That said... what an unusually mild winter we're having!

Yesterday wrapped up February school vacation. We're not skiiers or island hoppers (skiing looks fun, but it's the island hopping I could really envy), so we generally stick around. This week's been warm enough to go on a couple of really great walks. Watching my lovely girls "discover" a shallow pool along a trail through the woods of our town's little nature center took me back about four decades.

For a couple years when I was really little, our family lived in a college town just outside Boston. The college campus had a little pond. One fall day my mother packed a picnic and we sat on the grass by the pond and had lunch, then played around for a while. I couldn't have been more than 6. I distinctly remember the sensations of that day; the "ploop" sound of little stones tossed into the water, the endless circles of ripples they made, rough twigs in my hand and the sounds they made flicking mud and water around, cool damp moss at the pond's edge, brightly colored leaves floating about.  I remember it as a Huge Adventure.

I want my girls to have so many memories like this that they don't seem unique. I hope each of my daughters will walk in the woods as an adult and feel that it's a familiar thing, a thing she grew up doing with her mother and her sister who love her beyond measure, so that whenever she does it it's a comfort on some very basic level.  Assuming we can continue to avoid both poison ivy and Lyme Disease, we appear to be on track for these happy woodsy memories to be so plentiful they blur together.

Yesterday afternoon they came across this mushy puddly place in the woods and pretended it was Degoba and they were Yoda and Luke Skywalker. That's a memory I might single out, even if they don't.

September, ur doin it wrong.

Yeah right. Being "present in your present" is all well and good when there's crisp, dry air, and sunshine warm enough to comfort but not so hot you're sweating before you burn your first calorie of the day. Not so easy from beneath a damp sticky air mass that hangs like a mouldering blanket over everything for days on end. Late September, and I am running air conditioners just to prevent me from pulling my remaining hair out. Who wants to buy pumpkins in this weather? I ask you.

Actually, it's getting better. I should quit my whining and focus on the fact that in a mere few months, a run of days like this will be an impossible dream. All too soon, there will be cold and damp to complain about.

So, remember Mr. Sandyshoes and I got to spend a few days in Maine at the beginning of the summer? And remember I'd said I was going to plug our hotel, etc.? Of course you don't. But we did that, and I said that. Accordingly:

We stayed at the lovely Blue Nose Inn, a pleasant stroll from central Bar Harbor, with great views of Frenchman Bay. The hotel is attractive and comfortable. There's a hot tub, steam room, and pool, which we used, and exercise equipment, which we didn't. There's a bar and a pianist playing nightly in the "Great Room," which made for an enjoyable nightcap (and when did I become someone who enjoys a "nightcap"? Is this not something one's parents used to do? Sigh.) One evening there was a wine-and-cheese reception hosted by the manager. It was interesting talking with him about the similarities and differences between the tourist-dependent, seasonal economies of Bar Harbor and Cape Cod. Don't ask me why it was interesting, because I can't remember a thing we said; I was on vacation. But I know I enjoyed the conversation, which I could not have had it been dull.

What else? We loved dinner at Cafe This Way. It's a cool setting... tables set up in a converted-garage (though it isn't, I asked) feeling space, full of books and original artwork. Hard to describe. Check their website for pictures (caution:  the font is damn near unreadable. Why do people do that?). The food was so good that we went back the next morning for an equally terrific breakfast, and will make a point to revisit it if we're ever in Bar Harbor again.  

The day before, we'd had an (eventually) delightful breakfast on the porch at the Two Cats Cafe, though it took a while to get seated, and after that a bizarrely long while before anyone took our order. We waited and waited. I was this close to leaving, but it turned out fine. I guess they were having a tough morning. A lady at the table next to us sent back her coffee because it was too hot, and her pancakes because she thought they were mushy (maybe they were, who knows. Ours were fine). Sent back coffee because it was too hot, though! Can you imagine? Steven Wright had a joke: "This pizza's too hot. I think we should send it back." Restaurant people must just shake their heads sometimes.

Something that amused us in Acadia National Park: We were parked at one of its famous natural features... Thunder Hole, I think, though the tide wasn't right for making the thundering sound it's named for... and, after climbing around on the rocks a bit, came back to the car, ready to move on.  A small group of people were gathered behind the car next to ours, pointing at something, and saying things like "ooh! Look! Right in the parking lot!" and we looked in the direction they were pointing, and there was nothing there. Unless... wait, they couldn't mean... that seagull? Ayuh, they did. A whole family of tourists was beside themselves at this incredible wildlife sighting. They all looked sane, but what the? I took a peek at their license plate: Indiana. So I assume this was the morning of the very first day of their very first Maine vacation, and that they'd arrived in darkness the night before... and that they don't have landfills where they come from.

Naturally we had way too much fun pointing out those wily, elusive seagulls to one another on the rest of the trip.  I'm told we have them here at home, too. If it's not too humid tomorrow I might try to find one.

A great time-lapse video of the lunar eclipse I didn't see first hand

It was cloudy here last night so I only heard the music. (Wait, what?)

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Heh heh. Let's pee in it. Heh.

It appears Beavis and Butt-head are alive and well and living in Wyoming.

And as much as it pains me to admit it, I thought that was pretty funny.

