What life on the island can be

Frequently, I feel like I talk about the struggles or downsides of living on the island. Today I want to talk about a Good Weekend.

For me it started Friday afternoon, drinking a few beers on a good friend's deck which overlooks Big Fisherman Cove. It was a perfect, clear, sunny day, the beer was cold, the conversation was satisfyingly interesting. Very nice.

Saturday, the Things and I worked on building these treasure chest kits they got for Christmas (thanks, Aunt T!). We'd been painting the pieces all week, and finally were at assembly stage. After some gluing and hammering, they were mostly together by lunchtime. That evening, we got a neighbor, PK, to look after the boys for an hour so Sweetie and I could have dinner out by ourselves. We went...to the restaurant, but it was still nice to not have to deal with kid issues. When we got home, PK stuck around for wine and conversation, which was also quite pleasant.

While we were at the restaurant, we ran into a friend who invited the Things over to play with her son on Sunday. Sweetie and I decided we'd do some Thing-free hiking on the West End while they were there. So Sunday morning we had breakfast, got our hiking stuff together and drove out to Howland's to drop the boys off. It was another gorgeous day - warm in the sun, but cool in the shade, with crisp clear skies. We drove on to Emerald Bay, and walked past Parson's Landing and on towards Starlight Beach (soon to be a blog posting on ). We didn't have time (or energy) to make it all the way to Starlight, but, after an initial ascent, the hike was quite pleasant, relatively flat with nice views of the Channel and mainland. My knees didn't even start hurting until we were descending back to Parson's. (Darn knees!) When we got back to Howland's, we found the boys having a wonderful time. Our friends invited us in for some drinks and food, and we had a nice visit with them.

So we had it all this weekend, time alone, social time with adults, a nice hike, a nice dinner. Sometimes it's pretty nice living out here.