The 8th Sign of the Apocalypse...

... Karen actually submits a post. I've been to Plum Island almost every day for the past week-- it's tree swallow migration time, a new end of summer/beginning of fall ritual for me to enjoy. Every evening around sunset, thousands-- and I mean thousands-- of tree swallows sweep over the island as they prepare to roost for the night.

So I leave work, drive to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge, and park in the dirt lot at the "North Pool Overlook"-- a favorite roosting place of said swallows. After drowning myself liberally in insect repellant, I ensconce myself on the hood of my car, and spend the next few hours watching the show. To my right, unbelievable sunsets over the river-- even though it's August, the slight evening chill of fall has been in the air, and the sunsets are decidedly fall-like as well. More pink and orange with lots of streaky clouds than the humid hazy reds of high summer. To my left, the moon-rise over the scrub pines. And all around me, swarming, swirling-- swallows, swallows, swallows.

They come in waves, sweeping the fields and then up over the dike and skimming the pond, in a pre-bedtime feeding frenzy. The air is thick with them, and they chatter incessantly as they swirl, oblivious to anything-- or anyone-- in their way. It's like being in a giant snowglobe that someone has just shaken frantically; they sweep so close to me that I could reach out and grab one if only I were quick enough.

And then, in the blink of an eye, as though one single bird has perhaps given the grand cue, they roost.

Silence.

I drive home with the windows down and the radio off, feeling like I'm 13 and there just might be a door to a magical land at the back of my closet...

Greetings from Atlanta

My brain's in a bit of a jumble since it's Sunday night and I'm not at home suffering from the (somehow comforting) Sunday blahs, but instead am sitting in a large hotel room taking advantage of the high speed internet connection and the A/C. I feel like it won't even be fair to say that I've been to Atlanta since this will be an airport => hotel => office => airport type trip. My thoughts so far about Atlanta have been as follows:

1. Wow, it's hot
2. Look at all those green trees
3. Where's downtown? Oh wait, you mean we just passed it?
4. Why is everyone in this hotel tan?

Profound, huh? People should pay me to make such stunning observations. ;)

In any case, my favorite conversational tidbit of the day was provided by the man sitting behind me in the shuttle bus to the hotel. Five of the eight passengers were discussing various topics including where we all hailed from and how much gas cost in our respective areas (Pensacola won with $2.79 per gallon; I could have claimed to have seen $3.09 on the Palisades, but we had actually paid $2.49 before getting onto the Palisades, so I thought that wouldn't quite be fair). He said to us at some point "That was the first flight I've taken since 1972."

I goggled at him. "How have you managed that?" I asked.

"I don't leave the country," he said.

I didn't know what to do with this information, I honestly didn't. I mean, even if you don't leave the country, it's still a pretty big country -- big enough to need to fly around in. I mean, you could technically drive around the continental US, but it would take such a staggering amount of time all you'd be doing is, well, driving (yes, Karen, I see you smirking and saying "the journey IS the destination"...). The entire topic of not leaving the country -- that I'll save for another day.

In any case, I wish I had asked him where he'd taken his last flight in 1972.

Okay -- time for bed.

I Heart Fup. Store Cat.

I have never ordered a book from Powell's, but I receive their bi-weekly newsletter, and after forcing myself to look at the headline book (which I do out of some sense of obligation I think), I scroll all the way to the bottom of the e-mail to read about Fup, Store Cat and her adventures. I found this edition's installment particularly poignant. Read it here:

Fup. Store Cat.

Another Cat Photo??

Another photo?

Poor Mew Mew. He puts up with a lot -- hot weather, a clingy younger brother (who was the star of the last, ill-fated, mobile post), and now multiple photos snapped using my new phone. I'm trying blogger's mobile blogging feature again, even though my last mobile post somehow "disappeared" on some server somewhere, never to be seen again on this blog. (As a database support person who receives posts like "I was entering a Client record into the database and then it just disappeared!!!!" I cannot believe that data disappears. It just "fails to save" or exists in some other unexpected location). I'm wondering if the issue isn't the act of editing the post after saving it. I posted the image and caption via phone, but am now editing the post and adding text...we'll see what happens next. I apologize in advance to those of you who use Bloglines and may end up with a "ghost" posting.

In any case, it's now about 85 and humid in the apartment and I'm stuck here waiting for Fresh Direct to deliver the groceries they promised would arrive between 11am - 1pm. I got a recorded call at 1:11 announcing that there were delays of up to an hour. Having just taught a seminar on customer servce last week, I then announced to no one in particular that Fresh Direct should have set that expectation BEFORE 1pm instead of almost 15 minutes later. Then I realized that the mere fact of having groceries delivered precludes the right to complain (although service is service...so I can complain from that perspective). Next week I'll think we'll go back to Whole Foods.

