2025 Life Logs, Day 204: A Visit to Woods Hole
Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 74, Low 53 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Ollie and I did one of my favorite things today. We spent part of our day in Woods Hole. Ollie is interested in building boats, so we went to visit the Woods Hole Historical Museum which has a boat shop. When went to the marine sale at the museum in the spring, a woman overheard Ollie talking to Jed about converting a kayak to a sailing kayak and she invited Ollie to come to the shop during the summer to watch people working on boats. But we really had no idea what that meant. Now we do. A very helpful young woman in the museum took us out to the boat shop for a tour and explained that a group of people meet on Saturday mornings and on Tuesday evenings to work on boat projects. And anyone is invited to come watch and participate. I don’t know if Ollie can go on Saturday of this week, but hopefully I can get him there on Tuesday evenings. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity.

While in Woods Hole, we both decided we just had to visit the aquarium. From 2012 to 2017, I visited the aquarium often with the boys to watch Bumper and LuSeal at feeding time. Those two seals lived at the aquarium for years, but then both died just weeks apart in 2017. I cannot believe that I haven’t been back to the aquarium since they got two new seals in 2022. One of them, Kitt, died. But Bubba is still there, and Ollie and I enjoyed seeing him.

After watching him frolic, we went into the aquarium. The displays have changed since I was last there. I love that they now have a couple of tanks dedicated to octopuses.

After touring the aquarium, Ollie and I walked out on the dock to look at the boats in the harbor. It was a wonderful Woods Hole visit.

At the end of the day, I headed to Hyannis to buy something Coco requested for her birthday. And when I returned home, my new (renewed) Google Pixel 6 phone was sitting at my door. My old phone was not charging and when I took it into the phone repair shop, I was told I needed a new charging port for $75. The port costs $7, but the additional $68 is for installation. But then Sam noticed that my battery was swollen and said I had to buy a new phone as a swollen battery is a fire hazard. He found the renewed Google Pixel for a good price and ordered it for me. Tonight, he and Heather got me up and running on the new phone. Thank you, Heather and Sam.

2025 Life Logs, Day 203: Another Case of Medical Ping Pong
Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 74, Low 59 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Yesterday’s focus was the back and forth on whether or not I have Lyme disease. Today it was Shadow’s turn. On June 30th, I took Shadow to the vet to check out what looked like a little growth just above his eye. The vet I saw tried to convince me that the growth was caused by allergies to his food. I just couldn’t buy that and did not switch his food as it took nearly two years to find a food that a dog with colitis can handle. But the growth has gotten much bigger, so I made another appointment. The vet I saw today said Shadow needs surgery to remove the cyst and that she doesn’t think the cyst has anything to do with an allergy. Same office, different veterinarian. The surgery will cost well over $1,200, so I left the office without scheduling. I have to give this some serious thought as I really don’t have the extra $1,200. The car ‘doctor’ told me this month that my car needs a new oxygen sensor at a cost of $350. So, I’m already driving around with a car with the check engine light on continuously. I was hoping to get that done in August, but now that will have to wait indefinitely. Shadow’s doctor appointments and medications for just the two appointments, one in June and one today, have already cost me more than $500. I sure wish money grew on trees!
After an appointment at the bank this morning to meet with the financial advisor for the Board of Library Trustee’s investment fund, and then Shadow’s vet appointment, I had a delightful lunch to celebrate the birthday of a friend. Then I was off with Ollie and his friend Seton for an afternoon of mini golf, bumper car rides, and ice cream at Somerset Creamery.

2025 Life Logs, Day 202: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t
Date: Monday, July 21, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny; High Temp 80, Low 56 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Last week I was told I tested positive for Lyme disease. Today I was told that, yes, I tested positive for Lyme disease, but when they ran the complete panel of subtests, actually I don’t have Lyme disease. This is very confusing and took much of my day talking to the doctor at the Urgent Care that ordered the tick panel, talking to nurses who called to confirm prescriptions, to confirm my afternoon telemed appointment with my PCP, and to do a pre-meeting interview, and then talking to my PCP via Zoom. One doctor prescribed more doxycycline, then the next doctor cancelled it. Then that doctor called back and added four more days of meds. The really confusing part of this is that I had a tick panel done in 2022 and had the exact same results. I have much to learn, but for now we are going with the ‘no Lyme’ diagnosis and will follow up in September with yet another tick panel. Whew!
I also had to call Shadow’s vet for an appointment. The strange growth above his eye that was diagnosed two weeks ago as being caused by food allergies has gotten significantly bigger over the past few days and is oozing a bloody fluid. I do not believe this was caused by a food allergy, and I will fight that battle tomorrow.

