Thursday

adventures / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Flower photos and plant peektures
18
Jul 24

Flower photos and plant peektures

Up dimly lit and early this morning. Everything went according to plan, despite the cats’ best efforts to get in the way of things. Just one of the cats, actually. You’ve got a 50-50 shot at guessing, and I don’t think you’ll need a hint or odds. If you’ve been paying attention you can guess which one.

You’ll be right.

We had breakfast at a local diner. It was fine. Some diners are better than others, I’ve learned. This one was OK. The cheese in the omelette was the best part, though the paper place mat told me they have all-you-can-eat chicken pot pie on Wednesday evenings. I don’t know how much chicken pot pie I can eat, but I might find out one of these days.

Being up early meant I got to enjoy a nap today. That means I’ll be up all night.

Let’s have a look at a few more of the flowers in the backyard.

This is a scarlet beebalm, or a crimson pincushion, or a wild bergamot. I’ve no idea, they all seem to look the same.

I didn’t notice it last year, I think it might be a weed — so the bergamot, maybe. My horticulture teacher in high school would tell you that weeds are only weeds if you don’t want them. Whatever is undesirable is a weed. If I say the beautiful roses are undesirable and the pokeweed is what I want, I’ll eventually never have to think about weeding
again. (I never think about it now.) That teacher is a preacher now.

Look at this hibiscus go!

The brown eyed susans are getting a lot of attention.

The butterflies aren’t the only ones. And beyond these bumblebees there are other bees and things I can’t identify.

And I’m thinking about sending a media release on this one. We have figs!

Now I have to learn about harvesting figs. And I must also do some weed-eating.

adventures / baseball / Philadelphia / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on We forgot our brooms
11
Jul 24

We forgot our brooms

After a leisurely day around the house, I’ll give you one guess about where we went this evening.

OK, I’ll give you a second guess about where we went this evening. You’re sure to get it from here.

(Click to embiggen.)

Thursday night is theme night, I guess. And it was also inexpensive ticket night. So we semi-spontaneously went across the river and spent some time at Citizens Bank Park. We watched the great Shoehei Ohtani go 0-4 and saw Aaron Nola scatter four hits and two walks across six innings as the homestanding team beat the not-very-well-liked visitors 4-0. Brandon Marsh hit a home run and charted a triple to right, Trea Turner recorded his sixth home run in nine games. And just after I took that large photo (seriously, click it, it’ll open in a new window and you can scroll around) Kyle Schwarber hit a baseball a very long distance, as he frequently does.

The good guys won, 5-1. It was a series sweep. In a related story, after a two-inning battle I defeated the sunscreen that oozed into my left eye.

Did you notice the new graphic up there? The blue one? I’m updating a few of those as I go. And, this evening, as we were leaving the park, I had the opportunity to get a nice skyline of the city.

I was, of course, photobombed.

It was a delightful night over the river. Except for the sunscreen incident.

We’ll be back over there in a few weeks. Not eager to repeat the same mistake, I’ll be sure to have a new skin protection strategy by then.

adventures / books / history / Instagram / photo / swimming / Thursday — Comments Off on Happy Fourth
4
Jul 24

Happy Fourth

I am starting to feel better today, thanks for asking. Many of the key symptoms have disappeared. I think I hard-coughed all of them right out of my body this morning. It was a huge fit. More the beginning of a cold than the end, or so it felt. But I patiently sat my way into an afternoon without any other great big symptoms.

And so this afternoon I willed my way into the pool to see what would happen.

What happened was I struggled through 500 yards or so and then spent another several hundred yards wondering when I would find my rhythm. Somewhere along the way in a long swim I just slip into a nice (for me) pace that just sees the laps melt away. I haven’t charted this, but it seems like it should come at a fairly consistent time, right? Only I was somewhere around 1,200 yards today and still wondering when that would happen.

It did not happen.

But I did swim what was, on balance, a solid 1,800. And I didn’t feel the need to roll over and sleep the rest of the afternoon away. It felt like progress.

After which I finished reading John Barry’s Rising Tide, which was an incredible book about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River.

How can something so devastating be all but forgotten just a century later? At a place called Mounds Landing, the levee gave way and “a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high” came through the crevasse. Weeks later, engineers used a 100-foot line to find the bottom, but they failed. The river had gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

No one could every wrap their arms around an official set of figures for the entirety of the massive watershed, but Barry has some data on the lower Mississippi, where the flood put as much as 30 feet of water over lands where 931,159 people lived. The whole of the country was only 120 million people at the time. Barry continues, “Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated, roughly equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. (Months later) 1.5 million acres remained underwater. Not until mid-August, more than four months after the first break in a mainline Mississippi River levee, did all the water leave the land.”

