No watercolor art going on up here this weekend. Manual labor and then some. I, however, do not have to paint! We discovered, to my extreme delight, that Dana loves to prime walls. She loves it so much that she asked if she could paint the walls that were assigned to me. How could I deny her this small pleasure?

So, she painted while I went outside, with my mosquito-net hat on to keep those very intelligent calendar-reading flies from flying up my nose, and I hacked down scrub growth that had grown up around the property since last year. Then, I hauled five wheelbarrow loads of the stuff up the road to a dumping area. I paid my dues today.

We're going to skip the black fly supper at the town hall and head into Keene for Mexican food. Keene's a neat little college town not far from the Vermont border in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire. When we're up here in the woods, it's our "big city." Keene is where they filmed the movie, "Jumanji," and there's a mural painted on one of the main square's old brick walls that says, "Parrish Shoes." It was in an opening scene of the movie, and they left it there.

It's going to be a good year for great blue herons. I saw four of them sailing all at once above our cove. I've never seen that many gathered at one time before. Quite beautiful.