A Touch Of Summer---Sunny With Temperatures In the 80's

6:19

I was up at 6:15, just as the sun was rising above the horizon over Long Point, filling the living room and kitchen with a glow.  I might as well enjoy it because in a couple of weeks, our trees will act as a shade from the morning sun.  For now, the buds are just beginning to open, as baby leaves fill the branches.  The lake is quiet, an occasional honk or quack, no fishing boats yet, just me and the empty lake.

Thursday was a strange day, mostly because it was uncomfortably warm by early afternoon and the black flies have landed, making it difficult if impossible to work outside in the yard.  I started the day with yoga and today will be my last class until June, as we will be traveling to visit grandchildren in the next couple of weeks and I am getting tired of the routine.  Class was crowded, as usual, on Thursday, the most popular class and day.  I then picked up some kitty litter at the hardware store, came home and began filling half empty paint cans with the litter.  The Transfer Station will only take paint cans that have been dried out with litter.  It was a beautiful day on the lake, so before lunch, I jumped in my kayak, despite the burgeoning wind, and paddled across to Long Point, along its shores, back to Sandy Bottom and home and surprisingly, the wind died and I paddled home on a lake like a sheet of glass.

Kayak Weather

Lunch was leftover spaghetti and meatballs, and we watched some of The Daily Show.  Because of the black flies, Evie busied herself inside, wishing she could be in the yard working.  Mid afternoon, she did adjourn to the dock, to enjoy the sun for an hour.  And about 3:00, after getting bored with reading, I grabbed a beer, took my fishing rod out of the garage, jumped in my kayak, and sipping my beer and fished down along the reeds for forty five minutes.  No luck, as usual, what I call zen fishing...goalless fishing, happy to just be on the water, tossing my line, reeling it in, expecting nothing.

When I got home, we both decided to relax with a beer and sat on our front porch, immune fortunately from the gnats, and I worked on the fishing lines on our three rods, making sure to cut the lines, retie the lures, getting them ready for our zen fishing.  Neither one of us felt like fussing with dinner.  In fact I was going to drive to the Ashville General Store and pick up a couple of subs but Evie talked me into staying home, and we had some frozen homemade pizza, surprisingly good despite sitting in the freezer for a couple of months.  And we watched a good movie, THE IMITATION GAME, the story of the life of brilliant mathematician and father of the modern computer, Alan Turing.  He is responsible for solving the puzzle of the Nazis Enigma code in the early 1940's.  In 1954, tragically, he was arrested for homosexual behavior (homosexuality was a crime in Great Britain until 1967).  Instead of a prison sentence, Turing agreed to take certain drugs which might cure him of his 'abnormality.'  Instead, it led him to commit suicide at the age of 41. And most shocking, no one knew about his breaking of the Nazi code until fifty years later because it was considered a state secret.  Historians have estimated his work ended the war two years early and saved millions of lives.  Yet he was driven to suicide for his homosexuality.  A sad film, certainly the end, but it kept my interest, as it jumped forward and backward in time, from his early days in prep school, to the beginnings of the police making a case against him for his homosexuality, to the work on solving the code.  Turing certainly was arrogant, at times insufferable, but brilliant.  And once again, we see how lives of young men can be twisted and destroyed by societies intolerance of 'differentness,' and in Turing's case, it led to his death.  Benedict Cumberbatch was brilliant as Turing, and Keira Knightly was equally good as Joan Clarke, his fellow code breaker.  This quotation best sums up Turing's life:

"Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."