Coyote
June 17, 2009
Feeling pretty sure it was a coyote, I said to Nick, “Think I saw a dog,” not wanting to be misbelieved.
Nick said, “Must have been a coyote.”
Too early for a good image: Coggeshall Farm, Bristol, RI, 17 Jun, 2009, about 5 a.m., Saved at 1920 by 1200 pixels
Anti-quark
June 17, 2009
This is Ed, who walks the opposite way ’round from me in the morning. Like the two cartoon sheepdogs clocking out: “Mornin’ Ed.” “Mornin’ Ed.” Only twice, since we walk in overlapping loops.
We can tell ourselves apart because I’m the one with the faux hip, he’s the one with the pacemaker…or, wait a minute, is that right?
Photo: Poppasquash Road, Bristol, RI, June 17, 2009 around 5:30 a.m. Saved at 1920 by 1200 pixels.
David Letterman’s demographic problem
May 16, 2009
For many years I’ve taught a computer-based strategy simulation game, Markstrat, and I have required my students to prepare a presentation at the end of the course to demonstrate what they learned from the simulation. For many years I used a ponderous description of what I wanted from the presentation, suggesting all kinds of concepts that they might want to draw on for their ideas.
Probably ten or twelve years ago I felt that (1) the students weren’t having any fun because what they produced was so dry and drab that (2) I was bored out of my skull by the monotony of the presentations. I set out to correct the situation.
A new set of presentation instructions was issued, this one requesting that the students prepare a “Top Ten” list of things they learned from Markstrat, illustrated with whatever charts and graphs were appropriate, and that they make sure to balance humor and content. The presentation instructions include a link to David Letterman’s most recent “Top Ten” list and his “Top Ten” archive. For ten or twelve years, now, I’ve found it much more interesting to watch the presentations. And I think it gave me another dimension of the group’s performance to measure – something like “aptness of thought.”
Thoroughly unsuspecting, I sat down this year to receive the presentations. The first group went through an entirely humorless presentation with ten major slides detailing what they thought were the ten elements of the simulation that they had learned (“Understanding forecasting for production estimates”). Wow, I thought, I’m surprised that none of the other students in the room are muttering about how far off the mark this is.
As you can guess, the following five (!) groups all followed the same pattern as the first. No humor, no “Number 6 – Find out which side of his mouth the instructor is speaking from when he gives you advice.”
What makes this a little more difficult to understand is that I had six groups undertake the same assignment last December and all of them produced the intended tongue-in-cheek performance review. I am left to conclude that David Letterman has fallen off a demographic cliff, that the graduating class of this year’s college crop is clueless about his monolog and schtick.
Relative to newspapers announcing closings and TV networks scrambling to find revenue streams to keep their news organizations going this may be small potatos. But it doesn’t sound good for Mr. Letterman.
*****
The fog was thick on the harbor this morning. Formatted 1920 pixels by 1200 pixels.
Bristol RI harbor in morning fog
Case in Point
May 8, 2009
No one has actually asked my why I go out to walk (or, in the old days, run) at 5 a.m. Today provided plenty of reasons.
The soft pre-dawn light lit the low ground mist around the Mill Gut, and I walked through a cascade of mist that flowed past the Coggeshall farmhouse, the ice house, and dissipated at the edge of the Gut.
At the top of Surprise Hill (runners find out why it’s called that, a seemingly innocuous rise that is actually a three to one ascent over 150 yards) I turn towards Narragansett Bay. In the half-light, a broad shallow vee of 90 to 100 geese approach from my left flying about three feet above the surface of the bay, heading towards Providence.
I was going to ask Ed, the teacher who is the anti-quark to my quark, walking my route the opposite way, if they had passed him as he rounded the end of the park. I saw him coming from about 3/8ths of a mile away, something not possible a month ago in the dark. Then I saw a big group of birds floating about 150 yards offshore and decided not to ask. Which, as it turned out, was too bad, because the birds on the water were gulls, not geese. Where the geese ended up remains unknown.
