“Woah. WOAH. Look.”

“What is that? An ostridge? An emu?”

“An emu I think.”

“Wow. Well, maybe we can stop there on our way back to town, get a better look. Hey, they even sell fresh eggs there.”

“What? Emu eggs?”

“Um, no. Chicken eggs.”

“Oh, ok, because you could, like, make a whole omelette out of an emu egg, and that would be gross.”

“Yeah. That’s why people don’t sell those.”

“Ok.”

“Ok.”

Yesterday morning, after an infuriating battle with the airlines, which I’ll get to in a later post, J arrived - 10 hours after he was supposed to - at 8 a.m. in Manchester, a three-hour drive from the house. I woke up at 5 a.m. to go get him, and when I got downstairs, the entire house asleep, found a folded piece of notebook paper stuck in the front door. It said something like:

Cara Maria -

Wake me when you rock. I would love to be there when J arrives. Just know that I will sleep most of the time in the car.

Love,
Max

PS - I’m serious

I smiled and went back upstairs and into the master bedroom closet, where Max sleeps. Since waking him is no easy task, I put my heart and soul into shaking him, patting his head, saying his name over and over, until he finally turned to me (after I’d ask just one last time: “You wrote here that you wanted to come, do you want to come?”) and said, firmly, “No,” then turned over and closed his eyes again.

Luckily, besides being tired, the ride wasn’t bad. Driving through the quiet town at daybreak was, in fact, a lovely experience. The closed shops. The empty roads. Boats anchored in the harbor. I was glad we’re north enough that the sun rises early because I’m reading “Off Season,” a thriller by Jack Ketchum, and the first scene is of a woman driving down the Maine coast and then nearly getting beaten to death by a pack of cannibal children.

After the long drive, a few cups of coffee and filling up the tank I was reunited with J, who took a little nap and read some Stephen King on the way back until we arrived in Boothbay Harbor where he was greeted by all our friends. Naturally, it was only minutes before I’d lost him to the birds. I spotted him out on the rocks, field guide and binoculars in hand.

I’m very happy he’s here and plan to spend the next 24 hours trying to convince him to abandon grad school and stay with us. That’s what cool kids do this summer. They shirk all responsibility and live in Maine.

Max says I need to be more vigilant about taking notes and writing blog entries regarding this experience. He’s right. There’s a lot going on that merits recording. But it’s a little tough because writing constantly would require missing out on some of the very things that need to be written about. I’ll try my hardest, though. Unfortunately the camera I stole from my parents seems to be broken so I’m unable to document this experience with pictures for the time being, but hopefully I can get it fixed soon. There are happenings that need to be photographed here constantly. A few of us just got sandwiches at the Southport General Store, sat under the shade of pine trees at a picnic table outside on a hill and ate. Don’t worry, we talked a lot about how awesome it was. We may be living some kind of shockingly fantastic lifestyle, but we’re not failing to appreciate it.

Tonight Max, Rogue, Justin, Jennifer and I are going on the Reggae Cruise that takes off from downtown at 6. The boys described it as: reggae music, happy people dancing, and lots of drinks. That’s right up our alley. Afterwards we’ll walk over to McSeagull’s to see Buffalino, “back by popular demand,” which is how they were advertised in the Boothbay Register. They boys have been practicing hard every day and to show them our dedication we’re going to convince everybody on the boat to join us for the concert afterwards. All in hard day’s work.

Last night while eating a block of cheese, crackers and then finally cheese grated on top of chips - our version of nachos - Max, Vinnie and I were conducting a discussion that has become quite common up here, and that’s the dogs and their personalities. Before we’d even arrived the boys had come up with literary counterparts for them:

Lucy - Candide, and

Cecilia - Oliver Twist

It was unanimously decided upon Mina’s arrival that her obvious role was the role of Napoleon.

But it’s not in our nature to stop there. We conduct daily discussions on the dogs. We watch them play. We torture them, but gently. And we talk about their moral fiber and attributes. Unfortunately for me (because I feel she can hear us, and this somehow could make her depressed) we often talk about how Cecilia is not the smartest of the bunch. Vinnie goes so far as to say she is mentally challenged, which is nonsense.

After we had our share of nachos we saturated some of the chips with hot sauce and began feeding them to the dogs and Vinnie started in again on precious, obedient Cecilia. Of the three, he and Max said, Mina would be most likely to survive in the wild, because she would take what she needed with no regard for anyone else. Lucy would be smart enough to follow her. Cecilia, however, they said, would be found, perished - her only goal in life to love - and so she would have forgotten to eat and hydrate herself and do anything else necessary to life.

After getting sufficiently angry and trying to refute the claims, I explained to Vinnie that I didn’t care. That maybe my dog is not the smartest but she has learned things that make up for her lack of natural intelligence. Like to never, ever have an accident in the house. That, I said, Lucy and Mina are still working on. And sure, they may survive in the wild, but I’m not cleaning it up if they take a dump in here.

Today while making a grocery run Jennifer looked at me as she grabbed two huge bags of Tostitos and said, “See, we know what we’re doing now.”

