Paddles and Wheels!

Hi, everyone!

After James and Thomas left, I got my first ride of the season in Grandma’s kayak!  I borrowed Thomas’ life jacket, and it fits even better than mine!  Grandma said it was about time for the rose mallows to bloom, so we paddled over to the wetlands to see.  She was right!  From the wetlands, we could see the breach in Crescent Beach, the sandbar that separates the bay from the lake east of the channel.  The opening is so big that we could see the lighthouse through the gap!  It was not hard at all to paddle through the breach and out onto Lake Ontario.  Charles Point is now really Charles Island, because it’s completely cut off by the breach.  The water level has come down a lot, but other parts of Crescent Beach are still flooded!

We’ve been going back and forth between the bay and Fairport.  In Fairport, I helped Grandma feed the azaleas and rhododendron.  When we picked up the mail, there was a thank you note from Giampiero-san.  He really liked the map of our Finger Lakes that Grandma sent him.

The firewall and fire door in the garage are now completely finished and painted, and Grandpa has filled up the new shelves against the wall.  Now he has another garage project, on the outside!  The cinder block foundation has holes on the outside, so Grandpa got paving stones to cover them up.  He hopes this will help keep the chipmunks out of the garage!

Grandma and Grandpa were taking their turn hosting their church dinner group, so I helped clean the house.  Grandma wondered whether it was grandmotherly to clean all of Thomas’ fingerprints off the windows and sliding glass doors, but we decided to do it.  La Vache’s grandma and grandpa are in the dinner group, but La Vache forgot to come with them!  I was sorry not to see her, but I enjoyed making some new church friends.

When we went back out to Sodus, the water level was finally below the level of the front edge of the deck.  Grandma and Grandpa had to figure out a different way to launch the kayak, because they couldn’t just float it off the deck anymore!  Grandma planned to weed water chestnuts, so I couldn’t go along.  Guess what?  Grandma checked all the places she usually has to weed and there were only three water chestnut plants total!  Grandma says it looks like that was at least one good result of the very high water levels!  The sunset and sunrise were both cloudy but still very pretty.  Grandma paddled over to No Name Creek to check for water chestnuts there, and there weren’t any.  I still think that creek needs a name, and I think mine would be just fine!  The water is still deep enough that Grandma could paddle all the way up to the pond that feeds the creek, but there were signs of how much higher the water had been!

The flowers in the wetlands are even prettier this week than last week!

Grandma’s car, the Volkswagen Passat, is fourteen years old and the emergency brake has started misbehaving.  When Grandpa took it to the shop to find out what needed to be repaired, he decided it was time for Grandma to have a new car, instead!  Grandpa did a lot of research and identified three new car models that would be good replacements.  He and Grandma test drove them all last Thursday afternoon and decided which one to buy!  Yesterday, I got a last ride in the Passat when Grandma drove it out to Canandaigua.  Harlan-san is buying Grandma’s car, just like he bought Grandpa’s last car!  I helped Grandpa take the license plates off after we got it there.  At least we weren’t doing it in the rain this time!

Today Grandma and Grandpa and I picked up Grandma’s new car.  It’s another red Volkswagen — a Jetta this time!  Grandma likes the fact that it mostly has the same controls in the same places as her old car.  It was raining when the salesman put our license plates on the new car.  I don’t think he minded, since this is the very first new car he’s sold!  I got my first ride when Grandma drove it home.  Do you think anybody will even notice that there’s a different red car in our driveway?

Love,

Lion-san