I’m here for a month. Then I’m going back to Seattle to visit the office, assess how working remotely has gone, visit life there and prepare for Burning Man. After Burning Man, I’ll stick around Seattle for a week or so, then come back to Maine. In particular, I’m returning before the Common Ground Country Fair, where I grew up volunteering. When I started volunteering at Burning Man, I looked back at my experience at the CGCF. I realized how well it had prepared me well for Gate at BM.

Yesterday was spent on the logistics of workings from Surry. I’ve been slowly working on dismantling my childhood bed. The frame is 48″ x 84″ (4′ x 7′) making it a rare “Super Single,” but I saved it anyway. It contained an old water that had no baffles and wasn’t much fun, which I disposed of earlier in the year. Most of the frame made it to the basement, I need to find help to get the remaining heavy portion of the frame moved still. I moved my bed and furniture that I had stored in the spare room when I moved to Seattle up to my old room so I could make the spare room into an office. I’ve been staying in my fathers room so far this year and will continue to do so, because its floor plan isn’t interrupted by a chimney (from the wood cook-stove in the kitchen) like my old room is. I believe my intermittent problems with my land-line are finally solved, with the continued help of a Fairpoint (Formerly Verizon, Bell Atlantic, New England Telephone and NYNEX; telephone company churn is amazing) technician; time will tell. Fairpoint‘s bleak financial state means it is unlikely to get DSL service in the near future, so Internet service was installed by Premium Choice Broadband. The name invokes distrust in the company, as does their unprofessional website and confused FAQ. All of my neighbors use them, as satellite is the only other option, and seem happy enough. The hole they drilled through the house for their cable didn’t increase my confidence either. I’ll fix it up later myself, I need to run a cable to the living room for the new DVD player, to replace yet another that has stopped reading new DVDs, which also has some internet streaming functionality. I also got the plow move out of the way to start site work on the garage. So a pretty productive day.

It was also hot, in the low 80s. In fact, it was still a “cool 80” in the bedroom when I went to bed last night. I wanted to go swimming all day, but couldn’t find the chance. But when Kate came home, caked with dirt from farming, she asked me what I thought about swimming. Yes! We’re lucky to own a family beach down on the lake, so off we went. A good portion of the neighborhood was there too, so we spent a bit socializing before actually getting in the water, but neighbors are great too. When we were leaving I said “Have a nice night” to my neighbor John, who has known me since I was born. He replied that he didn’t know how it could get any nicer. Indeed, an evening on the beach on beautiful Toddy Pond after a hot day is pretty hard to beat.

Time has been fully distorted. I can’t grasp that I’ve only been here three nights so far. This morning I was thinking about if I should go to the grocery store today for vegetables for dinner, and remembered that we’re eating with friends and family the next three nights. This is all very good.