Sometimes it's hard to start writing after a break and then you put on top of it that I saw Julie and Julia where part of the plot is about how self-absorbed bloggers are plus I heard from my cousin in California that my favorite aunt is now is hospice care and yeah, that's most of it.
Today my older daughter went home because she has soccer practice this week and she's a senior and wants to be captain and so forth. We still have a week in Lake Placid and I'm not easily dislodged, so I drove her to Albany, NY, where the train station features jungle noises piped into the parking garage, something I'd not experienced before, and I put her on a train and she had 90 minutes to change trains at Penn Station and we heard from friends that it was easy.
My daughter is a great kid but she is also a bit of a shlamazel sometimes. After driving back to 15 miles shy of Lake Placid, my phone rings and she tells me I have to drive back to Albany, pick her up and drive her home. Why? There's a problem with a bridge. She doesn't know where she is but they've been backing up by a bunch of stations. "Where are you?" "I don't know." I tell her I'll head back but if the train starts going forward again she'd better get on the phone to me right away.
Let me insert a once upon a time. I took a train from Glacier Park in Montana to Chicago in what I didn't realize was the aftermath of a major flood. North Dakota was essentially underwater, and though normally that could happen and I'd never know the difference, this time it meant the train stopped somewhere and all I could see in any direction was water, with the occasional tree and fence sticking up. We backed up for 3 1/2 hours, almost 100 miles, then switched onto a track that went through South Dakota, and everyone who was supposed to go to North Dakota had to take a bus from someplace further south. We got to Chicago almost exactly 12 hours late, but I was pretty sure they weren't backing up all the way to Albany.
As I'm getting ready to turn around just in case, and she said they'd just stopped at the Yonkers station. In case you don't know where Yonkers is, look at a New York City map and look at the northern edge. That's Yonkers (named after a Dutch guy whose nickname was "Jonker,' just like the Bronx is where the Bronck family lived, as in going to visit the Bronck's), so they were maybe 8 miles from Penn Station, so basically, they'd gotten almost all the way there but the draw bridge was broken, so they had to get on a commuter train and go to Grand Central instead. At this point I explained that there was no way I was going to pick her up. And then I was out of cell phone service (as most of this area is) and never got another call along the way.
Finally she called again at 4:15 to say she'd made her train to Philly by about a minute and would be home on schedule. So it was a drama but not a tragedy.
After I got home, I wanted to walk around the lake. This is 2.7 miles and among the most pleasant walks you could imagine. I have done it in every sort of winter weather- snowstorms, 20 below, that kind of thing. Summer isn't usually so eventful, but today it was drizzling as I left and it began to rain harder and harder and harder until there was thunder and lightning and a torrential downpour. I had given it enough thought to bring an umbrella, which was fine until I was almost exactly halfway around the lake when the skies opened up. By the time I got close to home, the sidewalk and street were completely flooded, my feet were squishing in my sneakers, a car had come by and completely splashed me completely from the waist down. In the middle of this my daughter called to tell me she'd gotten home.
That's enough to catch up, I'll take some pictures and put them up tomorrow or Tuesday.