The scale and scope is too big for a series of movies, and maybe that’s why it isn’t in the common zeitgeist. The rural nature of the landscape plays a part here, too. Could you imagine if this could have somehow happened on that scale on the east coast? There are certainly plenty of characters you could draw from. This book fixates on Hoover, of course, and on a few of the key locales. But, then, who would be the antagonists. Here’s one.

The good ol’ boy club of New Orleans would be another. Bankers, the New Orleans establishment and nothing but, and they wiped out two adjoining communities, having made desperate promises about it to save their city. New Orleans dynamited the levee that doomed St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. A day later, other upstream collapses proved New Orleans didn’t need the effort. And, of course, New Orleans civic leaders went out of their to deny the compensation promised to their neighbors. New Orleans’ old money would definitely be the bad guys. Alas, it set the stage for Huey Long. The flood — and Calvin Coolidge’s cold shoulder — returned Herbert Hoover to the national stage. The aftermath played a big role in the great migration, and all of it together was hugely influential of generations of what would come for the region.

The current plan for the river takes some of the old hypotheses and puts them together but, Barry finds some flaws in the mathematics. This isn’t an engineering book, though it does deal with some important issues in easily digestible ways. And, then, in 1973 …

It’s all folly — and we know it.

This evening we went to see the fireworks. (We missed them last year.) They were held at the county fairgrounds and we picked out a spot across a wide field from where they launched. We sat on the side of the road and thought of the past and the future. We were far enough away that it wasn’t noisy, and close enough that it was still pretty.

At home again, we lit sparklers in the backyard. Had a great time of it, too. There were at least three different kinds, because there’s no such thing as a supply chain shortage these days.

I’m trying to talk her into taking sparklers with her everywhere she goes.

It’s not a terribly difficult sell, frankly.

Instagram / memories / Thursday — Comments Off on We moved a year ago today
27
Jun 24

We moved a year ago today

One year ago today we were cramming the last of everything into our cars, taking one last shower, still finding things to pack up, and then, finally getting in those overstuffed cars and driving east. We spent the night in Ohio. (We try not to make a habit of it, but in this case it was a good contingency plan and a great idea, because we were physically and mentally beat — but emotionally upbeat!

That night I wrote:

Moving is a terrible thing. Packing is a tedious, physical chore. And if that’s not physical enough, there’s the move part. This is why people don’t do it frequently, if they can help it. But thank goodness, thank the universe and thank Providence for movers. At 8:30 this morning, precisely when they said, the movers arrived.

The owner of the company is the former student of one of our colleagues. And that professor has hired this company twice for moves, and is about to hire him a third time. A good endorsement.

Four guys come in. Two of them former D-1 football players. All of them strong and young and confident. All of them, “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “May I put my water in your refrigerator?” and “May I use your restroom?” These guys were great.

They were taking our things out of our hands because, as they said over and over, this was their job. And that’s true, but you’d feel like a total heel if you didn’t help.

One of the guys loaded his pickup with the last bit of junk and trash for the nearby dumpster run and followed me there to help us get it out of the way. These guys were great, and they worked hard.

And so have we! I told you about the packing. Things hurt on me, and part of that is a direct result of this. Moving is a terrible thing.

[…]

The thing I learned this evening — while loading up my car, full of a “You want it to go, I’ll get it in here” bravado that was mostly sincere — is that there’s something sad about some of those last few things that you put into the car when you’re moving your entire life.

Oh, some things you need. And I stupidly put my suitcase in the middle of the back seat, so everything is on top of it. Some things are important or are sentimental, and they go in their places. Some things are practical. We needed the vacuum and cleaning supplies for the last run through of the house for the buyers (a nice young family of four, first time home owners). And then there’s whatever else you keep running across in your last half dozen walk throughs of every room. And some of that stuff, dear reader, is just pitiful.

But now, underway, in a hotel, with pizza topped with plans and dreams and contingencies, we are past the hardest, most hectic part of the move. We packed it all. It all got loaded. Everything is in motion. It is almost difficult to believe it all came together, considering where we were on Friday.

Everything that well went well because of these guys. We came across them because the man that owns the business is the former student of a colleague. That colleague had hired him for two moves and was about to use him for a third. Friends, if you get someone that wants to re-hire movers, take note.

