sunset over Fawn Lake one, originally uploaded by Bork Bork Bork.

All good North Woods vacations require a lake. This one was no exception.

While our particular lake was a fishing lake — there was a separate fish-cleaning building on the premises, and the shoreline was weedy and mucky — it had a rowboat and two kayaks, which were used to take would-be swimmers out into the deepest part of the lake.  I am a particular fan of the bob ‘n’ float, or bobbing lazily around the water buoyed by a life jacket.

Climbing back in to the rowboats and canoes in order to get back to shore, however, was a considerably less dignified operation.

While we had no time during our recent trip to revisit all of our favorite people and favorite places in Madison, we did at least manage to hit up one of its most distinctive and wonderful locations: the cheese aisle in the local grocery store.

Jen contemplates some of Woodman’s cheese selection, originally uploaded by Bork Bork Bork.

Woodman’s, where we used to do the bulk of our grocery shopping, is itself a peculiar entity. It is massive, cheap, and dingy, but employee-owned, so not as evil as one might assume.  Its fruit and vegetable selection can be pretty sketchy, and their check-out lines unbelievably long, but their selection of other goods and household items is both larger and less expensive than virtually anywhere else I’ve ever been.  And, in a city with the largest producer-only farmer’s market in the United States, you’re not hurting for options.

Anyway.  The jewel in Woodman’s mammoth crown is its cheese section, 1/4 of which is featured here.

This is the Wisconsin-based block cheese section; Pete is holding a massive block of Super Super Sharp Cheddar in his left hand (not to be confused with the mere Super Sharp Cheddar in his right) that weighs 2.75 pounds and costs $19.02.

Not pictured are the equally large sections for imported and smaller varieties of block cheese, shredded cheese, and cream cheese / sour cream / soft cheeses.  Now, one of my chief regrets is not taking advantage of this bountiful harvest to make a super-awesome, super-rich batch of mac ‘n’ cheese.  Next time!

Not only are our urbane, civilized cats afraid of the outdoors, but they’ve now become officially uninterested in watching squirrels, even those six feet directly in front of them.

Moreover, they spent much of last evening trying to eat canned chickpeas out of a colander draining in the sink, and with some success.

I think I’ll suggest that their status be official downgraded to Class 1 Cat-Like Domesticated Fluffy Creatures, because simply calling them “cats” gives the wrong impression these days.

Before our recent trip to Wisconsin, I constructed an elaborate spreadsheet estimating the total cost of various ways of getting there: a direct flight, renting a car in Montreal and driving over, and so on.  The cheapest method turned out to be flying to my parents’ in Cleveland, then driving our car from there.  One of the definite highlights of the 8-hour drive between Cleveland and Madison — all trips within the Midwest must inevitably pass through Chicago, mind you — was getting to use the new-to-us I-Pass system on I-294.  Instead of slowing to a halt and tossing away a handful of change a dozen times or so, you just… keep driving, without changing lanes or slowing down or merging or anything, and your nifty little transponder automagically takes care of everything.  The future is here, even if we’re discovering it a couple of years late.

The drive back wasn’t as simple.  Pete — who possesses an unusually keen navigatory instinct, and thus acts as chief direction-giver in the Jejune household — decided to change things up a bit and take us down 290 to 294, and soon we were stopped in traffic.  Pete was certain that surface roads would be faster, so we spent 3.5 hours covering the following bit of ground:

We’re used to construction traffic, but this was… different. Every single time that we inched our way down a road, we’d reach a police blockade completely closing it off.  We’d make a U-turn, set out in another direction, and, 45 minutes later, reach another blockade.

Feeling like we were in the middle of a piece of absurdist theater — the only open roads seemed to be the ones that we’d come in on, but highway traffic was halted as well — we were relieved to finally figure out the reason why:

Flooding! Who knew? I guess this is the disadvantage to being on media blackout for a week, huh?  At any rate, it was an immense relief to discover that we hadn’t descended into some sort of bizarre traffic purgatory.  We also eventually figured out that all of the highway entrances were shut down because the highway itself was flooded, and got to gawk, from an overpass, at the spectacle of single-file semis sluicing through the waterlogged roadway.

After that, you’d think that getting back to our apartment would be a relief, but I always feel a bit of trepidation when returning home after a long absence.  It’s the cats, see: they’re well-fed and well-cared-for in our absence, but I worry.