Though it would have served 'em right if the timing of their antics had been off. Old Faithful blasts thousands of gallons of scalding water 150 feet into the air every hour and a half...-ish.

Ah well. These two will have to get their Darwin Awards by some other inglorious route.

Are we stupid?

Yes. Yes, we are.

On the upside, environmental geologists will never be out of work.

Oooh, look!

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is especially gorgeous. I'm not posting it directly because it's not a NASA picture, so the copyright is private. Go see! Of course, that link will be to a different picture tomorrow, so if for some VERY odd reason you don't check this blog daily, go find the APOD for December 12 2008.

Nice, hm?

Tonight's full moon will be lovely too, if we can see it, which seems unlikely because it's been overcast and raining for about six months now. OK, a few days. But still.

Opening Season

Memorial Day weekend. Though the solstice is weeks away, this is the symbolic start of Cape Cod summer. Route 6 is packed with everyone coming down to Open the House for The Season. BJs was packed with people stocking up this morning. Well, good for you guys. Someday maybe I'll have something to open for the season, but with two college tuitions looming on the financial horizon I kind of doubt it. I also feel that for me, one house is enough of an anchor, though I am delighted that mine is where it is.

(Oh wait, does a shed count? Mr. S. is building us a shed, which I'm sure to be Opening for The Season for the rest of my natural life :).)

It's been an absolutely glorious Spring. Lots of sunshine and cool breezes, and the temps haven't been much above 60 (F), which I think is just perfect. Last week a friend remarked what a warm Spring we've had, and I laughed, because I'd been about to say the opposite. We're both right. Daytime highs haven't been as warm as in past years, but we also haven't had a frost in weeks. It's all good.

So the daffodils are done and the forsythia's faded, but the rhododendrons are rocking and the oak leaves are opening. Which means the caterpillars are crunching. Hopefully we won't be hit too hard by those this year. The past two caterpillar seasons have been like a plague - really revolting. The trees need a break to recover.

This is also the year for the 17-year cicada. I hate them, hate them, hate them. Which is irrational, because they don't bite or sting. They just hang out in trees making a god awful racket, and blunder noisily through the air, clumsy and stupid, banging into everything. Years ago a friend changed my mindset about them a bit by pointing out it's as if they're saying "whoa... how do you fly this thing???...." then, crash. And it does help to see them as ridiculous rather than loathsome, particularly if I happen to be what they're crashing into. But I still hate 'em.

In my brief search for cicada links, the top sites I found were owned by people who love the damn things. Cicadamania.com ("are you ready for Brood XIV?") warns that if you have a shellfish allergy, you shouldn't eat them.

That's right.

Wherever your season and/or wings are opening, I wish you a joyous and relatively collision-free time of it.

Where the (sorta) Wild Things Are

We get the usual mix of suburban "wild"life at our house. Racoons eat the girls' playground balls if we don't bring them in overnight, and skunks do their stinky thing every so often. We've had a half dozen deer in the yard more than a few times. I'm sure that coyotes see us, whether or not we see them, although one day a big one loped down the driveway casual as anything, right as I was unloading the groceries. I yelled at it to scram and it just stared at me like "uh, you and what army?" Yikes.

Yesterday during breakfast, the Bean hollered that she saw a REALLY BIG BIRD! ON THE CAR! Given that she hollers like that when she sees so much as a moth on the screen door, my first thought was "sparrow." But sure enough, there was a big ol' bird of prey just hanging out on top of the car. Quick, to the window! We stood very still watching it for a while. The novelty of a hawk chillaxn (heh) on the sunroof a few feet from the house warranted a few moments of video (Mr. Sandy is away with the still camera, dang it! I can't post a pic!). It stood, sat, stood, sat, shifted its weight around, and settled in for a while. So long that the girls went back to their raisin toast and told me to alert them if something interesting happened.

People just don't say about me, "now there's someone who knows her raptors," and that's probably not going to change any time soon. Paging through my Peterson's guide to Eastern Birds, I now see that I noticed all the wrong things, if I want to be able to tell hawks apart. It had bright yellow legs! Yah. They all do. It had brown and white flecked belly and brown upper parts! Yah... all the immature ones do. It had a banded tail! Yah... they mostly all do. I failed to notice whether it had yellow or red eyes, a notched or rounded tail, a stripe over its eye, or any other critical identifying characteristic. I'm quite sure it was a young 'un, and I hope it was an endangered species, cause we have a family of four of them thriving right in our woods and it would be especially cool to see that. But it's probably the Exceedingly Common Cape Cod Woodland Hawk, or equivalent.

We are always glad though to see anything in our yard... hawks, snakes, owls, anything... that eats mice. Mice carry deer ticks, which carry Lyme disease, and if you live on Cape Cod, your risk of getting Lyme is many times what it would be if you lived most anywhere else -- greater even, I think, than if you lived in Lyme itself. Also, mice nest in the cars' air vents, then proceed to die a gruesome death there when the fan is turned on, then proceed to smell awful, then proceed to cost us $35 to get the air vent cleaned out. (Loathe to spend the $35 yet again, Mr. Sandy did this job himself once, and said it was the most disgusting task he ever did, no contest. Mike Rowe he ain't, but still.)

So bon appetit, birdie, whatever you are. But dude, no pooping on the car, I just waxed it.