Our grocery cart was stacked with boxes of granola bars, cereal, bags of fruit, cheese and an economy pack of English muffins. On our first visit, last week, we’d spent money on organic cereal. We’d foolishly purchased just one box of crackers. We had learned. Living in this house, today eight people (the number will soon grow), and six of them boys, is like living in a black hole of spontaneous, thoughtless consumption. It’s not mealtimes that drive us, but what is available, and when. New jar of salsa? Devoured, instantly. 30-packs of beer are just starters for the evening, and by the end of the night we’re pouring ourselves small glasses of Courvosier (here when we came) because that is, literally, the only alcohol in the house, and we’re just not ready to go to sleep. Last night I stayed up til 3:30. I woke up at 11 this morning. This sort of behavior has become unheard of in my normal life, but Maine is bringing it back. This house, filled with enthusiastic participants in, well, whatever, is reminding me of a long gone ability to rebound.

The reason for the late night was that after sitting around watching television for a few hours, and making a huge dinner of three boxes of spaghetti, a salad, and meat sauce with peppers, Alaina, who had to leave this morning, asked just what exactly we were doing and ordered us into the kitchen for the most complicated drinking game I’ve ever played. I won’t even go into all the details, because you’ll get a headache, but basically it involved rolling a pair of dice, choosing an opponent if you received certain sets of numbers, and then staging a little competition that I didn’t really understand until halfway through the thing. Luckily at that point we made up some new rules, because it wasn’t confusing enough, including one that you had to call everyone by dinosaur names. As we didn’t all agree on the merit of some of the new rules, certain people thinking they were rather harsh and senseless, the game became a hysterical shouting match. “I AGREE WITH NICKOSAURUS! WAIT! CARACERATOPS, DRINK!!! SHUT UP! PETERDACTYL, SHUT UP!”

I’ll admit, writing posts has been somewhat of a challenge for me since I’ve been here, even though I’ve managed to get a few down. But not for the reasons you might think. I’ll explain how I normally write, first. Normally, something funny will happen in the course of a day. J will do something noteworthy while shopping at Wild Birds Unlimited, for instance, and I think immediately, “That might make a good blog post.” I think about it for the rest of the day from time to time and when I finally sit in front of my computer I have a pretty good idea of how that particular piece of writing is going to play itself out, and it gets done quickly.

That’s how it normally occurs.

Here, however, here in Maine, with the band and our friends (the house currently holds nine), my days are different. I wake up, we make coffee and have breakfast, 100 or 200 funny things happen, and then it is nearing the end of the day and, yes, I have time to write, but what the hell do I write about? Do I write about all the funny things? Do I really tell you what’s going on up here, really? Because the thing is, if I did, you would hate me. “Oh no,” you’re saying, but I’m not kidding, you might. If you didn’t hate me - if you didn’t hate us - you’d shake your head slowly and go, “Those guys…” and by “Those guys…” you’d mean, “Those guys are being ridiculous.”

It just is. It. Is. Ridiculous. Here. In a good way, sure, but in a way that if I simply wrote what we’re up to, you’d certainly recognize that the amount of fun we are having is shameful. But for a few reasons (like the fact that we’re all planning on resuming fulfilling and productive lives once this is over, and because I believe that sustaining some level of writing integrity means not leaving all this wonderful material out) I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell you as much as I can about Our Summer In Maine, because honestly, it’s been great and I’m not lying when I say that I wish you all, except maybe people who are total strangers (although that would probably be ok, too) were here.

First you need to know who you are dealing with (and I’ll catch you up as the visitors increase).

The Cast of Characters:

Jennifer - Best friend, maid of honor, partner in this Maine adventure. You can see a picture of Jennifer here. That picture is very informative as it pretty much sums up a normal day for her.

Max B. - (who arrived yesterday). You all know Max from previous blog entries, so I’ll leave him for now, but needless to say he’ll be prominent on this site these next few weeks.

Matt (Rogue) - Buffalino manager and PR agent extraordinaire.

Pete - Singer, rocker, dreamer.

Nick - The keyboard player and sometimes vocalist, as well as a fabulous dancer.

Cory (Hawk) - Bass player for the band, intellectual superstar.

Alaina - Another Wooster alum who is (very sadly) only here until Thursday when she must depart to return to the world of doing-important-and-career-oriented things.

Vinnie - My brother, the drummer, who is constantly using excuses like “This is my house,” and “I made all this happen,” when we try to get him to do things he doesn’t want to do.

On our way back from picking up Max in Manchester yesterday, a subset of the group - Pete, Rogue, Jennifer and I, who, by the way, are not only the ones who got pumped about driving hours to and from Manchester to get to the airport, but are also the ONLY people who had gotten in the ocean at that point, and therefore, a superior bunch - were telling our new housemate about our adventures. I told Max it was a little like “The Real World” and he said maybe it was actually like “The Intellectual Real World” since a lot of people in this house are incredibly smart and very well-educated. We decided that in between eating lobster rolls and hanging out on the patio overlooking the ocean, snuggling up watching movies in the cozy den and making rum cocktails, drinking cold beers, or heading out to town in the tour bus to make a scene, we’d probably be discussing a wide variety of worldly, weighty issues. We’d use our skill and logic to examine those issues, not looking facts up on the internet, or in books, because, well, let’s face it, we’ve got the time. And what better way to spend one’s time in Maine, jobless, living in a house of musicians and other crazy, fun individuals, than examining philosophical truths and then maybe later that night making movies of ourselves playing basketball and dancing in the house? Really, you tell me, how we could better spend our time. That’s right. We couldn’t do anything better than that.

