A goal for summer day trips is to find the best lobster roll on the coast. I doubt that we will beat today's find at MacLoon's on Spruce Head near Thomaston. You can get it with no mayo, just butter to dip the big pieces of lobster in. A tall assertive young man was enforcing the masking and distancing rule. We ate at a picnic table by the water. Yup, that is headed toward unbeatable.

This was our fifth week of two open days for the thrift shop. We are adding bookcases in the conference room for old books and just more books. Yesterday Pastor Karen said her good-byes and I met the interim pastor, Don. He is not the reconciliation agent; that's another pastor from the same church in Waterville. It's an interesting process and one that I hope works so that the local community institution (church) lives on, but also because their impasse is a microcosm of the larger world of tribal partisanship. Some friends are surprised that I am volunteering to maintain a church, but my relationship to it has several layers. First, the shop is a valuable local resource. Second, I hope to be around when they open up a bit and allow the church to be used for music and other community events. Everyone quotes the bylaws that prohibit such things, but no one seems to actually have a copy of the bylaws. Think of an a cappella festival or bluegrass gospel or sacred steel: there is a lot of crossover between their mission and my musical interests. Third, Annie Dillard studying a praying mantis.

Religion itself is neither here nor there; it serves some people. It is no predictor of behavior. It's like it is an accidental characteristic of some minds. It is an feature of this particular node of our community network and I want that community node to connect to other community nodes.

We are headed toward the peak of light and the cool nights/warm days are delicious. I put the blue kayak in yesterday for a shake down cruise. Left foot brace keeps coming off. Can't find my good kayak gloves or my vest. Lisa K and girlfriend stopped by yesterday and she showed me a neat way to get my good kayak onto the Prius. It's a long tailed car so you can't go from the back like the Forester. You put a towel between the racks, slide it up perpendicular to the car, then turn it onto the racks. It's all strapped down and I'm about to see how it rides through town.

The Good Steward has been open for three Friday-Saturday weeks averaging $450 a week. What a great business model. People donate the products and volunteers do the sorting and selling. No bills, no payroll. All the money goes to the church. It will pay for all the church expenses while they fight it out about what sort of church they want to be and what pastor they will tolerate. The town gets a needed resource and we mix together a couple of networks who need to talk to each other. Pastor Karen leaves at the end of the month and I don't know how things will change after that.

Today was clean-out-the-shed day at Good Steward. The donation shed was packed and starting to distort the plastic doors. We set up triage in the driveway and did the smell test outside. Big bags went to Good Will and recycling and trash. Two new volunteers, the Marys, were energetic but got bogged down in the details of setting up dishes in the kitchen. The goal was to get bags and boxes to their department rooms. Brian did the heavy lifting, Logan stopped by, Mary Leaming stopped in, Bahoosh stopped in, and in the middle of it I took a call from Sara Trunzo. Just to give the flavor of it all.

We call the dealing with the donations "processing." And doing it has greatly improved my ability to organize a room, a task, a random set of objects. I am much more comfortable with temporary chaos because I know I can organize it into rooms, departments, teams, destinations.

After 10 days of protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, these are the news links on NPR. It takes days of national and international protests to move the dial just a little. Massive protests inside huge economic contraction inside a pandemic. That's where we are now. And yet we went out for an early dinner at Delvino's in Belfast yesterday, with real dishes and cocktails in real glasses, and sitting inside. Wait staff takes your name and number for contact tracing in case. It is nervous making to push back a little to normal, but the sound of glasses clinking and real forks on plates...

Jim put the dock in by himself this year, although sturdy helpers were available. The whole thing of getting the dock right is the two old wood sections that lower in steps so that the ramp of the actual dock is not too steep. Jim got that perfect and added a step to get down to the second wooden piece with ease. I will take many pictures of that to see if we can duplicate it next year. All parts of the dock are level, solid, and not shaky; that is the mark of Jim work.