“What’s that on your shirt?” asked The Commander, squinting at me. Well, what *is* that on my shirt? I had been slogging around all morning, walking the beach with Ernie and Alfred, cooking breakfast stuff, sorting out the refrigerator, making a grocery list, going to Glen’s, chopping vegetables up for later, washing dishes and more dishes and more dishes, sweeping, taking out the garbage, sweeping, taking things off the clothesline and putting them back on again (in the intermittent little piddly bit of rain we were getting).

I looked at my shirt. It was comet. I remembered that it had splashed there when I was cleaning the sink. I grabbed a dishrag and scrubbed at the comet with soapy dish water.

“What’s that on the floor? How did it get wet?” asked The Commander. I said, “No Mom, it isn’t dog pee.” It was from the dishpan, which I had washed and put upside down in the dish drainer. The Commander came along and moved it underneath the sink and all the water that was stuck under the rim of the pan splashed all over the floor.

Then the “kids” started getting up and somebody said they couldn’t remember which bath towel was theirs. Okay. It was hot and humid and it smelled a little funky in the cabin and I really think it was the garbage that smelled that way, not the towels but I made an executive decision to do some emergency towel washing over at Radical Betty’s.

Ernie and I took the laundry over to Radical Betty’s and put a load in and we walked around the corner of the house along the path to the beach and suddenly there was a frantic buzzing around my right shoulder and a stinging sensation! I looked up and there was a big *wasp* nest! I kept on going to the beach and Radical Betty was down there talking to Sharon and they asked, “What’s that on your shirt?” I was about to say, “comet,” but then I looked down and it wasn’t comet. At least not mostly. There was still a little bit of comet but there was also a big wet spot where I had sloshed soapy dishwater. Okay, you guys, I’ve been slogging around all morning and I don’t give a rat’s patoot whether there is comet or a wet spot or mucus or whatever on my shirt and I don’t really care if there’s a little water on the floor in the kitchen. Dog pee I do not want but I know that’s not what it is.

So, finally I got the laundry done. Not that any of this wasn’t any fun, dontcha know. In all of my travels back and forth, I managed to fit a lot of socializing in. I got to talk to Radical Betty and Sharon and then walk the beach with Radical Betty, Alfred, Ernie, Bugs, and Horsey. Sandy and Mac had a toilet out on Don’s deck and they were fixing that and sorting out cosmic debris in general. And then there was a big consultation about the wasp nest. We think Ernie was also stung but both Ernie and I are doing fine.

So then, I was thinking it was about time to take a kayak ride but I decided to walk the boyz first and we encountered Brigid and Pat digging out what I thought were some big old rocks that belong to the old crib in front of the McNaughton cabins. Lo and behold, they were not digging out some random rocks. They were digging out The Cheerio!!! I have been wondering where The Cheerio went for probably 30 years now. It used to be in front of the Old Cabin and when I was a kid we played on it whenever we went swimming. I didn’t think we’d ever see it again. When I exclaimed, “You found The Cheerio, we used to play with that when we were kids!” Brigid replied with her typical response to anything a bit hard to believe, “Get out!”

I never did get to do much kayaking. Ominous clouds rolled in and the wind started coming out of the northwest and kicking up the water. I was about to get into the kayak anyway, thinking I’d just play around in the waves close enough to shore to swim in if I ditched. I got the kayak down into the water and I was about to get into it when I saw a sand spider scuttling around in there. I didn’t really want to share my ride with him, so I fiddly-diddled around for a while catching him and getting him out without squishing him. I got my boat into the water again and, *again* I was just about to get into it and this time, there was a little toady in it. Hoppity hop. Took a while to catch him too and once he hippity hopped down into the front end of the boat and I had to tip it up to about shoulder height to get him back down to the seat where I could catch him. By the time I got him out, the waves were big enough that I really needed a spray skirt, which I didn’t have, and after almost getting swamped a few times, I gave up and swam instead.

Just another day on the beach and, you guys, if I am slogging around in my kayak clothes, I probably don’t care if I have comet or soapy dishwater or mucus on my shirt. Blood or seagull poop I might want to know about. And between the dial-up and the mysterious beach wifi, I have struggled to no end to get this posted. Any typos or run-on sentences or sentence fragments, I probably do not want to know about. I’ll find ’em and fix ’em eventually.

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