If you’re starting to get angry at this situation (Max said he was actually afraid to tell some people what he’d be doing this summer because it was “too awesome”) just remember that there is a sad part, and that’s the fact that we are going to have to go home at some point, and it’s going to be very, very sad.

(By the way, I thought about writing this post while on a run this morning and actually had to write an outline in a notepad when I got back because I was afraid I’d be distracted during the day by the prospect of a trip into town to do some shopping or maybe a swim in the frigid ocean followed by some sunbathing on the rocky beach. And I was. I was diverted by both.)

I found the equipment necessary to upload some of the pictures I’ve taken since we’ve been here with the camera I stole from my parents. This one, a starter, is simply the gorgeous view from the house. But you can expect a lot more - with people in them. There are a lot of people here, after all. A lot. And they’ve been doing some very picture-worthy things.

As you can see, I’ve changed a few things on my blog. Ok, so I had some help. After sitting down with Mike for a couple hours last week and learning about FTP servers and stylesheets I finally started to understand, at least a little, how to work on this thing. Now, here in Maine, I discovered that Nick, who put together Buffalino’s site, is another source of expert knowledge. He helped me make the site look more like what it is, I think - the blog of someone who thinks it’s (sometimes, and lovingly) amusing to make fun of her husband’s birdwatching habit, rather than a site that is actually about birdwatching.

That’s just one of the excellent things that’s happened in the short time we’ve been here. This morning Jennifer and I retreated upstairs for a few hours to work more on the screenplay while the boys played upstairs. Our work was punctuated constantly by rapid drumbeats, and often by somebody calling the dogs (LUCY!!!! CECILLLIIIAAAAAA!!!!!) because they like to run away every hour or so. We joked that we’d come to a “very calm” place to work, but in all honesty, it’s a great atmosphere. We’re trying to motivate ourselves with a general rule - we can’t do anything fun until we reach our writing goal for the day. Yesterday it was lobster rolls. Today, for me, it was a long, hot shower. We work, we get the reward. Luckily the work is fun, too. Jennifer’s taken to wearing this Russian hat made out of fur and calling it her “working hat.” The kind that my dad likes to collect and then leave around, just begging his children and their friends to put it on while drinking wine. Drinking wine that he bought. Listen. If you’re going to leave Russian fur hats and wine around, people are going to find them, and use them.

First, the present. Sitting on a couch. The couches are green and blue plaid. It’s raining. Vinnie’s got Mina in his arms, and we’re watching tv. Jennifer is making a friendship bracelet and I’ve just put my knitting aside. We’ve had a fairly productive day.

In fact, I amazed myself somewhat by waking up and going running this morning - even after a late night at the local bar, McSeagull’s. That’s where the boys have been hanging out and even scored a weekly gig. We saw them listed in the local paper today on the schedule - “Sunday - Buffalino - back by popular demand.” Last night was karaoke night. Vinnie, Jennifer and I did a stunning rendition of “King of the Road,” but it was Pete and Nick who stole the show. They performed, among other songs, “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers, which, although J thinks otherwise and always tells me so, is their best song.

Despite the late night, however…the “dark and stormy’s,” with a lot - a lot - of rum, meeting a few locals and finally the sweet, necessary hours of sleep, I awoke to a grey sky, the ocean and rocky beach outside the window, and all three dogs in my bed. I went for a run down the dirt road, past the other houses and around the Newagen Inn, a very nice community with tennis courts, a pool and a mysterious dance hall that Jennifer and I, upon pulling in last night, immediately recognized as our “Dirty Dancing” connection. Do the staff members head up there late at night and host wild parties? Our guess is yes. And we have, somehow, got to get an in.

After I got back I poured myself a cup of coffee and Jennifer and I retreated to the upstairs bedroom to work on our screenplay for a few hours. We all piled into the band’s new tour van - white with a blue racing stripe - to drive down to Brenda’s for lunch. The owner, Brenda herself, served us sun tea and lobster rolls, and we checked out some leaflets about local attractions, like the alpaca farm in Wiscasset, “Maine’s softest farm.”

Jennifer and I spent the rest of the afternoon in town. Bought yarn and other items for knitting and various crafts, had lattes in a local, cozy coffee shop and wine bar and bought a lot of groceries, then came home and did some cleaning while the band played upstairs.

That brings us to the present, and Jennifer and I agree it’s been a very productive first day and coming here was, no doubt, the right decision.

12 hours, 6 million mixed CDs, one sandwich spilled on my pants, and WE ARE HERE FINALLY. Maine. On the ocean. Vacationland. Spent our first night singing karaoke. Pictures to come. I already sense the upcoming self-discovery.