We’re not moving anytime soon, but if we were, these are the first people we’d call. They were phenomenal.

I won’t keep returning to the sequence of events. If I did, tomorrow I’d write about driving through Pennsylvania all day and sleeping at my god-sister-in-law’s house (just go with it). Saturday would be about the morning of signing a million documents and the afternoon of the incredible guys from Ballew telling us to stop helping. We did not stop helping. They did not stop working. We were so grateful for them.

Guess what I did for about four hours this afternoon.

It was a celebration, you see. One year in the making.

adventures / photo / SCUBA / Thursday — Comments Off on Diving Cozumel
20
Jun 24

Diving Cozumel

It’s raining a lot down here, and often times, it is raining hard. I woke up three times listening to a fast, soaking rain. And then I woke up again with my lovely bride’s hand tapping my leg.

“We have to wake up.”

There’s a sentence I never hear, so I was up and moving before I knew why.

We had to get up because we were running late. And we were actually going diving. This is how our anniversary began.

It continued like this. We got to the dive shop, conveniently located next to our resort, a bit late. They hustled us off to a shuttle right away. The driver took us down to the famed 5th Avenue, where we met today’s host, David, who was also our dive master yesterday.

This poor guy has to put up with us for two days in a row. We followed him to the ferry, and we crossed the 10-mile straight between the mainland and Cozumel. He guided us through some cenote caverns yesterday, and now this.

We arrived in Cozumel and David flagged down a cab. We rode 25 minutes down the coastline to another resort. We walked through the housing area, beyond the pools and he pointed out where lunch would not be held, and where we would, later, depart for our dive. Lunch had been moved from a nice modern building near the beach, back 200 yards to the main building as a weather consideration.

Over a bad lunch — one which made us happy we didn’t stay there, as we briefly considered — I wondered aloud how it was that the weather was risky enough to move the food, but we’re going diving in it. The weather, this afternoon, was merely hot, and humid. And this was how we sat around for an extra time for our boat to arrive so that we could go dive.

Eventually, though …

We slipped below the energetic surface of the sea. Of course one of the first things I saw was a giant brown bowl sponge.

And then some more of those.

This one was quite pointed.

All of the little reef fish were out on their afternoon reef fish business. The visibility was limited by the region’s weather. The good news for you, then, is that between the low-viz and the few dives, there aren’t that many photographs to scroll through.

Here’s an overhead view of a spotted trunkfish (Lactophrys bicaudalis). This is probably the worst photo of the set, so it’ll get better from here.

I had better luck with the sponges and coral this time. I guess because they weren’t moving. We were. The currents were strong, not impossible, but it was obvious why the ports have been closed and the diving canceled this week and last.

Here’s the blue chromis (Chromis cyanea) hanging out over his local sponges. Not all of them look healthy. Also, this water was incredibly warm.

And if you think the best shots might be of the brown sponge, you could be right.

Another smattering of reef fish, and a good demonstration of the murky visibility, and a reminder of how spoiled Caribbean divers can be.

Here’s a stoplight parrotfish (Sparisoma viride) that was passing by. This is a mature male, you can tell from his appearance. The parrotfish has two appearances, and they can change their sex. They’re called stoplights because of the yellow flash near the pectoral fin. You can almost see it here as he swims along. Also, I think this color scheme would make for a great sneaker.

I believe this is a permit fish (Trachinotus falcatus), which feed on crab and can be found from Massachusetts to Brazil. But that’s about all I know of them.

I know a bit more about this fish, which is easily the best fish in the sea.

We saw three barracuda on the first dive of the day.

And here’s another stoplight parrotfish, and this one is showing off that splash of yellow.

This is a blue tang (Acanthurus coeruleus), the common name of quite a few different reef fish. This one is an adult. The coloring is the clue. They range from a yellow juvenile, yellow tailed blue subadult to the blue adult phase.

And here’s one more shot of the best fish in sea (still no bubbles).

These are from our first dive this afternoon. I’ll share some photos from the second dive tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have a few videos for next week.

The downside was that after our second dive, and our boat ride back to the island, we changed into dry clothes, and then the bottom fell out of the sky again. We had to run in a deluge the 200 yards back up to the hotel. Another cab, another half-hour ferry ride in a squall the whole way, and then a shuttle back to our hotel. It took 10 hours to get in these two dives.

Also, our romantic anniversary dinner on the beach was canceled. Weather. No one told us. We had late night Italian, of sorts, instead.

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