Sumer Is Icumen In

Lhude sing where the hell are my damn capri pants?

It's been gorgeous here over the past few days, after a long grim winter. It still hasn't quite set in, that the summer vacation is no more, at least not until we get us some kids. Despite the fact that I will have exactly ten working days of not working, this summer, I still get to fantasizing about road trips, the lake, the beach. Oh, the beach. I may be a native Kansan, but years spent in Norfolk, twenty minutes from Virginia Beach, have left me unable to conceive of a summer in which I am a pale, soft girl on a boardwalk crawling with women in white denim cutoffs underlaid by tan-tyhose, worn with open-toed sandals. God, that scraggly-ass salty hair whipping in the sea breeze. Who wouldn't want to eat a dipped cone looking at that?

Okay, wait. Now how can Durry Quain, as we say in both Norfolk and Wichita, copyright Cheesequake when it is the name of a town in New Jersey?

Also, was Chicken Features the snazziest name they could come up with?

And why is the closest DayQue eight miles away?

Comments

[jilbur]

It's mighty, mighty near me. nanananabooboo!

Hmmmph, I don't know why you like the stuff. It's not Orange Julius by a long shot (even if it is part of the same mega-Funfood-corp).

Ahhhh Cheesequake. It was a couple of exits north of where we lived prior to our current sitch. It was the Q when I played 'A-to-Z' in my head during car rides to our inlaws. It is an extremely large state park and nature preserve; but oh-so-ironically, it is also the name of a very large rest stop on the Garden State Parkway. Sweet Cheesequake of my days of yore.

[Kendra]

Really? Kansas?

I am not a native, but live here now. I grew up spending my summers in Ocean Grove, New Jersey and/or on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Did you know that every lake in the entire state of Kansas is man-made?

Every summer I grow wistful for large bodies of water. And I usually do not get a tan.

Enjoy the beach for me, please.

[Jo]

Kendra, I sure did know that. That, and what to do in a tornado drill.

So, what, Lake Cheney doesn't count as a large body of water? Why, you could be up to your knees in mud, it's that deep!

[Mamarama]

I remeber summers at Lake Cheney, when my sister and I, along with all the other dirty WT kids would sit in the shallow water until the back sides of our swimming suits were permanently brown, slathering ourselves in lake mud as if it were some exotic European beauty treatment. I mean, hell, when you have lemons, make lemonade, right?

[OliviaDrab]

May I have permission to use the term "tan-tyhose"? That is divine.

Dairy Queen is one of those anomalies that you have to love, based on the Blizzard alone. Where else can you come in starving and leave in a walking sugar coma? But with a big just-ate-lots-of-ice-cream grin...

Just don't eat their chicken features. Beaks are hard to swallow.

[Jo]

Mmmm exotic lake mud.

Unfortunately it often contained exotic lake leeches, at least at El Dorado lake.

Kansas. Land of Ah's.

Permission granted, Melissa.

[Lisa]

Having stopped at the Cheesequake rest stop many times on summer trips "down the shore," I gotta say the name has always puzzled me: I picture massive piles of cheese so tall that they, well, quake. Not such an appealing image, is it?

[Kendra]

Since reading this post last night, I have been walking around humming "Sing cuckoo!"

[Christina]

Norfolk? Really? A cool blogger like you actually lived within thirty minutes of where I grew up? No way! I'm from Yorktown--and I still can't get over the fact that although the town played an important part in the Revolutionary War, most Americans have no idea where that is.

Is it sad that although I grew up less than an hour from Virginia Beach, I've only actually been there half a dozen times in my entire life? Oh well, at least I don't have to worry about hurricanes here in the middle of Texas.