As I walk along the water, the sun is coloring the sky in the east, shining through the trees on the ridge line, oranges and yellows against the purples and mauves of the clouds and the light blue of the morning sky. A handful of small clouds above the sunrise shines with an intense yellow.
On the way up the hill to the defunct toll gates that mark the entry to the park I pass the five or six varieties of fruit trees that are blooming, each variety to its own drummer.
Joe, one of the other local geezers, has just broken into an easy jog as he approaches from the other direction. He stops and waits and we descend towards the head of Bristol Bay, congratulating each other on our good fortune to be out on such a glorious day. He breaks off and heads for town as I turn towards Poppasquash Point to return to where I parked the truck.
The salt marsh is greening now, and across from the Bristol Marina the weeping cherry I photographed a year ago is again lit by the rising sun. Nick, my former running buddy and now occasional walking partner, passes by in his Harley Davidson Edition Ford 250 and pauses long enough on his way to his spinning class to remark on the beauty of the morning.
Ed, the anti-quark, passes, each of us now headed in the opposite direction. Today our fifteen-word conversation remarks on the appearance of the sun after a week of clouds and rain. The conversation window is too short to adequately frame a question about the geese, so I let that go. The two donkeys are in the pasture across the road from the Bristol Yacht Club but the sheep haven’t made it out of the barn yet.
In the truck, I pass the Goose Lady on the way to Sip ‘n’ Dip. She’s the Goose Lady because for the last two years she’s chronicled geese in the early morning hours all around the top end of Bristol Bay. In the last six months she appears to have finally gotten enough goose pictures because she’s broadening her photographic interests to other fowl. The low, bright light of the sun makes the boat hulls on the harbor shine and sparkle, giving her a great background for whatever bird is in her sights this morning.
At Sip ‘n’ Dip the wait staff are carrying on patchy conversations in Portuguese. I draw an unfamiliar waitress and for the first time in months I have to repeat my order; medium black, no sugar. A medium coffee ordered without other qualifiers comes heavy on the cream and sugar. That and the ProJo (Providence Journal, now quite skinny) come to $2.97, up from yesterday’s $2.86. Next week I’ll find out if it’s a price increase or simply the new waitress.
* * * * *
I park the truck just the other side of this stone fence. The yellow blossoms of the weeds seem to float above the surface of the pasture. Taken Sunday, May 3rd and formatted 1920 pixels by 1200 pixels. Click for full view and download.
Coggeshall pasture
I almost forgot…Easter scenes
April 14, 2009
Dunkin’ Donuts is to Rhode Island what La Boulangerie or Leidenheimer’s is to New Orleans. New Orleans is probably the French bread capital of the United States; Rhode Island is most definitely the fried dough capital of the United States and – by cholesterol-laden extension – of the universe. New Orleanians remember the drawn-out demise of Tastee Donuts in New Orleans which preceded the brief success and decline of the Krispy-Kreme presence. Alongside these two chains, the Northeast’s champ, Dunkin’, put up a pretty good showing; at last count there were still two Dunkin’ Donuts outlets in New Orleans (the Metro area, not Orleans Parish).
But here in Rhode Island (there are statistics, by the way, that substantiate the claim about fried-dough consumption), the road to anywhere is paved with Dunkin Donuts, Honey Dew Donuts, Sip ‘n’ Dip Donuts, even the Canadian upstart Horton’s trying to invade this paradise of saturated fat. The eight-mile trip from our condo to Laurie’s former place of work afforded us at least ten different donut opportunities directly on the route of travel, including four Dunkin’ outlets.
So it was not unusual that Sunday saw me visit the closest Dunkin’ outlet (two blocks…it is just barely closer than the Sip ‘n’ Dip which is three blocks away) on the way back from my walk and getting the Sunday papers at Pik ‘n’ Pay. As I headed for the condo, swinging off State Street onto Thames, two substantial wild turkeys came right down the middle of Thames street towards me. They were walking on the yellow centerline, so I decided the best thing was to yield (I don’t know if Rhode Island has rules of the road applicable to turkeys). Striding confidently down the road, the two veered to their left without signaling and entered the parking lot belonging to the US Post Office, their black feathers glistening with a green and purple sheen. Oddly triangular bodies, propelled on substantial drumsticks.