Sigh. Okay -- time to figure out what to read next. Just finished Witch Child (which I enjoyed but didn't love). Now I'm considering Red House (to continue a sort of New England history theme...).

More later...

The It's-the-Middle-of-the-Week and I-Don't-Have-Much-to-Say Post

For your entertainment:

You Are a Plain Ole Cup of Joe But don't think plain - instead think, uncomplicated You're a low maintenance kind of girl... who can hang with the guys Down to earth, easy going, and fun! Yup, that's you: the friend everyone invites. And you're dependable too. Both for a laugh and a sympathetic ear. What Kind Of Coffee Are You? Take This Quiz :-)

I'm not feelin' it...but it was still a fun momentary diversion. And please don't ask why I felt the need to run out to Starbucks this afternoon and order a mint chocolate mocha frapuccino -- I took one sip and realized why I have avoided them for years. It didn't taste like coffee. It tasted like chemicals. Blech. That experience should keep me away for another few years.

Sirsasana for What Ails You...

...so I hadn't gone to a yoga class in something like, um, 3 months until this past Thursday. I had started practicing at home a couple of weeks ago -- in part because the thought of having to stay on asthma medication any longer than necessary makes my stomach clench in knots -- and if yoga is about anything, it's about breathing. But the other part of practicing yoga again was something undefinable -- a recognition of lack of life-balance, and a lack of movement. I was sitting on the floor in the bedroom one night when the thought "Instead of sitting against this wall, I bet I could do sirsasana leaning against the wall..." occured, completely out of the ether. And I did, for the first ever on my own. Some part of me must have known that being upside down can help one move towards balance in life...

Weekend Reviews...

I had quite the weekend, between hanging out at a BBQ, seeing the new "Willy Wonka," and devouring the latest Harry Potter novel. Here are some quick thoughts:

1. I think the New York Times' A.O. Scott got it right when she wrote that "the sumptuous, eerie look and mood of the movie make it possible to ignore this dispiriting and superfluous adherence to convention." (See the entire review here) The "superfluous adherence to convention" is a wholly unnecessary and maddening psychological "back story" about Wonka's relationship with his dad. I'm all about sorting out one's dad issues -- but not in my escape movies, thank you very much.

2. I love Harry Potter. Love, love, love, love, love. I love ripping open the specially-branded Amazon box (I like to pretend that it was delivered via Owl post), the smell of the brand new book, the density and smoothness of the never-touched pages. I love being allowed to dive into the story and pretend -- just for the time that I'm reading it -- that I have no responsibilities or cares other than what happens in the book. I finished reading the latest installment at 11:40pm last night and think I might just have to start reading it again because it was over too fast. As many of the reviews have said, it's the darkest of the books so far, and it's very clear that any innocence Harry retained up until this point has been torn away by the end of this book. This makes for a deeper, richer reading experience -- but at the same time, I find myself nostalgic for the lightness of the earlier books where the worst thing (for the most part) Harry had to worry about was the Dursleys. I don't know what I'll do when the series ends -- there's really nothing else like these books. The writing isn't always stunning, and the 5th book (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) could have been edited with an axe, but there is always humor, compassion toward her characters, as well as amazing plots and characterizations that set these books apart.

3. I am now officially done with summer. I do not get along with heat and humidity, and the weather for the upcoming week portends temperatures in the 90's and very high humidity. Summer - done. Now.

More soon...

MIT Blog Survey

Sometimes my brain hurts. This morning I was reading a discussion of the juxtaposition of an ancient craft (knitting) with modern technology (blogging) on one of my favorite knitting blogs (Yarn Harlot) when I see in the Comments section a link to a blog research survey sponsored by MIT. Normally, I would have ignored it, but curiosity got the best of me. The survey seemed to be trying to suss out who uses what forms of communication (blog, IM, SMS, phone, etc.) and to discuss what topics. I'll be interested to see the results when they're posted.

SO, all my Friends With Blogs, check this out: http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu/request (they have nifty buttons, too, so now I have to figure out how to post that code into my template. I'm ready, I'm ready....)

Thoughts on the Connecticut Shoreline

Along the Connecticut shoreline lies a vast tract of salt marsh. Tonight, while riding the train from Boston to New York, the marshes revealed themselves through low-lying fog; the waterways that cut through the reeds and grasses shimmered in the heat and haze.

I love the salt marsh because it is an eerie, subtle, but changeable landscape. The marsh transforms itself with a limited range of colors and plant life: in the summer, the grasses are bright green and lush; in the fall the color fades to brown; in the winter, the grasses die and the waterways freeze to hard, silver paths. There are no bright colors, no shocking contrasts between spring, summer, fall, and winter. The landscape only reveals itself over time. I feel a kinship with it because I've watched it morph from my train window, back and forth, season after season.

