Contrariwise

Yeah, so I meant to post these awhile ago. Then I just remembered about them, and figured what the heck, I'll post them as an antidote to my craptastic day...



This poor-man's-panorama dates back to August 10, actually. I drove out to Wachusett Reservoir, which I had discovered a while ago by accident. It has a really big stone dam and you can walk around it and up and down, and I was out running errands, and it was a nice day (although you can see the scattering of clouds thinking -- for the umpteenth time this summer -- about becoming thunderstorms) and I wanted to walk around a bit, but not in the woods where there are mosquitoes. So I drove out there... where I discovered that the entire dam area is under construction, and you can't park near it or walk near it at all right now. Crud.

So as I was driving back, there was this little turn-out, and I pulled in there to take these pictures, because it was so pretty.

( Individual shots below the cut. )

Also:



To go with my very pretty, girly bike, some very girly panniers! Not the girliest ever (because this particular design also came in pink, so), but pretty close.

I got them because while I really like the basket, I was having problems with things jouncing out of it while going over bumps. The basket is more suited to leisurely rides, rather than commuting. These are capacious, and waterproof! (They are made by a company in the Netherlands called Basil. You can find them on the web by searching for "basil panniers". They make a number of other designs, but they are kind of hard to get in the U.S. I got these by ordering them online from a store in Canada, actually.)

Sadly, it looks like my biking commuting may be over for the season. For one thing, I don't have quite as much wiggle-room about when I get in in the morning, since the term is now starting. For another, I discovered last week the drawback to my lovely ride along the Charles River Bikeway -- if you actually do it at dusk (which is, of course, coming earlier and earlier these days), along some stretches what you get is a constant face-ful of gnats. That was a whole lot of no fun, let me tell you. (BUG GUTS ON MY GLASSES AAAIIIGGGH!)

Not *this* weekend. This weekend you could feel spring trying to move into the area. Of course, it's early days yet. Winter could still have more in store for us. Anyway, a couple of weekends ago, jenlev took me snowshoeing again. Most of the snow was gone from the Boston area, but NH still had plenty of it!



( More beneath the cut! )

SSSSSSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, yes, I'm behind on posting the last of my NZ pics. And there's really no update on the whole car thing (I'll tell you as soon as I know something).

So...

I think this pic perfectly encapsulates "autumn is coming to New England, and it's coming *fast*", despite today being 80 degrees. I like the shading from green through yellow to red. I picked this up on the path today at Elm Bank, the headquarters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, in Wellesley. I ended up stopping by there and walking around instead of going to Broadmoor, nearby, as I'd originally planned. It was nice; I'd go back. I think it'll be even nicer when the fall really sets in. Except then, there won't be a ton of tadpoles infesting the big fountain in the Italianate Garden.



(This isn't a photo, it's me actually slapping the leaf down on my scanner.)

I stumbled across mention of a tall-ships gathering at Newport only a short time ago, and was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen more publicity about it in the Boston area. It didn't leave much time for planning, and in the end, katie_m and I were the only ones to venture down for the afternoon. Saturday was when you could see all the tall ships at dock, and go on them and stuff. Sunday was the parade of sail, which sounded like a nice idea, but I don't own binoculars, so, ehn.

Intelligently, we looked up some tourist information beforehand and found out that there were satellite parking lots set up, with shuttle buses running into downtown Newport. This turned out to be really key, because oh my god, was Newport crowded. Circling around trying to find any parking lot downtown that wasn't full, or places to street-park legally, if that's even possible, would have been DOOM.

( So, I really hope you like looking at SHIPS... )

So... Newport. It was cute. Hideously crowded, but cute. I'd like to go back when it isn't so mobbed. I'd also totally like to take the $50 helicopter tour of the mansions; just because, I'd like to go for a ride in a helicopter, and that seems not-unreasonable.

Mostly, what this day-trip inspired in me was a desire to find some tall-ships, or at least some semi-tall-ships, and go out for short sails on them. I really, really like being out on the water on a ship; even just on ferries, and how much cooler would it be on a wooden tall-ship?

There's a few places locally where this is possible. There's the schooner Appledore III, up in Rockport, MA. There's the schooner Liberty in Boston Harbor. There's the Friendship in Salem, MA; the Mystic Whaler in Mystic, CT; the Providence, in Providence; and the schooner Aurora on Newport's Goat Island (we saw it taking people out on tours of the tall-ships; I wish I'd known how you could have booked that). As far as I can tell, standard rates are about $30 for a two-hour sail, and many have various specials that cost various amounts more (such as a brunch sail on the Liberty, for like $50 including brunch).

I'm telling you -- at some point this summer or early fall, I'm definitely going to try that. Watch this space!

A big thank-you to everybody for the birthday wishes! It was a good day -- fairly relaxing (except for some traffic snafus early on -- a day when there is an afternoon Red Sox game at Fenway, PLUS some kind of street fair that has closed off Memorial Drive, is not a great day to be driving from Waltham to east Somerville and back). telepresence and katie_m and I went to see "Ocean's 13", which was exactly as enjoyable as I wanted it to be. (I seem to be one of the few people who wasn't vastly disappointed in O12, but yes, I admit that O11 was the best, and this one was better than O12 if not quite at the level of O11.)

