The other day as I was explaining a cliché about boats to our oldest child, Adelia, I became acutely aware of the gap between us. The old saw, “A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into,” meant nothing to her, she made clear as I tried to put it several different ways.

    Despite having grown up in a sailing family, I am now the owner of a 24-foot powerboat. The 1991 lobster-style fiberglass vessel was a gift from a friend who decided to take up flying instead of boating some years ago. It was mine, he said, for the cost of trucking it from its berth north of San Francisco.

    Adelia and I had been talking about the outboard motor and why was it that our boat could only travel across the water at about 12 knots when a friend’s Grady White might go 20 knots or more. It was all about horsepower, I explained. Our friend has a Yamaha 250; ours is a 125.

    “So why not get a bigger motor?” she asked.

    I said that more horsepower cost more money, and, plus, a bigger motor used more fuel. Then I dropped the cliché on her and got a blank stare in return.

    Given how infrequently I have been able to use the boat in the past few years, mostly because of the demands on my time and an attention-demanding toddler in the house, putting any more money into this particular hole in the water does not make sense. There was a boatyard bill for hauling and winterizing, more for summer dock space, a few bucks for registration, and a bit more to fill the gas tanks.

    Now, when we more or less are getting the kids’ summer schedules squared away, the East End has been locked into an unappealing couple of weeks with thunderstorms in the near-daily forecast.

    Truth is, the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July always seem like a prelude to real summer. There are screen windows to put up, beach chairs to dig out of storage, a garden to plant. By the July Fourth weekend, I’ve got most of it done, and, weather permitting, it will be boating time.

    This year, I really, truly, plan to get our money’s worth.

   I am not a believer in astrology, but could someone please tell me if Mercury is in retrograde? What a mixed-up jumble of a week I have been having.

    For starters, my computer decided not to accept incoming e-mail when it was plugged in at home; it would do so only when I took it down to the Star office, which is only a couple of hundred yards away. My husband’s computer kept receiving e-mail as usual at home, so I knew the problem wasn’t with our modem. I kept hinting to the computer, out loud, that I was lucky to live so close to the office, but the computer didn’t care. The I.T. man at The Star (a k a, the editor) just shook his head in puzzlement when asked if he had any clue.

    Then, oh joy, the charger slipped a cog — I guess I mean frayed a wire — and called it quits. I had been working, unwittingly, on battery power all day, and the screen went black in the middle of several deadlines. My husband was out somewhere in the car (probably buying strawberries), so I hitched a ride to the Computer Shop in Amagansett, bought a new charger, brought it home, and plugged it in at my usual bedroom desk.

    And then: a miracle. Somehow, the computer seemed placated by the new charger, soothed. It rewarded me with all my incoming e-mail. How peculiar is that?

    It wasn’t only my computer that went haywire in the past seven days. I spent Monday going in and out of the city for a minor surgical procedure. You don’t really want to know the details — it has to do with the second toe on my right foot — but all’s well that ends well. (I was able to put on my own shoes rather than a surgical boot and walk out of the examining room when it was over, which was certainly a relief in this hot July.) Still, the anticipation added to confusion of a gremlin-bedevilled week.

    At work, it wasn’t a normal, straightforward week, either. We have been putting together one of The Star’s Home Book supplements, to be published next Thursday, and, frankly, a couple of rabbits had to be pulled out of a hat to make it happen.

    Planning Home Books is fun. Advertisers like them; readers like them, and I like them, because I get to sneak-peek into all sorts of charming and glamorous places. But it is getting more and more difficult to find exclusive stories, given all the attention from outside media on the East End. An occasional house feature in The New York Times has always been par for the course, but these have never been terribly frequent, and there always were plenty of plum, publishable properties to go around. Now, however, all sorts of johnny-come-lately publications — some free, some not, some well-done, some not — are getting into the act.

