here I am, in the rain

We're in gorgeous scenic Ogunquit, Maine, near the beach and the Marginal Way and Perkins Cove and no end of scenic wonders, and it's POURING FUCKING RAIN and we're holed up in our hotel room eating salt water taffy (I've had so much sugar I feel ill) and watching cable TV. We tried a tapas restaurant, which we found rather disappointing, and I left a note for the chef explaining how to make a tortilla a la espanola.

Thank God we could change our room. The original room we saw overlooked Route 1, and it turns out that watching stop-and-go traffic inch along is almost as stressful as being in stop-and-go traffic. This room faces some maintenance sheds, a small lawn, and a few flowers and trees. MUCH BETTER.

We spent the last couple of days visiting my aunt and uncle up in Embden, Maine, which was really pretty fucking delightful apart from getting horrifically lost on the way up, in rural areas where we had no celphone coverage. I stopped to try to get a giant snapping turtle out of the road, which was a failure. That turtle wasn't going to budge unless it were to take a hunk of meat out of me. I have been trained to calm animals by throwing a towel over them and quickly and efficiently wrapping them up, and I imagined if I threw a big towel over this turtle, it would pull into its shell, I'd move it off the road, and then perhaps it would lick my hand in gratitude and turn its head over its shelly shoulder to watch me depart. Instead, as I tried to throw the towel over it, it lunged drastically and bit at the towel. I changed tactics and tried, toreador style, to lure it off the road. Around this time the Sober Husband's celphone suddenly got a few seconds of coverage, and my worried aunt called, who had expected us hours before. The Sober Husband described what was going on, as I performed my towel dance with the turtle, and my aunt told him to get me to walk away from the dangerous snapping turtle. However, the celphone coverage vanished before he could get better directions.

The subject of directions was a sensitive one, as the Sober Husband felt the emailed directions were a bit inadequate and I'd cautioned him against seeking directions from the locals. "They see that Mass plate" on the rental car I said, "and they'll think you're a Masshole. They're gonna give you the wrong directions."

Finally we found a store with a payphone, difficult as that was, and arranged for my uncle to meet us and show us how to reach his vacation home. After a day spent largely cooped up in the car, with the stress of being lost in remote central Maine, we finally arrived, where we were feted properly. The grown-ups ended up staying up late and getting quite drunk.

The next day my uncle introduced us to the joys of ATV riding. I was a complete loser at this (despite arguably being the best car driver), driving into a tree and losing my nerve. The Sober Husband, however, took to it fairly quickly. He ended up going on an hours long off-road trail ride (after a few bourbons) with my uncle and niece, including quite a lot of riding through deepish water. He came back elated and wired.

We also had a giant lobster feast. I explained to Iris Uber Alles that a lobster is an insect and that I didn't consider eating a lobster different than her swatting a fly (and Iris Uber Alles was indeed vengefully hunting flies with an electric flyswatter in Maine). This rationalization was promptly rejected by Iris and Lucy, who refused to taste the lobsters. "I just can't see why you want to sit around EATING CORPSES," Iris said caustically in the midst of our meal. (I am often criticized for raising my children as vegetarians, but no one ever seems to realize that I am not the alpha vegetarian in my home. I am the delta vegetarian at best, but at least I rank ahead of the Sober Husband, who actually eats dead mammals on a fairly regular basis).

"We're going to turn these girls into little rednecks", said my uncle, and the girls are indeed ready to move to rural Maine, aside from the lobster-eating. "But how can I go to the School of the Arts if I move to Maine?" Iris puzzled. "Life is full of compromises," I said unhelpfully.

If only it would stop raining, how happy I would be. Tomorrow we'll be attempting to enjoy scenic Ogunquit and hopefully meet up with an old friend of mine from junior high and high school. Five year-old Lucy keeps showing me on the iPhone how the weather is sunny and warm on the West Coast. "You're killing your mother with that thing, killing her," I said.