Memorial Day Parade

Memorial Day Parade

Every year the public schools are represented in the Melrose Memorial Day Parade by anyone from each school who wants to join in. Some kids walk, some pull wagons and some ride their bikes. This year we decided to participate on our bikes.

I often refer to Melrose as Mayberry. It really does have that feel. And nothing makes it feel more like Norman Rockwell's America then when Main Street is decorated with flags on all the lamp posts and people are marching down the street wearing red, white and blue.

It's charming.

This video contains some footage of us riding on the parade.

Ipswich River Canoeing

Ipswich Canoeing

I guess the visit to Odiome State Park wasn't enough outdoors for one weekend. The next day we went canoeing on the Ipswich River.

The Ipswich River is quite lazy. It actually starts not far from our house but it wanders through a whole bunch of towns before flowing through the Ipswich River Audubon Sanctuary (our favorite place), then through the town of Ipswich; finally reaching the sea at the Crane Estate. The portion in the sanctuary flows slowly through a very large swamp.

As with our walks through the sanctuary, canoeing there is so peaceful and beautiful. We just can't get enough of the place.

Odiome State Park

Odiome State Park

Both girls have been on school field trips to the Seacoast Science Center in Odiome State Park near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It has great tidepools and they have had a blast finding crabs and other creatures.

In May we visited on a weekend. We ended up not visiting the science center itself because we were having too much fun on our own picnic and beach exploration.

We followed the beach to the other side of a little bay and came across a rocky point where people had built dozens of cairns. It was a gorgeous spring day. I built a tall skinny cairn. Carol and I took a little catnap in the sun while the girls played.

Video Montage

In addition to getting caught up on photos, I have also organized the video from so far this year. I took all the clips from events that don't justify their own video and put them together into a montage that represents roughly the first half of 2013.

Click on the picture, or here, to get to the video.

Hiatus

We've had a little hiatus here at methot.net. I always assume most readers are family, but I know several are not: you've been in the dark all these months.

On May 6th I went to the doctor for a sensation in my throat. Over the next couple of weeks I would learn that it was a walnut-sized tumor at the base of my tongue.

That obviously sent us off on a little detour - a different kind of summer than we were expecting. In retrospect, I should have posted a notice here but my mind was elsewhere.

You can read that story in great detail at Cancer Fun Time!. There are currently 87 posts there, but if you want to start at the beginning, here's a link to the first post.

Treatment ended two and a half weeks ago. I have a long way to go in recovery but I've had enough energy this weekend to organize a bunch of photos covering April-June. I'll get some posts written to accompany those albums in the next couple of days if I continue to feel relatively good.

The cancer I had, by the way, is considered curable and I am expected to be cured at this point. That's not official until after five years of clean PET scans, the first of which I'll have in November. But it is our assumption going forward.