    Expecting to do a photo essay on an outstanding house by a local architect for next week’s edition, we belatedly found that Hamptons Cottages & Gardens had gotten there before us. No sooner had we lined up a house by another amazing architect than we discovered that one of his houses had been featured in something called Beach. This latest glossy follows the tried-and-true celebrity formula, but also features house and home, and we sure don’t want to look like copycats. So it was back to the drawing board, pronto.

    Ah, well, an active mind is a youthful mind, and at least all this is keeping me on my toes. (Just not the second toe on the right foot.)

   My iPhone 4 fell out of my back pocket and into the toilet.

    Three things raced through my mind when I heard the splash: Get it out! Dry it off! I can’t believe this is happening!

    I grabbed a towel and rubbed, and then I did what you are never, ever supposed to do when your cellphone gets wet: turned it on.

    A flicker of life! The little Apple silhouette — glowing, otherwordly — appeared . . . and vanished.

    Shaking the phone achieved nothing except a faint gurgle, probably imaginary. Now what? More power, I thought, hurrying to a wall plug (and thereby compounding the never-turn-it-on rule). This time I thought I saw a spark — the oh-boy-now-you’ve-done-it kind you see just before the bulb dies — then, nothing.

    This happened on June 6, a Thursday, a day that will go down in my personal infamy because two days later my two-year contract with AT&T was due to expire and I’d be getting an upgrade to a 5. By happy coincidence, AT&T was running big ads that same week offering up to a $100-credit on an old phone, depending on its condition.

    Depending on its condition! The nice young geek at the East Hampton store had already checked out my 4 and pronounced it eligible for the full $100 rebate! “See you very soon,” he’d said as I left.

    So, $100 down the drain. Literally.

    Thursdays are editorial meeting days at The Star, when we talk about the next week’s issue. Maybe somebody will have some ideas, I thought as I got in the car to go. It couldn’t hurt to ask.

    Sure enough, after they got through snickering there was universal agreement: Try rice. If rice doesn’t work you’ve had it, but try rice.

    Rice, it seems, has something in it, I forget what, that dries out moisture. You stuff the cellphone down into a bag of rice and leave it there for — well, it depends.

    I ran out of the meeting and drove to Citarella, the closest place I could think of with rice, and ran out with a bag of Nishiki Premium Grade Japanese White Rice, figuring the expensive stuff might work better than Uncle Ben’s. (“After you take your phone out of the rice, could I have the rice?” somebody asked.)

    That night, hoping for the kind of miracle that dozens of people on Google (which I should have consulted before trying the tune-in-turn-on routine) swore had happened to them, I took the phone out of the rice and pushed the On button.

    Nothing. I pushed it back in, way down deep, and stuck the bag in a cabinet next to a box of spaghetti.

    We were going to Oregon to visit family that weekend, but there were still two days day left before I could get my upgrade. I settled for a temporary GoPhone in the meantime, which I do not recommend except in a similar emergency and unless you have really good eyesight.

    Back at AT&T to turn it in, my geek heard the sad story with sympathy but little surprise. “Happens all the time,” he said, handing over the long-awaited iPhone 5 and a bill for $100 more than it should have been. “Never knew rice to work, myself.”

    We had a great week with the grandkids. Not long after we got back we had pasta for dinner, and — oh, yes — the miracle!

    I’ve learned something from this: Don’t keep a cellphone in your back pocket. Also, give rice a try, only give it plenty of time. A week would be about right.

   Irene Silverman is editor-at-large at The Star. She is at large in Amagansett at the moment.

   My brother-in-law said as I mumbled something about having to go to the U.S. Women’s Open this past week that there was, after all, nothing else to write about.

    “What nonsense,” I said. “There’s Little League!” And, indeed, our 9 and 10-year-olds were not to disappoint on the evening of July 1 as they took the wind out of Westhampton’s sails, by a score of 10-0, a merciless rout that was ended mercifully after four innings instead of the customary six.

    “Are we going to be in the newspaper?” Jackson Baris, one of Tim Garneau’s players, asked as that game began. “Yes, you will, but I’d rather write about you winning than losing,” I said.