I drove on without finding out what business brought them to town on Easter morning. Perhaps it was simply flaunting their presence on a holiday that they could feel confident about surviving.
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Thames Street!
The image below is from a walk through Providence’s College Hill on Palm Sunday.
Compensation
March 14, 2009
Right. I know. 2163 words is too long a post (see below). As penance, here’s Waiting, a picture taken on March 7th (formatted as widescreen desktop wallpaper, 1920 by 1200 pixels if you click on it).
Walkin’, yes indeed, and I’m talkin’…
February 7, 2009
Last time, I was about to get a new right hip; it was supposed to happen on the 9th of December but due to an unusual set of circumstances, Laurie and I ended up being told, at 6 p.m., that the surgery wasn’t going to happen that day.
(The day of fasting and prep was part of the annoyance…the fact that we’d come over to Boston and checked Laurie into a guest house at the hospital and would have to extract her from that was another…and since Laurie isn’t a great Interstate driver in the winter, the fact that we’d taken the train from Providence made it a late night getting home.)
Best face on disaster: We were called on Wednesday and told that the surgery would happen on Saturday morning, so Friday night we spent the night in Boston at the Omni Parker House, having supper in their wonderful paneled dining room and having – surprise! – Parker House rolls to accompany dinner. Growing up I never realised that Parker House rolls were anything but some euphemistic brand name (like Catherine Clarke Brownberry Bread – which mother always called Helen Gates bread).
Surgery on a Saturday morning when no other surgeries are going on is kind of intimate. Laurie sat by me during the preparations, watching me disappear down the hall as they administered the IV tranquilizers. The long and the short of it is that by Tuesday afternoon I was out of the hospital and home; three and a half weeks later, I was told I could shed the crutches and cane and drive again.
This week I’ve gone back out to walk through Colt State Park (I was a little leery of trying it before because we’ve had plenty of ice and a good bit of snow, so I was using the treadmill in the condo). This morning the fragmites along the Mill Gut looked sparkly in the early morning sun….
Western edge of the Mill Gut, 7:30 a.m. and 14 degrees F.
So the hip is a great success. Betty Brito (who’s had both hips replaced) told me that the most impressive thing about the surgery would be that I would suddenly have no pain. At all. And she was right. There are sorenesses and little tweaks, but they have to do with the surgery, not the hip.
And, if I have a recommendation for anyone facing hip replacement surgery it would be that you should keep exercising as much as possible before the surgery. The (former) runner in me kept me trying to be as balanced and symmetrical as possible in my gait and to ignore – as much as I could – the pain. I think that the fact that my muscles were in balance and in good tone was what made the difference in coming back from the surgery quickly.
Grumpy
September 20, 2008
I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. A while back, I posted this photo to a weather site because I thought that it captured early summer morning mist in a thoroughly bucolic setting. It has the hand-hewn fence, the thistles, the Queen Anne’s lace and – of course – the cow (incidentally, an heirloom breed).
A bunch of people came by and left nice notes and rated the picture more highly than anything else I’ve posted to that site.
But one person dropped by and said that anyone could take pictures of cows – in fact, she claimed to have taken some herself – but what made this picture special for her was its title (Beauvine).
I wrote back saying that for someone who had spent 35 years in Louisiana, spelling Bo as Beaux and Go as Geaux came pretty naturally and anyone can do it – most people do, and clearly I had just done it.
So I’ve been muttering under my breath about it and I finally realized that what bothered me was the gist of her remark…that the photo was unremarkable for its visual content, as though that cow by any other name wouldn’t smell of more than – well, whatever.
Anyhow. I’m headed over to my Flickr site, because my second-most-popular photo in terms of views is an unremarkable shot of a woodchuck that Yahoo! images has keyed on as a top-indexed photo. I intend to boost its memorability and acceptance by renaming it “Geaupher.”
Queen Anne’s Lace WS
August 6, 2008
Originally uploaded by bigfoot
Suitable as widescreen wallpaper. (Click on photo at right, click on “All Sizes” above photo on Flickr site, then download “Original Size”.)
