Today was our last day to prepare for our trip to the Adirondack Mountains and the Bedlam Farm Open House. This morning was off to a less than auspicious start when I woke up way earlier than I should have and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Usually, my first thought on waking up in the morning is “Yay! It’s coffee time again!” I had the same thought this morning, just at a slightly less enthusiastic volume. But in my attempt to compensate for several hours of lost sleep, I overdosed a little. After bouncing around the city of Indianapolis as if on an invisible pogo stick for several hours this afternoon, I crashed, and fell asleep this afternoon when I should have been packing. So when I finally woke up, I got right to it. I walked to Sean’s room and gave him his instructions: “Please find seven pairs of socks. You can probably locate most of them in that bag over there that we never unpacked from the Florida trip two months ago.”
Travis is the Gear Master in this house. I would also say that he’s also the only one with any sense of organization, but that’s not exactly true. Usually his spaces are completely chaotic, in a way that only he understands, and that just makes me shudder. But not The Gear. The Gear is organized. So he packs it.
Shortly after I took this photo, the dog made his way in a leisurely fashion upstairs to dine furtively on the contents of the garbage bag that Sean filled this week while cleaning out the guinea pig cage. In an act of post-snack revelry, he liberally festooned the hallway with strips of toilet paper from the same bag. The entire scene had a kind of celebratory air to it. Since Sean had found his seven pairs of socks by then, and was also the one who left the garbage bag in the bathroom, I called him to take care of it. He got a little upset with me, but not for asking him to clean it up; he was upset that I called Thomas an assmunch. “Mom, he’s not an assmunch. You’re always telling me that everyone is human and makes mistakes. He just made a mistake.” Fair enough.
Meanwhile, Deryk, Travis’s almost-seventeen year old son (his birthday is the day of the Open House), had been sent out for peach tea. This is one of the benefits of a teenager with a driver’s license. They can run errands. A few minutes after I retired to my sewing room to hide, he appeared in the doorway with a not-quite-full cup of peach tea for me. “I got a little thirsty on the way back,” he apologized.
You might legitimately be wondering what I am doing, other than photographing everyone else working. I am: doing laundry, packing clothing and other objects, making a list of what to get at the Target near Utica, gathering food and allergy meds, and photographing everyone else working. But most importantly, I’m making coffee for the trip. Because we’re canoeing, I’m making cold-brew coffee extract. I’ll strain the grounds off tomorrow and put the extract into a Nalgene bottle. We will add it to boiling water in the mornings, and I will try not to overdose.
