TheCapeBlog

Trifecta this past weekend, all three grandkids stayed over on Saturday, into Sunday evening.
They got to swim in the across-the-street neighbor’s pool and play with the next door neighbors’ two boys.
In the meantime, we completed a couple of rounds of croquet and had a cookout, pretty much staying close to home.
The tears when the ice cream man failed to show up on Sunday afternoon turned to smiles of delight when we stopped at a local convenience store and got the same treats, for probably half the cost.

Continue reading Swimming Pool, Cookout, Croquet – Sunday with the Grandkids

My son Peter is a thirty-something great. He has a bio the length of your arm, including numerous publications and maybe a speaking engagement or two.
He’s well known in his professional circle and perhaps by the time he’s our age, could be one of those craggy savants with multiple addresses.
He already lives on Cape Cod, so all and he and his wife have to do is acquire a second residence somewhere else. That’s not the usual order of things, but it could work, and the way the prices are around here, they’ve already passed the toughest hurdle.

Continue reading So, Why Aren’t We Great?

I live in a neighborhood of people who have serious problems with alcohol.
That wouldn’t be so bad if it were the Noel Coward variety, but my neighbors are neither witty nor urbane nor even kind when they drink. At this hour – 10:37 on a Sunday night – they are still making enough noise to raise the dead.
So, when I found out that there were going to be not one, but two parties this weekend, I decided to get the hell out of Dodge.

Continue reading Great Escape

One of the long-term neighbors (the description is relative, Cape Cod is a high-transition area) are on their way to what they hope will be a better life in Houston.
I’m returning to the world of regular employment in exactly two weeks.
Seems like change is hammering its way through the hot, muggy August air.

Continue reading Onward and Onward

I’m glad I’m not Condoleeza Rice. The matters I deal with consume enough energy that I can’t imagine having the fate of the world as a daily concern.

Continue reading Sunday Musings

Summer is holding us tightly in its hot, drippy claws.
I’m over my annual disconsolation that the county fair is almost over, the fleeting, melancholy event that leaves its participants exhausted and the neighbors longing for normalcy.

Continue reading Various

Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of “House”, in which putting patients into a coma and causing them to feel extreme pain are standard diagnostic tools, but I’m getting even more paranoid about things medical.
So, when the local news reported that the sins of being overweight include making it tough to read X-rays, I computed my BMI.

Continue reading BMI

Last night, I participated in a history walk which was a delight save the presence of a couple of the worst kind of tourons – the kind who currently live off-Cape, but whirl their “we grew up here” territoriality around like a spiked mace.

I must have heard that stupid phrase at least a dozen times in the course of 90 minutes.

I’ll take 15 tourists from New York to one such inarticulate, defensive, inbred jingoist any day.

In fact, at one point this summer, I was so fed up with these yokel types that I planted myself at “New Yorkers on vacation” central, the Popponessett marketplace, just for a welcome breath of civility.

I have one message for the bumptious couple who I had the misfortune to encounter last night: I live here. You don’t. I vote and pay taxes here. You never have. So take your ignorant, backwater, “Southie (or in this case, Bourne) is my home town” attitude and shove it up your basses.

There was supposed to be a nature walk at the Childs River Conservation Area less than one minute from my house; until today, I’d not known it was there.

The walk must have been cancelled, but I got to do a little off-roading this morning, heading southwest on well-packed dirt roads until I reached asphalt again in Waquoit.
There wasn’t much to see, woods and old bogs, but I located another spot that’s supposed to have good trout fishing for Bob and me, the Quashnet River Area on Martin Road off Falmouth Road.

Continue reading Into the Woods

In a page with banner ads “Still caught in the cycle of depression?” and “Find a Therapist Near You” is an old (July/August 2001, but reviewed in May of this year) article entitled “Why I Hate Beauty“.

It explains something I’ve suspected about Cape Cod employers but have never seen documented, i.e., why young, attractive people ALWAYS get hired, regardless of the job and their qualifications.

This is a tourist area and as a result, a slew of college students descend every summer to take low-paying jobs in restaurants, stores and motels, simply to be able to “hang out” with their pals on the Cape.

Being surrounded by these people, even for only part of the year, employers have developed a sense of ENTITLEMENT: they only want to see the young, the fit, the good-looking in their places of business.
It’s a fact. The psychologists say so. And to bring home the point, they even advertise their services to those of us who are depressed because we don’t fit the bill.

So, THERE.