Then they indulged me (and my inability to CHOOSE), and we strolled down the street (this was in Waltham) to the tapas place, and had a very nice tapas late-lunch. And sangria! Ah, the first sangria of the summer...

Nobody out there who also has raqs on their flist will be at all surprised that I got BENTO BOXES for my birthday. Oh yes. (See icon: LITTLE CRABS!)

This is for folks who are local to the Boston area - is anyone out there interested in going to see Rodrigo y Gabriela at the Roxy on the night of Tuesday, April 17th? Tickets are $20. Show starts at 8pm. This is downtown.

Caveat: I don't even know how many tickets are available. But if some folks are interested, I can try to get some.

I was a slug for most of the holiday weekend, which is not a bad goal for a holiday weekend, when you get right down to it. I can't even REMEMBER what I did on Saturday... oh, wait. I went running, okay, and then I did some art, and then I slugged. Yesterday, the remnants of Ernesto blew through (we had the clouds and the wind on Sat. but the rain on Sun.), so I totally stayed inside and slugged and contemplated art and watched TV and slugged some more.

Today, I woke up, and there was SUN. When I though it was going to be another wash-out day. So I got up and hauled myself out to the Deluxe Town Diner, where there was a big line but since I was only one person, I ate at the counter, which felt very diner-y indeed. They have the BEST thick-cut bacon, like, EVER.

After that, it seemed too nice a day to just go home, so at random I decided to drive to WORLD'S END, which is located in Hingham, and of which I have known for many years but to which I've never actually been. First, though, after I exited Rt. 3, I drove on Rt. 228 up through Hingham and Nantasket to Hull, which is one of those spits of hilly land sticking out into the water with which Massachusetts Bay is well-supplied.

Hingham along Rt. 228 is impossibly quaint and New-England-y. Nantasket Beach Reservation is this extremely long sweep of beach that gets very wide at low tide. It has a long, long seawall running along one side of the roadway, with lots of nice free parking and bath-houses and stuff, and along the other side of the street, charmingly, are just enough remnants of sea resort-town type stuff to be enticing (ice-cream and fried-food stands, arcades, miniature golf, etc.) There is also this big covered pavillion thing that partly houses a beach-food place and the rest of it is a band-stand, and as I wandered through, a whole bunch of people, mostly older people, had set up chairs and were listening to a six-piece combo, which played big-band songs like "Stardust Memories" while people got up and slow-danced.

So I sat on the sea-wall with the ocean at my back and listened to the music and watched the people wander in and out and start dancing, and I thought, yeah, this is a pretty perfect holiday-type day, here. Then some guy came on and starting singing "Country Roads" REALLY BADLY, and I had to wander the hell out of there...

Across the street from the pavillion, on my way back to the car, I passed the Paragon Carousel, which is an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned carousel inside this big old octagonal pavillion. It only has horses, and none of the horses look exactly pristine, but that's part of the charm of it, actually. It doesn't look too plastic and new. It looks like something that has been there forever, which it has. Some of its horses go up and down, too, which is important. (IIRC, all the horses on the big carousel in Central Park are fixed; I remember being disappointed by this, although in exchange, that carousel goes *really fast*.) I wandered in and sat down on a bench and watched parents take their kids in and put them up on the horses, and I thought, oh, I'll sit here and watch it go around.

And then it hit me: why am I being self-conscious about wanting to ride the carousel when I don't have a kid with me? If I want to ride the carousel, then I should ride the damn carousel, which, in fact, I proceeded to do, handing over my $1.75 and picking out an up-and-down horse in the middle. It was a fun ride. It doesn't go *that* fast but neither is it pokey, and it plays proper tinkly carousel music. I was glad to have done it.

I definitely need to drag more people back to Nantasket, to walk the beach and see if the arcades have skee-ball (I forgot to check), and eat bad food, and play miniature golf.

After that, I finally did drive to WORLD'S END (I just like saying that, because it's a wonderfully melodramatic name for a not-all-that-dramatic piece of land, which is *another* spit of land sticking out into the water alongside Hull. But it's all just parkland and paths to walk around. It was very nice. It's not wild or anything -- it was farmland up until the mid-20th century, I think. At one point at the turn of the century, they were going to put a housing development on it, and the owner had Frederik Law Olmsted landscape it, but the actual building never happened. Apparently at one point, it was on the short-list to be the site for the United Nations World Headquarters. (Boggle about that along with me, will you? Yes, instead of putting the UN downtown in one of the biggest and busiest cities in the U.S., they were once considering plunking it down on a rural spit 15 miles outside of Boston.) It also narrowly missed having a nuclear power plant put on it. But now it's a park, and it has a nice mix of rocky paths through woods, and these big meadowy hilly spaces ringed by trees. It's a very New England landscape, and I loved it.