    I’m glad to say the kids obliged. One wants upbeat things to write about if you’re like me, without having to take pains, such as you might in following golfers around 300 acres, however breathtakingly beautiful they may be.

    And so, knowing that my favorite photographer was eager to go, I, aside from a brief visit to Sebonack with my brother-in-law Friday afternoon, decided to watch it on TV.

    And I’m glad I did. The TV crew and commentators made far more sense of things than I, an avid non-golfer, ever could, and you couldn’t get any more upbeat than Inbee Park, who calmly took the course apart, winning her third straight major this year, tying a record set by Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1950.

    You’ve got to hand it to these South Koreans. How do they do it? I doubt they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over there to join a club like Sebonack. To talk of democratizing the game when such obscene figures are involved seems absurd, though I know efforts are being made here. The First Tee national school program, about which I wrote recently, is in our schools now, and I’m mindful as well that a good number of private clubs, the Bridge, Maidstone, South Fork, and the East Hampton Golf Club among them, have beenvery helpful when it comes to supporting high school golf teams.

    Still, you wonder. Once the kids learn, where will they play? Montauk Downs maybe, which I’m told stacks up quite well when compared to the private courses out here. That’s where my brother-in-law plays, even on New Year’s Day.

    And even he (as I too have vowed) has said he’ll never go to another U.S. Men’s Open. There’s one coming to Shinnecock in 2018. I had to buy periscopes the last time a Men’s Open was played there, forbidden, as I was, to venture inside the ropes. “Periscope-a-dope,” Muhammad Ali would have called it. The good news is that I’ll either be retired or dead by then, perhaps both. Or just dead.

   We were two weeks without a functioning washing machine, and not one of the local repair companies with which I had left messages had called me back about service. It seemed odd.

    We had been going to the in-laws to use their washer. For us, a family of five, plus beach towels at this time of year, that made for a lot of trips, missing items, and an all-around headache. Something had to be done.

    The problem was pretty clearly the pump that evacuates water from the drum. The front-loader would not drain at the end of its cycles, and the waste hose itself was heavy with increasingly smelly water.

    Were they all too busy to deal with this? Was I on some secret blacklist of repair people? I felt alone, scorned.

    At the one mom-and-pop shop where I did get someone on the phone, mom told me they no longer dealt with our brand of machine because it was difficult to get parts. That seemed fishy.

    It turned out that the Internet came through when I needed it and that the problem was indeed a dead pump. Searching on Google for “Frigidaire washer pump replacement,” I quickly found a how-to video for my specific model. It looked easy. Selecting a parts supplier was simple, too, and just a little over $100 later, a new pump was on its way. A small box arrived at the office two days later at most.

    At home, two screws held on a cover plate at the bottom of the washer. Two more screws held the pump in place. I used a large pair of pliers to ease the hose clamps away, and the old one was free. To install the new one, I just reversed the procedure.

    The only snag I encountered was calling to my wife to come get Ellis, our 3-year-old, who saw tools and wanted to help. I fired up a load of beach towels as a test; a satisfying draining gurgle was my first clue that my diagnosis and repair had worked.

    On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being changing a light bulb, the whole job rated a 3 at most. I didn’t get it. Why wouldn’t a repair shop want to make a couple hundred bucks if it were so easy?

    The old saying is that if you want something done right, you do it yourself. Around here, in the Hamptons in high summer, anyway, it appears that if you want something done at all, it’s up to you.

    I’m still waiting on those other call-backs.

   Protesters holding  signs reading “Trayvon Martin Lynch­ed” marched down University Place in New York, where I happened to be, on Monday. From across the street, the marchers seemed outnumbered by police. A long line of officers walked in tandem with them, another line of police on motorcycles edged the street, and other officers, apparently of higher rank, stood nearby, along with several vans. I had no idea what to expect and wondered if the police were sent out in high numbers only to keep order or because violence was feared.

