Wrapping up good old Cee Tee

I don't know how many more stories I'll tell about our time in Connecticut this summer. There was just so much fodder; I've never seen such heartbreak and hilarity, I've never suffered such conflict or pain or appreciation, I've never had such a powerful or relentless current of emotion.

I have all these photos on my camera, photos that beg to be captioned and shared, with stories that seem both minuscule and mellifluous.

So I'm just going to purge the ol' memory stick on you this Monday morning, okay?

We were in CT for three weeks. We had about 45 hours of innocence there, if you mark my terrified call to 9-1-1 on Thursday afternoon as the end of that phenomenon.

Yet the rest of the time was filled with activity, because we're human people who crave normalcy and nourish ourselves with the comforts of friends, beauty, music, and laughter.

Our activities included alot of this:

Sometimes interrupted by a little of this:

adult swim

The kids were such a blessing. They not only rose to the challenges that the circumstances demanded, they soared above my expectations for how they'd manage. They helped me. I think they helped all of us. They brought levity and light when things tended toward darkness.

And they were full of great ideas, like building a human pyramid:

One day, mom and the kids brought me to a highway rest stop, where we waited for a Peter Pan bus charted by New London's own Dutch Tavern to whisk me off to Citi Field.

That outing was a little bit like the opposite of mourning:

Except for when that pesky window popped off the bus on the way home:

We made it out okay, a very svelte Peter Pan Two eventually came along to save the day:

A couple of days later, my boy drove a yacht:

And my girl ate an ice cream roughly the size of her head:

Toward the end of our stay, the kids and I headed up to New London for a visit. Naturally, we headed straight to OB East, where after a gorgeously lovely afternoon at the beach, the kids dragged their Uncle Schlekah over to ride this cunningly named amusement:

Here's my boy going down head first, soon to be scolded about the dangers of that type of maneuver by the guard types:

And here's Mistah Schlekah, about to plow right over my poor unsuspecting girl:

Still, they all made it out okay:


We had busy days, we had some restful nights:

I guess we made it out okay.