Before lunch, I went over to check in on Ollie. He was making jewelry and quite content to stay in his room to do this. But it was a beautiful day and I needed to get him outside. We came to my house and had a lovely lunch out on the firepit deck. The ‘firepit’ is a fire pit stove that happens to be square. We put a tablecloth over it and enjoyed our lunch. Then Ollie went across the street to cut the neighbor’s lawn, and I went inside for my telemed Zoom call. After that, Ollie did some much needed trimming and weeding in the garden off the back deck. Our next chore was to find a hitch and ball to attach to my car so we can haul Ollie’s Sunfish. That was it for today and tomorrow we have plans to play mini golf.

The weather today was beautiful. Yesterday I turned off the AC but still needed fans. Tonight, it is so cool that I had to turn off the fans and close some windows. The temp today was 80, but without humidity, it didn’t feel hot at all. And tonight, it going down to 55 degrees F. It is 62 right now and I feel chilly! But warm, sunny days and cool nights make for perfect summer weather.

2025 Life Logs, Day 201: Learning Day
Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025
Weather: Overcast with Dibble Dobs, Tiny Bit of Sunshine PM; High Temp 77, Low 66 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

My day was dedicated to the first attempts at producing financial reports using Excel for the Board of Library Trustees. I have gotten a couple of tutorials from friends, but today I tried to put what I have learned into action. I made huge progress, but it was very, very slow going. I now have a long list of questions. Once I get the answers to those questions, one more day like today should get the reports done. My hope is that after I do this once, it will be easy to produce future quarterly reports. I worked until 7:15 tonight and then went to Heather and Jed’s for a family dinner. It was a quiet Sunday, but quiet days are good once in a while.

2025 Life Logs, Day 200: Ollie’s ASLP Graduation
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 77, Low 69 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I can’t keep up with my family. All in one day, we are scattered here and there. Heather, Jed, and I went to Mass Maritime for Ollie’s graduation from their two-week summer college-like residential experience. It is called Advanced Studies & Leadership (ASLP) and is for 7th and 8th graders from the Cape and Islands. Ollie loved it and hopes to go for a second-year next summer to try and win one of the scholarships to Mass Maritime. Ollie’s team won the boat building and race contest and became very close with their counselor, a cadet at Mass Maritime. The rooms were typical dorm rooms, but his had a view of the canal.

I asked him if he was really interested in going to Mass Maritime after high school and he responded with an enthusiastic YES! It could be a good fit for him. Right now, he is just excited because he had such a positive experience. But the prospect of a college scholarship excited him even more.

I came home and went to the Saturday Freedom Rally on the Green. Sam and Jonah were both working at Corner Cycle today, and Heather and Jed went to work on the boat. Tonight Heather and Jed took Jonah to see the Trombone Shorty at the Melody tent in Hyannis. This was part of his birthday present from Grammy Marti. And after Ollie got home from camp, he went boating with his good friend Seton and family and didn’t get home until 9:30 pm. That left just Sam and I at home to have dinner together before he took off for the evening. Sam experimented with salt brining steaks that he then grilled. We had steak, salad from Heather’s deck garden, and the best corn on the cob I have had in a very long time.

Then there is the crew in Puerto Rico. Justin and Ziggy took off on Friday evening for Lake Guajataca for a weekend canoeing adventure. I sent a “Have a Great Time” text to Ziggy and that got us into a back forth texting adventure. He sent photos of the lake when they arrived, breakfast the next morning, and even a bird that we identified together. He thinks it was a moorhen. Fom the photos, I thought it was a juvenile black-bellied whistling duck. But regardless, how much fun it was to communicate back and forth.

2025 Life Logs, Day 199: Mingle and Mix at the Woodin’s
Date: Friday, July 18, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny; High Temp 80, Low 61 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I spent my morning getting a little Excel tutorial from my friend Sue Gilbert. And while I was at her house, I got to meet Brian and Nadia’s new baby, Sequoia. She was a preemie, but now at four months, she has caught up. And what a beautiful four-month-old!

Then this afternoon, I headed to Bruce and Jane Woodin’s for an Encore Mingle and Mix. We gathered at 5 pm and enjoyed the summer evening together on the Woodin’s deck, with some escapees who sat out on the lawn. It was a lovely evening. Thank you to Bruce and Jane.

2025 Life Logs, Day 198: One Million Rising, Making Good Trouble, Lyme Disease
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny; High Temp 80, Low 69 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

One Million Rising, Making Good Trouble, and Lyme Disease … What do these things have in common? The answer is me. I attended the One Million Rising Zoom class last night, I went to the Making Good Trouble rally at the Bourne Bridge rotary late afternoon today, and this morning I found out that the inevitable finally happened. I tested positive for Lyme disease.

