hot in the water.

Hannah and I went to the supermarket to get food for our trip to the lake with two of her high school friends. Even there, it was incredibly hot, but it gave us something to do (like swim...at gawk at small children, and look at the fish.)

(I don't remember quite the order of the rest of the events, because I guess sometimes I have an incredibly short memory.  maybe. maybe its all in place.also at some point we watched an animated film The Illusionist and Le combat dans l'ile)

I think it was Sunday that we went to the nature center where Hannah had been organizing archives and the such. We saw a white egret and a couple of blue herons. We were absolutely wiped after that (at least I was), so we went and ate and then went to a Vietnamese restaurant. It had finally started to drizzle, but not enough to break the heat spell and humidity. There was also a street fair, but it broke up at the first hint of rain, and it was very small.

Monday we intended to go to the pool, but instead danced in the sprinklers in front of the library, stared at the sky in the park, ate an an ice cream parlor, and then went to her grandparents house. Her grandparents are lovely. We talked for a spell and then went to the garden, were we collected some corn and bell pepper and jalapenos and basil from the garden for dinner.

We made some sort of middle ground between green salsa and guacamole, it was really good. :

2 cloves garlic

2 jalapeno peppers (it can defiantly hold more)

lemon juice

cilantro (we had Asian cilantro from the garden)
1 avocado

1 small green bell pepper

1/2 tomato

1 scallion

salt

Dinner was the fresh picked corn, burgers (my first ever-yes, yes, I know, it's strange), and smores for desert. (mmm...caramelized fluffed corn-syrup and melted dark chocolate, so good)

The next day we snuck me into a Columbia library (twice) so Hannah could do some work for her class. Lunch was for some reason fantastic-I guess I was a lot hungrier than I thought I was when we came around to it, but that bagel with olive cream cheese and orange juice and mochi was delicious.

And then I bought a ticket to Sloutsberg to visit the Kuznetsovi. Misha and Diniska and I played tennis-in the rain, with dead balls. Which made it so much easier because everything was so much slower, I felt like a beast. And then the next day we went swimming with , and somehow eating ice cream while Sasha and Misha and I waited for the bus was perfect.

Also I had a dream I was an art teacher at my high school.

And today Osya came back from Israel! He has a tan (well...a tan to the extent him and I get tans) and he's happy :)

104 degrees in NYC

A week ago I met up with Sergi, and then we went over to Kostya's house and hung out with him and Sisi. It was a very russian beet soup day-first I had svekolnik, and then borsh. The next day I passed my road test (I got my license in the mail today) and then Папа dropped me off at South Station so I could catch the bus to New York. 

I got in line, and I was 5 min early (cutting it close) but it said NYC on the sign. Of course the sign turned out to be outdated and the people in line where waiting for Philly, so I got to sit around for two hours and then Hannah's mother had to pick me up instead of Hannah and me taking the bus back to her house in NJ. I was dead exhausted by the time we got to her house, but I got there, I'd passed my driving test, and I'd finished Catch 22 (which is fantastic, by the way.)

The next day it was 104 degrees out, or something like that. Hannah and I made blueberry pancakes-so many that we put most of them in a bag and ate them on the subway for 1st lunch. She showed me around Columbia, where she is taking a class on Medieval Art in Manhattan (about how art got imported during the guided age and a lot of studying of the art that ended up there-of which there is a lot, definitely enough to study) We looked at a chapel and watched the tourist groups listing to their tour guides, trying to fight off the heat. We then met up with Rosette and went to the Met. There was a two our line to get into the Alexander McQueen exhibit (it was kindof satisfying walking past them to look at the Contemporary photos and the Byzantine art that is always there. The exhibit for Richard Serra was in a mostly empty hall, and so quite and cool, though I can't really say I liked most of his work, but it was nice after the heat to wander around. Rosette said modern art makes her upset, even if she likes it. After some felafel, we met up with Anna (the one from Paris, who is coming back to Bard this year) joined us too and we went to the strand (huge bookstore) and got sucked into it for a couple of hours.  

Eventually we split up and all went home, where I, for one, fell into an exhausted sleep on a green cot. 

The rest I will tell later...

Mini

I visited Margaret! Her mom's side of the family rented a house in Rockport, and I stayed there a night. We swam in a small quarry on the property and in the ocean after that. Cut her hair, stayed up watching Mission Impossible 3 (which is...the kind of movie that you know it would be based on the name) with Jack and Nora (Margaret's sister.) 

I had a strange dream there. again. My family and I was running away from a group of men (yes...again with the running away.) We were hungry so we stopped at a restaurant, but it  was a medical-themed one, and we ordered like...chicken fingers with bandage raps in it. After that there was a clay station, and I made a miniature of Margaret's head, as well as a miniature of a head of some random girl that was sitting next to me. Next we covered it in latex, to get an imprint, filled it with plaster, and took the final plaster model home (I guess we could paint on it with normal paint instead of glaze that way.)

