I'm back!

A thousand apologies for the long absence.  I had to take a trip to Florida for a very dear friend's wedding, and my alter ego had to make a week-long stop in Virginia.  When I got back, there were a million things to take care of, and the weather has made sure that our internet connection has been spotty.

I know.  Excuses, excuses.

There isn't much new going on up here at Camp, so I'll just do a quick round-up of interesting stuff.

First off, I finally got the new date for my guide's license oral exam.  I have until July 21 to do all the studying I'm going to do.  At 4:00 that afternoon, I'll be standing in front of a table of experts down in Augusta sweating bullets while trying to sound calm, collected, and knowledgeable.  (I'm going to hope for the best but prepare for the worst; that tactic usually seems to work pretty well.)

Our weather has been wet, wet, and more wet.  We've had plenty of sunny days, but when it rains, it pours.  This afternoon, right after I snapped the picture below, we got about an inch in fifteen minutes.  Before and after, the weather was great.  I've run the trail around Island Pond a couple of times since I got back from Virginia, and it's like training for a triathlon- half the time, I'm running, and the other half, I may as well be swimming.  Unfortunately, we did get a perfect storm of cloudy days and mountains of laundry last week, and we had to turn the generator on for a few hours to get everything done.  (All told, though, turning it on once a month isn't too bad!)

We did have an interesting phenomenon the other day that I can't yet explain.  Sunday morning, we looked out the front window of the lodge to see seven goldeneye ducks flying around one of the large pine trees on the other side of the pond.  I was surprised, since I hadn't seen more than the one pair of goldeneyes all spring; I'm not sure where the rest came from.  They took turns perching in the tree and examining/entering a cavity about 40 feet up.  Goldeneyes are tree-nesters, so we first assumed there must be a predator going after the eggs/ducklings, but we didn't see anything else emerge from the cavity.  Then we thought that maybe the ducklings were getting ready to take their first big leap of faith, but we didn't see any ducklings emerge, either.  The flock of adults flew around for a solid hour without any indication that anything else was going on, so if we see ducklings in the near future, I'll be sure to post pictures.  Otherwise, it'll just remain a mystery.

So that's the scoop on my extended absence; I'll try to get back into the swing of the blog now!  It's good to be back.