    There have been other protests around the city and country after a jury of six women in Florida found George Zimmerman not guilty of either manslaughter or second degree murder. In the city on Sunday, thousands had grouped at Union Square, then moved up to Times Square and eventually into Harlem.

    At about the same time, some of the Web sites I look at started recounting the case of Marissa Alex­ander, who was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison, having been convicted of attempted murder after a gun she fired hit a wall, injuring no one.

    Twenty years is the mandatory minimum term under a 1999 Florida law, which requires an automatic 10-year term if someone shows a gun while committing certain felonies and 20 years if the gun is fired. Judges are left with no discretion in sentencing. (If someone is wounded, judges can mete out 25 years to life.)

    Ms. Alexander had given birth nine days before the incident, and it was reported that she had a protective order against her husband, Rico Gray, who had beaten her during pregnancy. Mr. Gray had a history of abusing her as well as other women, and she had been hospitalized at least once.

    She testified that she went to the house they had shared to get some of her clothes when they got into an argument. She said he laid hands on her, that she escaped after he tried to lock her in a bathroom; she then went to her car to retrieve a legally  obtained handgun, and fired what she later called a warning shot. Mr. Gray said she had aimed at him but missed. She was found guilty of  aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

    Not sufficiently informed about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, I am not qualified to make an in-depth comparison about what happened between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin and between Marissa Alexander and Rico Gray. However, both Mr. Zimmerman and Ms. Alexander said they feared for their lives when they fired their guns. The jury did not believe Ms. Alexander and voted for conviction in 12 minutes. The six women on the Zimmerman panel, on the other hand, believed him. It was a crucial difference.

    Hovering over each case are the contexts in which the incidents occurred: domestic violence and disregard for women’s rights in one, institutionalized racism, perhaps, in both. There were rallies on behalf of Ms. Alexander, after her conviction, and a movement asking that she be pardoned is under way now. The Justice Department is reportedly considering whether to bring a civil rights case against Mr. Zimmerman.

    Regardless of what happens, these Florida laws and those who have written them should  be indicted in the court of public opinion.

   Nostalgia, Platonic love, and a church-like experience would hardly be on the average man’s mind when contemplating a routine excursion to the East Hampton Town dump. Now the dump is referred to as the East Hampton Town recycling center. But Sunday arrived, time presented itself, the dump beckoned.

    Cardboard boxes, a damaged plastic storage container, a toy lightsaber, a carved wooden handle, a child’s club with a note of the aboriginal: These artifacts would make their final departure to the unknown.

    The way Henry, Lane, and Morgan Jr. had swung those extendable plastic “Star Wars” swords on the lawn, it was unlikely this one still glowed the way it once had.

    And that old black jacket never did bring me much luck. Some of that Kmart clothing can be like that.

    Other things would be loaded into the Ford truck: a small amount of unruly sweepings from the driveway, some remnants of the annual winter wood-splitting massacre, a half-baked lampshade, a book concerning Donald Trump, two empty wine bottles, a destroyed pair of L.L. Bean tropical-weight shorts. Can’t be seen in shorts like those around this place anymore.

    All would make it via the 2004 Ford Ranger two-wheel-drive truck to their final resting place at the town dump.

    How many great memories can one location hold for a person? Seems like yesterday when I refused to allow my father to ride along with me on the weekly dump excursion. The air temperature was hovering around 92 degrees and heading upward; August heat had set in like a wildcat’s claw.

    I told my dad that he was not coming to the dump with me, and that was final. I told him, “What do you want, to drop dead of the heat at the East Hampton Town dump?” He was dressed in his usual bona fide safari jacket, nylon pants circa 1965, thin Christmas socks, and clean sneakers. Dad was closer to 90 years of age on that day than he was to 80.

    He was very mad about the whole thing. I explained to the man, “Your obituary headline will be ‘Judge Dies at Dump.’ ” Some sharp newspaper person might point out what a total idiot the son was, taking his aging father to the dump when the temperature there could have been 100 degrees.

