I keep walking across the lawn to the beach and back to the house, and thinking of the little cues that make the season into summer. It’s a only few hundred feet of open lawn, but it’s easy to fall into the moment and forget everything else as you walk across it. There’s the subtle smell of grass cut the day before, a few bumblebees browsing the flowers, a fresh breeze, sun setting over the Adirondack Mountains, the hum of a motorboat miles out on the broad lake …

… and thoughts of a ride on the boat to a distant sandbar, perhaps group whiffleball or Frisbee game on the lawn, dinner on the beach by the Tiki Bar … ice cream in the humid evening with fireflies blinking outside. These are a few of the sensations of a northern summer. I’m endlessly grateful that we have the Airstream to enable us to spend summers here.

Of course, for some of us the sensations of summer is completely different. Emma discovered the teeter-totter here at our new campsite and enjoyed the sensation of being popped up in the air with me halfway down the other end.

Saturday is the day for Farmer’s Markets all over the state. We’ve got three we go to: Vergennes, Shelburne, and Burlington. There will probably be an article on the subject in the Spring 2008 issue of Airstream Life, so I stopped by this weekend to snap a few photos for it. I want to drop in on Burlington’s on the next nice Saturday. There’s a local cheesemaker there who has fabulous blue cheese and I can’t get it anywhere else.

The one downside of summer is that our labors at the storage unit continue. Let this be a lesson to those who acquire too much “stuff”. Getting rid of it is much harder than you might think. Fortunately, we sold all the living room furniture this weekend and were able to get people to pick up several boxes of stuff, thanks to Freecycle. After two summers of effort, I think we are finally approaching the end of the project. We should be ready to bring in the movers in a couple of weeks.

I have partially resolved the Internet problem here at the campground. My repeater is bringing the signal into the trailer, but the distance between the source and the repeater is so great that the connection is fragile. If anyone in the area uses their microwave oven, we get knocked offline. A whole bunch of common wireless devices share or contribute interference to the same frequency band as wi-fi, including 2.4 GHz cordless phones, Bluetooth-capable devices, and microwave ovens.

The solution would be a second repeater to cut down the distance and thus strengthen the signal, but I don’t have one handy. I’m still playing with ways to enhance the signal and hope to have a more workable solution soon. In the meantime, the connection I have is adequate for most tasks. If I really need super-fast and reliable Internet, I can head over to my parent’s house on the lake to borrow their connection, and get another taste of summer while I’m at it.