North

So it's 9:10pm and Stephen and I are taking bets on how late it'll be before the sun sets up north here...I'm thinking 10ish. Oooh--through the wonder that is the internet, we've just discovered that sunset here in Thunder Bay (48.35 degrees latitude) will occur at 10:04, and that it will finally get *dark at, um, 10:44pm.

I love North. :)

Little House on the Prairie...

Just a quick post--after spending 11.5 hours on the road yesterday driving from Buffalo to Champaign, we have arrived on the prairie. Today we spent a most wonderful day playing with Isabel (who is 4), eating lunch outside on the porch, watching Jason mow the lawn, and all sorts of other exciting activities unknown to dwellers in small, urban apartments. (Can I just say that I will be returning home on a quest to find a place we can live that has a dishwasher? And why is it that helping other people do dishes makes one feel good, but doing one's own dishes is an unbearable chore?)

Low Bridge, Everybody Down....

I have to admit (Karen, stop laughing right now) that I find "journey is the destination travel" travel challenging. It's difficult to shift the gears in my brain from must-get-there/finish-this/do-that mode to being-where-I-am mode. The only time I can really achieve that feeling is when I'm traveling by train between New York and Boston. That trip always feels like suspended time, where I'm off the grid and don't have to pay attention to life's details. I can knit or read or write without guilt.

Yesterday's drive seemed to pass like a dream--a long, hazy, humid vision of green fields and the smell of grass. We cut through upstate New York via Route 79 and 96; there are still portions of 79 that remain unchanged from the time my family would drive from Danvers to Ithaca to visit my Aunt and Uncle and favorite cousins. Parts of central New York feel like a second homeland because I've driven through them in so many different stages of my life--childhood, college, grad school, now.

But what's causing my brain to stutter is that we're continuing on shortly--it feels hard to be here in Buffalo knowing that on Tuesday we set off for Illinois. And I keep thinking forward forward forward--to what Thunder Bay, Ontario, will look like, or how long it will take us to drive from Ottawa back to Jersey City. Then I start to think about how two weeks seems so *long...a long time to be away from work, the house, the cats, the routines that define my life.

I don't remember feeling this way when we were in Berlin last summer, or on any of my trips to London or Amsterdam. But perhaps that's because we traveled to those places, created a home base, and explored from there. This trip is more nomadic. And I've never wanted to be a nomad. To travel, see the world, explore--yes. But to feel at home wherever I am--that's the challenge.

Bullfrogs and Muskrats and Veeries, Oh My!

I have fallen in love with a swamp. A swamp in New Jersey--a place I never expected to live, much less even like (I apologize in advance to anyone who grew up in NJ--because it's not until you actually live here that you realize it's a beautiful state--except for the shocking sprawl that forms part of the New York City megalopolis. Even that can be beautiful in its own strange, industrial way). In any case, Karen drove down from Massachusetts to visit for the long weekend, so Stephen and I decided to show her our new favorite place, Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. (I told her Great Swamp was similar to Plum Island...except that it's 25 miles inland...and, well, isn't quite an island. Unless you consider that much green in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas of the eastern seaboard an island).

Early Sunday morning we drove to Basking Ridge and were rewarded with amazing bird songs and wildlife. We walked the same three boardwalks that Stephen and I had walked two weekends ago, but the ferns had grown a foot and the underbrush thickened. Everything looked more green--primal and muddy and lush. The most exciting sound we heard was the Veery--a bird song that sounds other-worldly and slightly chilling (like a series of descending flutter-tongued notes--very metallic and hollow); we also figured out that the sound S & I had been calling "the Wheel-of-Fortune" bird was really made by a Wood Thrush (phew--that one was driving me crazy). Because of the thick cover at all levels in the swamp, Great Swamp is an amazing place to listen. (I find it hard to see much of the time in any case, so I love being in a place where sound is as vital as sight).

The loudest sounds we heard, though, were made by a whole slew of bullfrogs, creating a joyful noise in a pond:


Photo: Stephen Howe

This muskrat swam in silence through the reeds and grasses in the frog pond (mind you, if I saw a rat on the subway tracks, I would not think it was at all attractive--so why would I think a creature that looks like a fuzzy rat is adorable? Nonetheless...):


Photo: Stephen Howe

After leaving the swamp, we ate our "second breakfast" at the Sirling House Diner and then set off for Richard DeKorte Park (a park created from reclaimed land in the Meadowlands). Every time Stephen and I drive through the Meadowlands I wonder how people access the saltmarsh and waterways, so I was very excited to see the Meadowlands from ground-level. We walked along a thin path that crosses one of the Meadowlands' bodies of water--and despite being dotted with power-lines, we saw a group of 10 swans, a snowy egret (so pretty!), the ubiquitous Canada goose, mallards, and a Gadwell. Despite people's various attempts to tame the land, it maintains a sense of wildness; someday I'd like to canoe around the islands of phragmites.