    The matter blew over later that day. After much deliberation, Dad decided that if he had a stroke from the heat at the dump, it might not look so good for me. People from this part of the world talk about stuff like that.

    Late May 1987: What glory it was, in the era when men were mice and women were . . . now let me think. Oh well, my 1966 Ford Twin I Beam made it to the top of the hill. The top of the hill was where you used to dump lots of stuff prior to full-scale recycling. The hill was steep enough, and the gears were so low on that old truck, and what was left of the motor was not so get-up-and-go — a man was left wondering if the truck would make it to the top of the hill.

    As anyone who has delivered stuff to the top of the hill at the old dump in an antique truck knows, the view was quite good, and a scent of times gone by was pungent. It was the late 1980s, and the dump was destined to become what it is today, a recycling center. No more top of the hill nowadays, in a 1966 Ford in a state of dilapidation. How sad it really is; it was so fun.

    Boldly on to the present! The dump scene this recent Sunday had a touch of intellectuality to it. A man wearing a well-worn yet diplomatic East Hampton High School football jacket pondered a few books left on a stone sidewall next to the nonrecyclable bin. One of them was “The Art of Zen, the Art of Zen Drawing.” He had a hardcover cradled in his left arm, the black-lettered title broadly displayed: “Microwaving.” Me, I never really learned how to use a microwave oven.

    After many walks back and forth to the variety of recycling bins — glass, cardboard, plastic, and tin — I exited the dump in my truck, only to return. How does one go to the dump with small amounts of household leaves or brush and head to the regular recycling area without driving into the dump two times? As with microwave ovens, I never have figured out how to do that. It is a ponderous situation. Someday I will ask one of the people on duty at this fine East Hampton Town recycling station, “How do I recycle my household garbage and drop off some brush without having to leave and re-enter the main entrance?”

    My Sunday at the dump required one extra excursion from my family’s home, carting two large rhododendron branches in the back of my truck. Everybody in East Hampton knows unsightly piles of brush are not acceptable anymore. The in style is the Bridgehampton “new larger house look”: nothing on the lawn, new S.U.V. in the driveway. No forlorn yet beautiful daughter splayed out on the lawn in partial tears. The derelict uncle on a minor bender, blurry-eyed, thinking about his future, seated in some old outdoor chair.

    No, no, this will not do. No thoughts of future adventure on one of the many global seas for that young uncle. It is off to Target, Polo, or J. Crew for a set of new clothes. No piles of brush are allowed to be seen, and definitely no older trucks. Everything must be thrown away, neat and tidied up, especially the people.

    My son refused to ride shotgun with me to the dump. Can’t blame him. Morgan Jr. did hoist the heavy garbage cans into the truck bed and loaded some other garbage and whatnot. With arms like a truck driver’s and a head like a water buffalo’s, Morgan Jr. is the perfect Loader of Truck for Dump Run.

    He does a much better job of it than my dad used to. On the other hand, my dad used to meet the most interesting people at the dump. Like the guy in the old white van who was in the witness-protection program, who had either been run over by a car or had run somebody else over — never got that story straight.

   Morgan McGivern is a staff photographer at The Star.

    I was not myself this past weekend, nor was Mary herself. You may well ask, who were we then?

    “It’s not you,” she said at one point.

    “Of course not,” I said, “because I’m not myself.”

    Still, I felt like atoning for having freighted one night in the city with such a fervent hope we’d be able to get beyond ourselves that we came close to self-destructing.

    It was too much “relax and hurry up,” and for that I was sorry.

    By the time we got home — in record time — we had begun to find ourselves again. While I mowed lawns, she took arthritic Henry to Louse Point (our Lourdes), and, after a long nap I was able to report cheerily that “I’m beginning to feel more like myself.”

    Soon, I was beside myself with joy running within myself at the high school’s turf field.

    I am the designated joyous one, though sometimes I forget that joy is where you find it. It can’t be imposed, or manufactured, and it can’t erase pain, though it can go hand in hand with it, and, in fact, must, as lovers who’ve lived a while on this earth know.