I would probably have loved it more had I been wearing better shoes and not been tired of walking at that point. Still, it is open year-round, and I can definitely see myself going back there to walk around. I bet it would be pretty in a lot of seasons.

Then I got home, and here's where we get to the BAD CAT part.

Anyone who has met my grey cat, Emily, will have heard the story by now of how when I first got her, she had not the slightest idea what to do with mice. When I moved into this apartment, for example, when the kitchen was still empty, we had some juvenile mice get in there, and she was mainly perplexed by them. And this led to the priceless moment, which I witnessed, when she had this teenage mouse cornered and the mouse got away by -- no lie -- jumping up and boxing Emily on the nose. Brave mouse. Hapless cat. I just about fell over laughing.

Anyway, since that time, Emily has sort of figured out what to do with mice. So I had no sooner gotten home and was puttering around the kitchen, when Emily lunged under the table and scrabbled around the baseboard. (She had been staring in that direction earlier in the day, but I assumed she had spotted a thousand-legger, which the cats find interesting, but about which they will do nothing, except eat them, but only if I smoosh the bugs for them first.) I was astouned when she emerged from the corner with one foot and a tail sticking out of her mouth.

"Oh, EMILY!" I said, quickly disengaging myself from what I'd been doing at the sink, as she ran with her prize into the living room.... where, as any cat-owner will have already guessed, she decided to "play" with the mouse. And when I say "play", what I mean is, let it escape. ("Good cat", under these circumstances, would be a cat that *doesn't* drop the mouse, just so you know. Judith's cat Ewok used to at least hold onto the things, so that you could grab her and then grab the tail sticking out, and then when she would let it go, you'd at least *have* the mouse in hand.)

The mouse ran under a nearby book-case. Emily has been staring underneath it ever since, but I have news for her, that mouse is long gone. It's too low for Emily to stuff herself under (not that she hasn't tried), but there are gaps under there more than big enough for the mouse to scrabble through. I surmise that the mouse ran out the back while Emily was fixated on the front, and under the baseboard, and down into the basement or something. Now Emily is all HYPER-ALERT, and really, mice don't bother me, but I've had a long day and I just don't need the drama.

Huh. Here comes Morgan. You know, I have no idea what Morgan would make of mice. I've never seen her encounter any. I wonder if she would pounce, or if she would just watch avidly, the way she does with insects?

So, a good day. Despite the mouse.

Boy, do I not want to go back to work tomorrow.

Yay, for nice days! (After the "second-gloomiest May on record", according to the Boston Globe.) I went out kayaking for a couple of hours, paddled up to the Wellesley dam (about 2.6 miles each way), and got some light sunburn on my arms, too.

Not much wildlife visible, except for scads of red-winged blackbirds, and grackles; and very loud frogs, which I could not see. There was one point where I almost got fucked up by a pair of swans who had about 7 little cygnets. So cute! Mom (or Dad) was sufficiently wary of me to get all the little babies to get up on her/his back. Eeeeee! I got out of that inlet before they fucked me up, then wound up going within about 6 feet of them all on the other side of the little island of grasses, which they'd decided to climb up on. Both Mom and Dad flapped their very big wings at me, as if to say, "you know one of these could break your arm, right?", and I replied, "yes, I know, but I have a paddle". They didn't charge me, though.

The river was at least a foot higher than usual, and in the upper reaches, the current was stronger than I'd experienced before. I got a hell of a workout on one half-mile stretch, right before getting to the dam, which was the closest I've gotten so far to being in anything like "white water". (And that was "not *very* much like white-water", really; just pretty choppy and interesting.) I was right that making it to the top was worth the effort for getting to turn around and virtually coast back along that half-mile.

I was also pleased that when I got to Trader Joe's and the guy said he hoped that I'd been out to enjoy this wonderful day, I could honestly answer that I *had*, virtuously, Been Out and Done Outdoorsy Things. (I think the fact that the jeans I was wearing were soaked to the knee should have tipped him off.)

My new super-lightweight paddle is pretty keen. And today, the muscles in my arms and shoulders don't hurt as much as I thought they would. (They did for a bit last night.) I think I'd better go and moisturize this sunburn some more, though.

Perhaps I shall go out again tomorrow, on Lake Cochituate. If the weather cooperates.

I wish the record to show that to get into work today (in Boston where, since more snow is the LAST thing we need after getting upwards of 26" over the weekend, we are, naturally, getting another 6"-8" today), I drove my car to where I normally park it to get the bus (first mistake), took a look at the traffic, and decided it would be just as fast to walk from there to work. Normally it's a 20 minute bus ride. Yesterday it took 50 minutes. Today looked worse.

As it was, it was not just as fast. It was faster. I was walking along the bus route, so I got to count. I beat 7 buses to Harvard. And it took me an hour.

I feel very mighty and accomplished. Also, tired. And I need to go get some coffee now.

ALSO -- woe! woe! My little foxy mood icons seem to be gone! WAAAAAAH! *sniff*