When I woke up I felt cheated because I had spent all that time making the clay model and woke up and had nothing to show for it.

Pasha and Sanya came the day before and are leaving tomorrow, we just watched generation p with them, and during the day went to my favorite boardwalk by blue hill.

We Dressed Up

Me as a Weird Sister (male band, played at the Yule Ball. Lots of eyeliner, even across the nose and lips, fake leather pants. They are described as hairy but..em...)
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Simona as Belatrix (sexy, insane, and bloodlustful, with the darkmark on her arm in eyeliner. fishnets. When walking to the Harvard theater, some guys sitting on a bench were like...hello pretty ladies. I think it's because of her)
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Yulka as Umbridge (hehEE, trying to get up to power and twisted.Yulka doesn't look anything like a pig, even in pink. Simona and her commented on people who weren't dressed up as filthy muggles)
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Veta as Luna Lovegood (We helped her make glasses that look like this, and she had a cork necklace and Ravenclaw colored tie)
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Valya as Proffessor Trelawney (like...gypsy hippie, lots of jewelry, long skirt, and holding an apple as a fortune telling ball)

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Valya got froyo, the rest of us got bubble tea while we waited in line for a while, but it didn't seem too long, and we sat inside and it was hot there too, but the movie was really funny and cheesy and lots of special effect and just ridiculous. Do we really need Harry and Ron to be changing while the camera flies around to get all angles? Really? the entire hall was laughing because it was so unnecessary. And, as usual, half (well, I guess a forth, in this case) of the book is missing, but nobody really expects otherwise, I don't think. 

scabior looks like tim minchin, mostly just the hair and eye makeup, but still.

Harry Potter Marathon

I'm at Yulka's. We've been Harry Potter marathoning. Right now we just finished the 5th one, and I was over a couple days ago and we watched 1 at her house, and then went over to Max T's and watched 2-4.  I'd only seen the 1st one before this week, but I'm going to the premier of the last one on thursday so...

and we were aimlessly on the computer, deciding weather or not to continue, and it devolved to this-us poking eachother on fb, and her going on here and being like, nope, nothing to look at.

so yes, vengeance!

{i just said that the smell of old books is a cliche. response: I think you're a cliche. clearly our brains are at peak function right now, brilliant come-backs and all}

(I also hung out with Max from my school and Jack from college/Yulka's town. I went to the decordava with the first and just...made cucumber sandwiches and talked with the 2nd.)

I also saved a frog. I've been living in the basement, and it used to be a bomb shelter (made during the cold war and all.) But there is a window (which we enlarged) and is slightly underground. The frog was jumping out of the ditch but it was too high. I tried to find it the next day but couldn't. Then I slept over at Yulka's for a night and then came back again the next day at 1am, only to hear it again. So I went outside and saved it from starving to death (this time I successfully found it.)

i know, terribly exciting. it's been miserably hot lately. more miserable because of the humidity than the heat. I walked my neighbor's son's dog today, I nearly died. And I mowed the lawn yesterday, and I nearly died then. Clearly, my life is just as dangerous as Yossarian's (I'm reading Catch 22, what can I say :))

Baxter State Park 2011

I've been going to Baxter almost every 4th of July weekend since I was two, and my parents decided to go camping. They thought all the green parts of the map would be campable, but most of it turned out to be paper mill land, and so they drove all the way to northern Maine until they hit Baxter, and we've been returning ever since.

Last time we got cabins, but we never make reservations, since the only way to make one is to go there, and early. The reservations can only start being made in January. Togo all the way up there in the winter to wait and then drive back is just not realistic. Sometimes it means moving around a lot. This time we got a lean-to for a couple of days.

A thing about lean-to's: they are great when its raining, but when its not, they mean lots of bugs. Mosquitoes, gnats, horse flies. Tent+lean-to combination works well though, though our tent barely fit.

I don't know why, but this time we were simply exhausted most of the time we were there. Kept waking up in the middle of the night, but by evening we would wake up...

The people in the lean-to next to us seemed to eat, drink and collect wood all day, but they went to bed pretty early and got up early too. They spent part of the days building a raised rock-bridge in the river in front of us to get to all the dead logs across it. It was funny watching them walk across it when they were drunk, attempting to keep balance and not fall in. They kept a crate full of beer in the river as well (very effective cooling mechanism, though Mama said it was a standard way, but I was impressed.) They tried opening wine bottles by putting them in shoes and slamming them against trees. When Папа offered a bottle opener they said "No thankyou! we are having fun!"
We came home on the 4th, and watched Independence Day :P.

Yosef wasn't with us, which was weird. He left to Israel with Бабушка (she lives there), as a barmitzvah-esk present, except that he isn't actually having any ceremony.  He was complaining that this summer was going to be like all others, so we sent him off. He hasn't really been in contact, except for the first night when he was being plagued by jetlag. Hopefully he's enjoying himself now.

(Shimon pouring sweetened condensed milk over buckwheat in the morning)