Late Summer Odds n Ends

Lots of things never made the blog, but should have. So, this post is an attempt to clear out some of the items that have not made it here yet, but which should while summer is still upon us.

First, we attended our first ever Quniceanera, the Hispanic event where a girl's fifteenth birthday is celebrated in high style. This was the daughter of a former Pastor, and they came back to hold the event in the church. First, a ceremony, much like a wedding without a groom. There was a court of honor, 14 boys and 14 girls, dressed up like, well, check the picture up above. Then a service, with presentations of symbolic gifts. A dress - the adornment of a princess - a cross, a necklace, earrings, coins (prosperity, success in wealth as well as knowledge and skill), a scepter (authority and responsibility for her life), a doll (represents the last things a girl hands down to her younger sister - if she has one), high heeled shoes (becoming a young lady). After this, there's a waltz, starting with the Quinceanera and her dad, then the whole Court of Honor, several of whom got some quick box step lessons, I'm thinking.
And after all this, then the piece de resistance, to use the wrong language entirely. The celebratory meal - and it was wonderful.

It was pretty much fascinating to me. I mean, as far as I know, the big "rite of passage" for a "wasp" in the suburbs like me was getting that driver's license. I imagine this event is similar in some ways to the bar/bat mitzvah. It is kind of neat to spotlight someone and recognize her maturity and - if not full adulthood - at least her coming of age at a decade and a half.
Second, a couple afternoons at the beach. Ok, it's Lake Erie, and not Ocean City, but hey, the sun was out, it was hot and the water was plenty warm, you can't see the opposite shore, and the overall effect was close enough. There was the smell of SPF 30 in the air, the sound of 80's hits on the obligatory transistor radio about 30 feet away, kids excavating holes in the sand. It was great to do the whole beach experience for a day.

A friend of ours says people usually fall into one of two camps - you're either beach people or mountain people. I guess I tend toward the trails-into-the-woods type; that's what I really like. But I am married to a beach lover, so it's fine to hang out on the hot sand with her for a day or two.

I love how everyone in this picture is just sorta lost in their own thoughts about the beach,
or their place in the world, well, except maybe those two in the middle

The first week we went up there, we were hoping to see our son and three friends emerge at the mouth of the river. They had canoed down this river in segments and only had one small segment left, bringing them to a spot adjacent to the beach by nightfall in their estimation. Well, here's the hitch. They couldn't come up with a canoe this year, so they took paddles and inner tubes. This, plus the fact that as you approach the mouth of a river, you lose any semblance of a current, of which there wasn't much of one anyway, so these four guys on tubes, trying every technique they could think of, got nowhere. They got out after a couple hours, finding a house and some people who took them back to their car back upstream. Meanwhile, we waited, and I walked over to the cove where I expected them. At least I got a nice sunset to watch.

See any inner tubes? No. You do not.

The next week, we just went up to the beach without any stressful attempted rendezvous with our Lewis-and-Clark party.

And then, third, last night was BAT NIGHT. Sorry, I have no pictures. I was upstairs when I heard a scream from my spouse. Coming down to see what the big deal was, I found out a bat had buzzed her and she had shut it into the kitchen. I will use her description of the story. And reader beware: I think she may have been writing just a tad sarcastically about me and my contribution to the bat extraction at one point. Trust me when I say that holding the door is a very precise task demanding a rather sophisticated skill set. I have seen a case where a window is opened, a bat flies out, and another one flies IN. One must be ever at the ready, with the stealthy reaction time of a jaguar. Anyhow, her story:

Well, there is nothing like sitting at the computer in the evening and seeing a dark shadow pass by on the wall. Yep, a bat was flying around the dining room. I have no idea how it got in. I jumped up and it went into the kitchen so I quickly closed the door. I called for Ben and he decided to go out the front door, open the back door and hope that it would fly out.

Well, it didn't. So I put a clothes basket over my head, (I know. Great image there.) and cautiously went into the kitchen. I spied it hanging upside down from a cabinet above my stove. Groooossssss!!!! So I got a tennis racket and its holder and a flat board and sneaked up on it and trapped it in the space so as not to hurt if of course. It appeared to be sound asleep as it did not move at all. Then I had Ben slip the board under the racket. The thing didn't move or squeak until we nudged it onto the board. Then it fluttered and made a noise. We both jumped, but we did not lose our grip and kept him, the bat, sandwiched between the racket and board. And yes, of course, I did scream, but hey, at least I helped trap him.

So I took the bat and its racket outside, released the board and screamed again as the bat flew away, and I ran for the door, which my knight, Ben, was holding open for me. Whew! Not the way I wanted to end the night, but at least it's gone. And now I will be off to bed and hope not to dream or think about the thing. Ewwww