    This week, I read that the fellow who wrote “Milord,” a song my father and I used to sing with gusto, had said that only joy should reign, that pain was a sacrilege.

    But how would you know joy if it weren’t for pain? Not that I’m plumping for it, but that’s the way it is.

    And so, at long last, we’ve begun to grow into ourselves, said Mary, knowing, as we do, that joy and pain go together, hand in hand.

   Leo the pig ate my sunflower seedlings on Monday. It was my own fault, having left the flat, in which they had germinated and begun to reach for the air, at swine’s-eye level on the patio. Ellis, our 3-year-old junior farmer, and I had planted them about a week earlier and been watering them daily, waiting for the little green heads to peek out of the soil.

    The seeds had come from a packet handed out by people on the East End Community Organic Farm’s float in the East Hampton Santa parade back in December. I had stuck two of the small translucent envelopes in the center console of my truck, discovering them only recently when I was digging around for coffee money.

    Planting something as relatively bulky as a sunflower seed was perfect for Ellis’s developing dexterity. The work went easily, and he was excited that the “babies,” as he called them, had begun to show.

    Leo was excited, too. Eating is what Leo does best, followed closely by sleeping. Until recently, when he wanted to be fed, he would nudge the ankles of whoever was in the kitchen; a few short blasts with a water pistol more or less broke him of the habit.

    Recently, Leo has been grazing in the yard from morning until his midday nap. In the last week or so, the huge bloom of pine-tree pollen that has fallen over everything has left him with a fluorescent snout. Sometimes, when he comes into the house now for a drink of water, a tassel of grass jauntily hangs from his jaw. It is indeed a pig’s life.

    As I have noted before, we have almost lost him twice. A young man my wife, Lisa, met recently told her he had seen him trotting along Cranberry Hole Road during his most recent escape. At 20 pounds and a dingy pink, he seems an unlikely target for a hawk; a passing vehicle would be another story.

    Lisa, still vexed that Leo will not be the 10-pound micro-pig she had been promised, still vows to send him back to his breeder. I’ve grown to like the little devil. So what if he eats the sunflowers? Ellis and I can always plant more.

   Our regular readers are likely to have noticed a couple of new features in the last few weeks, two columnists who add perspectives not always reflected in The East Hampton Star and a notable departure.

    The first new addition to come aboard was Rebecca DeWinter, the nom de plume of the author of “Tales of a Hamptons Waitress,” a personal column about what it is like to work in food service on the South Fork. Rebecca is fairly sure that if we used her real name, her kiss-and-tell about patrons gone wild and some of her missteps would quickly result in her getting the boot from her restaurant job. All we can say is that she works somewhere in our coverage area, and only our bookkeeper knows her real name, more or less.

    Next, Debra Scott has begun writing about real estate in a column we are calling Company Town. East Hampton pretty much rises and falls along with the area’s fluctuating property sales. It was really an oversight not to get someone on this beat sooner.

    Rebecca reports on what happens on the floor, her co-workers, and making a go of it as a young college graduate suffering the not-so-occasional verbal abuses of summer visitors putting on airs. Debra has the tricky job of unraveling the back stories of East Hampton’s principal industry without crossing the line into outright promotion of one or another broker’s listings.

    As to the departure, Rusty, as he is known to one and all, has left the building. Although the Russell Drumm byline will continue to appear in these pages, he packed up his desk and headed east into retirement of a sort a couple of weeks ago. He will continue to write features and the weekly fish report, but after something like 35 years covering, among other assignments, the East Hampton Town Trustees, it was high time for him to start enjoying the good life.

    This week as well, we welcomed Angie Duke to the staff as a summer intern. While we take on interns regularly, Angie’s arrival is notable in that he is among the first of what I expect will be a long line of the children of some of my friends who are now old enough to want to learn about newspapering.

    At the beginning of the summer, it is exciting to take note of these milestones. We are looking forward an interesting season.