went to Magic Hat Brewery which I have decided is overrated. On the way out, a guy pulled up in a convertible and a dog hopped out that had a Magic Hat Brewery bandana on. He came out a half hour later, chugged the remnants of a Heady Topper (which is that AMAZING beer from The Alchemist, where we went but they were out, remember?) and took off. It is   a better beer, but isn't that sleeping with the enemy if his dog is repping Magic Hat?


After that we headed to Shelburne and went to Folsino's Pizza which shares a building with Fiddlehead Brewery. We got a strange pizza with sweet potatoes on it that didn't work for us and got a growler of Fiddlehead's IPA. The pizza place doesn't sell alcohol, but they have chilled glasses so you can buy Fiddleheads growlers or bring your own drinks in and use their glasses.

And if you think I've forsaken my schoolwork for all these shenanigans, you'd be wrong. Friday Bryan wasn't feeling well so after loads of Pepto Bismol, he just laid in bed all day and I did this:
This equals finally starting to write my final paper for Male, Female, Other. It's about Deliverance which should already freak you out, but it's specifically about the way the men's bodies change as they embody masculinity, seek out bonds with one another, and perpetrate violence. I sat there and wrote my way through 9 pages, so I definitely earned my time away from it. Now, here at work in the computer lab, is where the hard part comes. I've got to turn these papers, pretty much word vomit at this stage, into graduate school appropriate papers.

In other important news, I've got to wish my pops a happy, happy birthday! Hope today is great!!!

the owls came in tandem

Not just one owl, but two gifted us with harmonious hoots last night. Bryan almost hit a turkey yesterday and he spotted (and I missed) a pine marten on one of Spirit in Nature hikes. By the by, my favorite of the quotes in there is "I believe in God, I just spell it N-A-T-U-R-E" by Frank Lloyd Wright.

This morning it was in the mid 50s and the pups had to snuggle in bed in order to warm up after a long and delightfully chilly night. I am looking forward to fall.

Our report came from the health department in the UP regarding our desire to have  a permit for a composting toilet. This is anxiety provoking because of the many, many ridiculous rules that police what you can do on your own property. That's a rant for another day, but that anxiety, combined with the fact that in 2 weeks we expect to move to our land, which we cannot close on because the neighboring land owner has not physically signed an easement that all involved gave us the impression he would have no problem signing. Also, I can't start my paper because my professor wants me to focus more on Ed's body in Deliverance and less on  his psychology. I'm not entirely sure what she's looking for and her office hours are during my other class. This is anxiety land.

In other news, we found out back when the police were here that the campground host last year died here. He was old and died of a heart attack, but it was interesting that the ranger did not mention this and gave me the impression that they hadn't had a host in a long time. About a week ago, a woman pulled up in front of our campsite, so I went outside to say hello and see what she needed. She wanted to just hover there and said she didn't need any assistance, so I just gave her some space and she looked at the yurt. She asked a question about it and then explained that her dad was the host last year. Of course, not expecting this, I didn't know what to say (typical me), but in my alternative relived version, I told her to stay awhile and that we'd leave for a hike so she could just be there. In reality, she drove away. Tom the Minnesotan guy asked about last year's host and why he hadn't stayed long, and we had to tell him what had happened and last night a couple came by who come to Moosalamoo ever year and asked about him. Evidently he was a really great guy. It's sad having to be the bearer of bad news. I hope we're doing him justice!