I’ll start with the bad news first. I live on Cape Cod where the chances of getting Lyme disease are extremely high. I have a dog that is protected against Lyme, but who probably carries little tick friends into the house all the time. I try to be careful, but I don’t use any tick repellent. So I finally have Lyme disease. Last Thursday, I discovered a tick attached to my lower abdomen area. The next day I discovered two huge red circles on my upper leg and lower abdomen where I had removed the tick. I went to Urgent Care on Friday afternoon and since I had been in one month prior with another tick ‘incident’, they decided it was time to do a tick panel. This is a blood test that shows what tick borne disease you might have. The final results are not in yet, but I tested negative for everything except Borrelia, common called Lyme disease. I have been on doxycycline since last Friday and will find out next steps once the full panel results are in.

Last night I joined 20,000 people on a Zoom call and another 80,000 on YouTube and other streaming options for the first of three classes to teach us how to build the number of people actively resisting what is happening to our democracy. It is called One Million Rising and is sponsored by Indivisible. More than 5,000 of us that watched last night pledged to hold face-to-face training meetings in our towns. The next class is on the 30th and then I’ll be ready to host classes here in Falmouth.

This afternoon I tuned into the weekly Indivisible Zoom meeting which included a guest speaker, Erica Chenowith. She is an American political scientist, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a brilliant strategist. She says the first step in getting the whole of society working towards democracy is to figure out how to get people to show up. Like other experts I hear, she says building the ranks with people who are willing to show up is the first step. How we do that is through initiatives like One Million Rising.

And then this evening, I showed up. I went to a Good Trouble rally at the Bourne Bridge rotary. I’ll talk more about that in tomorrow’s log.

2025 Life Logs, Day 197: A Trip or Two to Mattapoisett
Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny, AC Weather; High Temp 79, Low 72 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I was not going to confess, but I made two trips to Mattapoisett today. One to get the pin that I got shortened a couple of weeks ago cut to even shorter. And a second trip to get something I left in Peter’s shop. Thankfully there was no traffic.

Peter the is the man I met this spring that helped me with my search for a boom for Ardenna and who ‘mended’ the spreader that had split, and then shortened a pin needed to attach the new boom to Ardenna’s mast. He did exactly what he was asked to do the first time, but when Heather and Jed got the piece attached to the mast, the pin was still too long. Today, as per Jed’s directions, I asked Peter to cut off the equivalent length of 7 washers stacked one on top of the other and redrill a hole in the pin near the bottom. He then proceeded to show me how to measure those lengths with two different kinds of calipers.

I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but I really enjoyed learning about all of the different pieces of equipment while chatting with Peter about the state of the world.

Peter and his wife Jody finally got their sailboat in the water since the last time I was there. It is on a mooring in Mattapoisett Harbor. Peter reported that they ride their bikes to the harbor, sail or row their dinghy out to the boat, and never use the motor, not even to get off the mooring. Hard core sailors and environment advocates!

I returned home to a very hot house. We are once again having weather that requires air conditioning to be comfortable. So, I caved and turned on the little window air conditioner again.

2025 Life Logs, Day 196: Truth Brigade Indivisible
Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny, Warmer; High Temp 79, Low 69 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Today I discovered a ne part of Indivisible, the Indivisible Truth Brigade that I want to share with you. If you want to learn more, just go to https://indivisible.org/campaign/truth-brigade
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What is the Indivisible Truth Brigade?
We are an ever-growing community of grassroots truth-tellers who effectively disrupt the flow of disinformation and misinformation online and offline. We do this by strategically writing and sharing powerful, personal, and unified counter-messages to the most damaging and destabilizing lies. We track our impact, learn, make adjustments and do it again–and again–together, to reclaim a civil society built on the shared value of the pursuit of objective truths.
I loved today’s Truth Brigade message:

DISSENT is Patriotic when …
Voices are silenced.
Neighbors are vilified.
Immigrants are dehumanized.
When science is attacked.
When war is reckless.

The weather once again defied the forecast of partly cloudy. It was another gloriously sunny afternoon. I spent most of the afternoon in an Encore meeting, but before and after, I was outside with Shadow.

2025 Life Logs, Day 195: Lost One, Gained One
Date: Monday, July 14, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny, Warmer; High Temp 76, Low 70 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Early this morning, I drove Claire to the Sagamore Park ‘n Ride to catch the bus to Boston Logan. She was flying to Toronto to spend the next four weeks with her parents who live in the city. Her only sibling, a sister, moved to Toronto with her family last summer, so Claire will be spending time with them as well before returning to Mexico. Kevin stayed in Mexico to work on the boat this summer. I truly missed getting my yearly dose of Kevin, but hopefully they will both be back next year. I consider Kevin and Claire a part of my extended family. It was wonderful having Claire for a few days, but at 8:35 am this morning when she got on that bus, I lost one family member for now.

But then tonight, I gained back one family member when Sam arrived home from his European adventure. He, along with friends Robert and Ethan, left 21 days ago. Jonah and I were the only ones home when he arrived tonight as Heather and Jed were both at meetings. It was so great to see him.

He was excited and talked non-stop to Jonah and I for almost an hour telling us some of the highlights of the trip. I can’t wait to hear more.