I think I’m justified in my paranoia, too.  Before we left to catch our flight back to Montreal, we received an email from our cat-sitter to let us know that both cats had been outrageously sick earlier that day, and that they’d spent an hour just trying to clean up the damage.  When we got back to our apartment, we were greeted by abundant fresh evidence of severe feline gastrointestinal distress: messes of some description on virtually every flat surface, in virtually every room.  The bed, the hall bookcase, the office Flor tiles, my bookbag, the bathroom, a dining room bookshelf, several separate places on the dining room floor, the dining room table, the living room carpet, and the kitchen floor and litterbox.

Pete, I think, deserves particular praise for silently putting aside his dreams of getting home and playing video games for a reality involving lots of Lysol, used towels, laundry, a mop bucket, and repeatedly hosing off a certain fluffy orange cat’s rear end.

The good news is that both cats are doing just fine now — some of the mess was no doubt caused by them both wolfing down their food too quickly, and we eventually deduced that Sebastian’s GI distress was probably caused by his drinking a significant quantity of rainwater that had come in through the window earlier that week and puddled on the stovetop.  (Rainwater sounds benign enough, but ours evaporated and left tiny piles of fine dirt and grime behind it; I’m sure that it could’ve contained something potent enough to disrupt his delicate little system.)  The cats also, mercifully enough, managed to avoid making a direct hit on any of the upholstered furniture, and only a new duvet cover — which was effectively bleached by whatever internal juices were left to fester on it for the better part of an afternoon — and the rug seem to be worse for the wear.

I will readily admit that my friends with children face many more and many fearsome messes on a very regular basis.  Nevertheless, I think we deserve a little bit of credit for dealing with a particularly impressive brand of feline filth.  I mean, at least if a child is sick, he doesn’t dip his butt into a pan of clumping clay litter and then proceed to sit on any and all flat surfaces for the remainder of the day, permanently embedding a particularly foul-smelling mess into the carpet beneath a hard shell of congealed cat litter, right?

At any rate, we have no plans to find a place with wall-to-wall carpeting in the foreseeable future.

Materials: 2 skeins Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Devon. Size 1 needles. Pattern: Sunday Swing Socks.

Time: A couple of months.

Cost: $20.

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A little while ago, after months of careful consideration and deliberation, Pete got himself a bread machine.  I’m delighted to say that said bread machine has been used regularly; a store-bought loaf of bread has not darkened our doorstep since.  (I do, however, doubt those studies that you see all over the place that tout the added economy of the bread machine — one definitely eats a whole lot more bread in general when it emerges, fragrant and tender and warm, from one’s own kitchen.)

I mean, I’ve been busy with the baking as well, particularly since the weather has made me almost entirely uninterested in standard cooking.  I seized upon the cool period between thunderstorms last weekend to make some cheesy garlic bread, and a from-scratch Tunnel of Fudge cake (something whose charm I’d previously assumed rested in its status as Retro Dessert, but which was actually quite tasty on its own merits, like a deliberately underdone brownie).

Cheesy garlic bread and Tunnel of Fudge having been promptly demolished, Pete spent some time last night editing one of my favorite bread recipes for the machine.  We’d made it before in the ‘Zo, and with a great deal of success; still, the instructions were still unnecessarily complex, and Pete wasn’t sure about the liquid-to-flour ratio.  It sure smelled good while I drifted off to sleep, however.

And, this morning, we discovered this.  Behold, the Tunnel of Oats loaf:

Perhaps I should’ve stuck a ruler in there for scale, but rest assured that it contains a sinkhole worthy of Guatemala.  I think we’ve created a spiritual successor to last fall’s evil pie.  Actually, here:

Insert bad puns about us baking up devilishly / sinfully / evilly good food here.

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And a housekeeping note: Pete and I are going vacationing again soonish.  This trip will be significantly less ambitious and significantly more social than the previous one, but standard disclaimers about comments taking forever to be approved still apply.  We’re having a particularly busy summer, which is fantastic: at this time next year, we’ll have been kicked out of the country, and can only hope that some U.S. institution is willing to provide gainful employment that funds yet another international move.  Time to enjoy the professional and geographical limbo while we can.