Photo: Stephen Howe

The gosling below was the laggard of a group of about 5 tiny geese following their parents over a guard rail separating one side of the water from the other. The cuteness factor of these goslings was truly off the charts...


Photo: Stephen Howe

Tomorrow I'll try to post photos from Delaware Water Gap (last weekend's great adventure)...

Store Wars...

This is one of the funniest Star Wars spoofs I have ever seen...thank you Organic Food People!!

http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.htm

Further Adventures in Nature...

When Stephen suggested that we go to the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, my first thought was "ugh--why would I want to go to a swamp in New Jersey???" He prevailed, however, and we set off Saturday morning for Morris County.

I was stunned--the swamp and area surrounding it reminded me so much of the salt marsh areas of the North Shore! (Except that the Great Swamp is 25 miles inland, and so far away from either salt or cooling ocean breezes...). We stayed on the managed, boardwalk trails and practiced walking quietly so we wouldn't scare away any creatures...we saw one frog (that looked exactly like a leaf!), many tadpoles, three different kinds of turtles (indluding a bog turtle), two different kinds of snakes (two water snakes and one unidentified brownish snake with an ivory colored chin, about the size of a garter snake), and the following birds:

Yellow warbler
Brown-headed cowbird
Cardinal
Red-winged blackbird (lots)
Phoebe
Turkey vulture
Eastern Blubird

The bluebird was the most exciting sighting because Stephen had just been saying that he'd wanted to see one for years and never had. Next think you know, we sighted one sitting on top of a nest box in an open field. :)

We don't have any photos of birds, but we do have some of the paths and plants:


Path at Great Swamp...photo by Stephen Howe.


Unidentified flowering shrub at Great Swamp...photo by Stephen Howe.


Creative nesting space in a bird blind...photo by Stephen Howe


Creature along a woodland trail at Great Swamp...photo by Stephen Howe.

Adventures in Nature!

The weekend before last, Stephen and I took an adventure/photo walk along the southern stretch of Liberty State Park, and saw some Brandt Geese, three cormorant drying their wings on a log, and various, sundry gulls, but this was the most unexpected creature we saw:

Going to the Dogs...

Stephen found a great variant of the "What Kind of Dog Are You" meme on a site promoting the British Film Gone to the Dogs...it's one of the most lively and interesting sites I've seen in an age.

I ended up as a Hungarian Puli, and Stephen ended up as a Curly-Coated Retriver (surprise!).

What kind of dog are you?

Sound

I had the weirdest memory today--I'm not sure whether it came up because it's getting close to Mother's Day, or whether the sound actually triggered the memory to free itself from my locked-down brain. It was probably both.

In any case, I was brushing crumbs off my work desk and the sound of my ring on the table sounded exactly like the sound of my mum's wedding band as she would brush crumbs off our kitchen table after meals (she would cup them in her other hand and throw them away; I tend to brush them on the floor...alas). It's such a small memory, but I can picture it exactly.

It was like a little gift to remember this.

Testing Dash Blog

I'm having way too much fun with my new Tiger Dashboard...teseting out "Dash Blog," which I downloaded from Apple's site today...

Reasons to Be Cheerful...

There are many things I'm excited about right now, and since I seem to have some serious monkey-mind happening, I think I'll just make a list and forget about such niceties as, say, coherent sentences and the like.

1. I wish I knew xml, html, and sql. I'm going to have to do something about it.
2. I have to start Branching Out for the third time--arggg.
3. I am SO EXCITED about driving to Bar Harbor with Karen next weekend for her little brother's wedding.
4. One of the funniest memories I have of her little brother is him banging on the bass notes of their family's piano while Karen and I valiently tried to get through "Asa's Death" for piano 4 hands.
5. I just finished reading Buddha of Suburbia (loved it), Never Let Me Go (loved it), and In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (loved it).
6. I think that since I just finished 3 books I should get to buy more
7. I just downloaded the COOLEST SOFTWARE EVER: Delicious Library. If you're a Mac user and book lover, click here NOW: Delicious Monster
8. I'm getting Tiger next week :)
9. When I started scanning the bar-codes of the books into Delicious Library, I began to feel like the miller's daughter who had to spin straw into gold...I cannot quite explain how many books there are in this apartment. They are e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e, and double-shelved, to boot.
10. I don't know whether I should be blogging, scanning books, knitting, editing the six children's math books that are due on Wednesday, taking a bubble bath, or getting out of this chair to have a glass of port
11. I've been thinking of moving the saltwaterchronicles content over to my knitting blog...because the knitting blogs I like the best tend to have non-knitting content in them, too.
12. I would like to customize this blog template...which brings me back to item #1 on this list about learning HTML...
13. I just decided I'm going for the port.

More later.