Provincetown

Here are some comparisons between the official policies and guidelines of the two parades I remember seeing in-person in my life:

Application Deadline for Marching:
Macy's™ Thanksgiving Day:  8 months before parade.
Provincetown Carnival:  3 days before parade.

Cost to enter:
Provincetown:    $0.
Macy's:  $1,339.

Time before the parade marchers must arrive:
Macy's™:   6 days.
Provincetown:  45 minutes.

Philosophy:
Macy's™:   "..legendary for its rigid standards and it's [sic] highly competitive selection process."  (I guess the rigid standards don't include proper punctuation. Hahahahaha.)
Provincetown:  "...festive, colorful, and tastefully outrageous..."

Parade Pace:
Macy's™:   120 steps in 1 minute.
Provincetown:  0.25 miles in 10 minutes.  (At 3 feet per step, this is 44 steps per minute.)

Theme:
Macy's™:   America's Favorite Parade
Provincetown:  Summer of Love:  Peace, Love and Go-Go Boots

Nudity:
Provincetown:  Not allowed.
Macy's™:   No stated policy.  (This kind of surprised me.)


In My Head:
Macy's™:  Weeeeee! Snoopy!
Provincetown:  Does this shirt make me look straight?

Boat to South Beach

On Cape Cod, you can choose from many beaches.  Over the years, I've learned to distinguish between them.

You have your "Lake" beaches.  These are generally adjacent to a lake.  The sand is reliable, because it is imported by truck.  Sometimes there's a dock, you must have a parking sticker, and the Blue Sky Ice Cream truck is timed to arrive just as it's too early for ice cream.

Then there are the "Bay" beaches.  These are adjacent to the part of the water where in order to get properly "lost at sea" you'd have to drift for many miles around Provincetown.  Bay beaches have crazy tides; are near cute shopping, and the Blue Sky truck is timed to arrive just as you've started lunch.

Lastly, there are the "Ocean" beaches.  These are, apparantly, wide and varied.  There are dozens, it seems, and people have their favorites.  My favorites are the ones where you don't have to pay to park.  I'm still looking for one that fits this bill.  Ocean beaches are windy, packed with hole-digging, castle-building kids, require a full carload of people to transport all your stuff to the sand, and sometimes have fried food and ice cream nearby.

The boat to South Beach is a two-for-one.  You take a boat to a bay beach (not the real bay, a different bay) and then can either stay there among the mosquitos, or walk a couple hundred yards across to the green flies at the ocean.  It's up to you.

Harwichport music

In Harwichport, on Cape Cod, they have a "music stroll" about every other week during the summer. Six or so bands play about every two blocks.  We walked by several bands, listening to parts of songs,  until we heard one band playing "The Weight." 

Family tradition requires that we stop at this song and listen.  Not really my family, but the family I married into.  There are four musical siblings in this family, and "The Weight" is to Kathy and her three brothers what "Satisfaction" is to the Rolling Stones -- they play it at every show.  The reason for this, I believe, is because "The Weight" has 73 verses, which is divisible by four with a remainder of one, thus allowing each sibling the same number of solo opportunities, with one rousing group finish at the end.

Asking me whether I like this song is akin to asking whether I liked the drawings my children used to bring home from second grade art class -- it's irrelevant, because it's going on the refrigerator for certain.

Brewster Scoop

Our Cape Cod vacations are an exercise in deliberate movement. There are 8 of us, and we take a while to get mobilized.

Except when it comes to ice cream. The Brewster Scoop closes at 10 PM, so at about 9:40, for the first and only time all day, the kids express a clear understanding of what time it is, what we need to do to get ready to leave, and how long it will take.

The Brewster Scoop is an old New England institution, and thus I'm pretty certain that they trained the Minutemen by telling them that the Brewster Scoop was closing, and they needed to hurry.

Lake

Until this year, the beach umbrella was my frenemy.

Fre because it protects me from the evil effects of the sun's rays. This ball of gas 90,000,000 miles away makes me sweat and burns my skin. I do wear sunscreen, but I don't trust it. Every second, the sun turns 5 million tons of hydrogen into energy, and I'm supposed to rely on a gooey cream with a child's butt on the label? Plus, I like to use a 30-spf, which supposedly means that 30 minutes with the cream off is the same as 1 minute with the cream on. Thus, if I arrive at the beach and wait 4 minutes before putting sunscreen on, I've wasted two hours of protection. My umbrella, on the other hand, opens in seconds.

Nemy because in places where there is sand to plant the umbrella, there is also wind to unplant the umbrella. If I turn my back, the umbrella will take off towards some unsuspecting family eating sand sandwiches, and I'll have to chase it down like a bad dog, wondering what's gotten into it today, usually it's such a good umbrella. As a result, I end up sitting next to it in a chair, with one hand always on the pole. I look pathetic.

No more, however, thanks to the 75%-off "Beach Umbrella Anchor" purchased at the Star Market -- $3.00! Brilliantly simple -- it has a bracket that goes around the pole, and three bags that you fill with sand to weigh the umbrella down. Since it was installed, I haven't had a single problem. And with zero hands on the pole instead of one, I look 50% less pathetic huddled under my umbrella.

Cape Cod House

For the past 11 years or so, we've been spending a week on Cape Cod each summer with our friends the Whalen-Browns. For the last 8 years, we've rented the same small house in Brewster from friends of theirs, for a great price.

Each year when we return, the house has gotten smaller. My evidence: there's a small window (air vent, really) that the kids all used to make a game of crawling through each year. Then, one year, Jonah wouldn't fit. Then, Alex and Emma wouldn't fit. This year, Carolina barely fit. I'm betting than in another year or two, the window will have closed up altogether.

I think often about places I'm familiar with that I don't visit frequently, and how they exist independently of me. For example, Niagara Falls. If you've every been there, you were overwhelmed with the sheer volume of water that is continuously getting dumped over that cliff. Every once in a while, I think about Niagara Falls and how that water has been rushing since the last time I saw it or thought about it, 24 hours a day, every single second.

The same is true of the Dog. Not the flowing water part, but the "he exists without me" part. If I'm teaching a class, I'll sometimes remember the Dog, sitting at home on his chair, or on his couch, or on my bed (bad dog!). Then, when I get home, I imagine that he's been thinking of me in the same way. Judging from the way he acts, though, I'm pretty sure he doesn't remember who I am. Sort of a selective dementia.

Library

Libraries are wonderful places. They'll lend you books for free, and charge you a dime a day if you're late.

I like to request things via inter-library loan. You used to have to work with the librarian to do this; now, you can do-it-yourself online. I get a lot of DVD's this way. When I go to pick them up, though, I always feel that the librarian is judging me based on what I'm getting. If it's the third season of the BBC's "Ballykissangel," for example, it's okay because it passes the public-TV-I'm-a-discriminating-viewer muster. More likely, though, it's some movie that I want to see but don't really want to pay for, probably with Jennifer Aniston in it.

So I make sure that when I request one of those movies, I also request a highbrow novel that will counteract the stigma of my lowbrow film. I like to do this in themes -- if I get "27 Dresses," I'll also get "100 Years of Solitude." If it's season 2 of "How I Met Your Mother," I'll get Vonnegut's "Mother Night." And so on. It diverts their attention, and messes with their heads.