Weekend

As in, “The Weekend is too short.” But you know that. Finally, alone among weekends this year, this one included some canoeing. The Hudson hasn’t been much below flood stage since it thawed, and with everything else going on, the canoes took a back seat this year. But we finally got out this afternoon. Problem? The water was so low at Peebles Island that we had to muck out into the quicksand to launch the boat. Then we paddled upstream on the Mohawk below the dams, and suddenly the current was so strong that we couldn’t even get up it. We spun around and went back out to the Hudson for a while, and when we came back the river had risen considerably. Odd. But a beautiful day to be out on the water.

Yesterday was a 7-year-old’s birthday party at a town beach, which was very nice. The lake was massively warm and dangerously turbid. I snuck in a nice two-hour bike ride with some killer climbs. I don’t think I went 20 miles, and about 4 of them were on dirt-and-gravel roads. Know what works well on dirt-and-gravel roads? NOT MY BIKE!! A perfect September day, plunked down in late August.

My CD player knows it’s a year old, almost precisely, because it was making an alarming noise before. We found all the warranty information and everything else and were preparing to open fire on the people of Harmon-Kardon so hard they wouldn’t know what hit them. Then, just because, I tried the time-honored repair of hitting the appliance. No more alarming noise. Now I almost wish it hadn’t worked, because if it ever comes back, it’ll be post-warranty. But if I take it in now, they won’t be able to find anything wrong. (Like my truck, which has a squealing noise that is annoying deaf people, but which the mechanics can’t seem to hear.)