vermont holiday blog entry part la seconde

Nice friend's family's holiday house is totally fabuloso - rambling creaky 90 year old country house with enormous lawns rolling down to the lake, with a rickety little dock that I swam off every day except the first (because the hurricane was still going on, so instead we sat inside and drank wine and played "Loaded Questions" and sang kids' songs with the bambini gathered round the piano. it wasn't quite quite my ultrageeky fantasy of four part madrigals, but it came pretty close, AND I didn't even have to ask for it.) While overall the last few days were really fun, I will offer a variation on Sartre's famous dictum, that hell is other people's children, at least at night: an incubus possessed each of the children in turn at night, so after the first night, we didn't get an awful lot of sleep, whether it was S. (age two) throwing a two hour long shitfit about not wanting to go to bed, or I. screaming like a banshee at four a.m. "I HAVE TO GO PEE! I HAVE TO GO PEE! I HAVE TO GO PEE!" or, yes, even my own bundle of rapture failing to uphold her perfect reputation and deciding at midnight two nights in a row that somewhere there was a party going on, and dammit she wanted to be part of it. A. bless her was a good sleeper, but less competent on the urinary continence front, let's just leave it at that.

Three days of eating, cooking, swimming, sunbathing, reading my John Le Carre novel (which I have to admit I am a little bamboozled by; there are rafts of characters that I haven't been able to keep track of, and I am a little suspicious at this point in the book that he isn't keeping track of them either), and playing Loaded Questions. I will never be able to think about Rick Santorum in quite the same way again.... (those with a strong stomach can Google Dan Savage's attempt to redefine the words "Rick" and "Santorum," but you will likely regret it). The last two nights babydaddy (who, if anyone were in doubt about his serious machoness, stopped taking even ibuprofen a mere four days post-appendectomy) produced a magnificent barbecue dinner, and we had an oboe concert on the front porch as the sun set. What a good note to end a blog entry on....