Tag: Eastport

Back in the saddle again (I hope)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty much out of action. Good thing I schedule most of the Barn releases well in advance.

The latest sequence of setbacks started when I knocked a martini glass over, splashing my laptop keyboard, while talking to my wife. And here I’ve been the one to scold others about drinking coffee right over the computers. Ah!

Many of the keys became irreparably stuck or functionless, so it was time to move on to a new machine.

Things were going well with moving my files over from Carbonite until Microsoft’s One Drive got in the way. I have way too many photos for the MS service unless I opt to pay, which I prefer not to do. It’s a Big Brother Is Watching You sort of thing. We’ve been warned.

I wound up taking both machines to a highly recommended computer guy an hour down the road.

Just kept telling myself I wasn’t screwed, not between that and the fact that my beloved elder stepdaughter had given me an external hard drive for one Christmas and I had all but maybe my last two months’ worth of new writing and photos backed up there.

Alas, I’ve also been vigilant about erasing photos from my cell phone gallery and my Google photos. Get the picture? It’s just too easy to get bogged down in all the clutter otherwise.

Being without a computer is an exercise of its own these days. I’m far from the point of using my phone for most of my online browsing and emailing, and I’m definitely not drafting blog posts much less a novel there.

That said, enough of the whining. I’m back.

~*~

Just in time to keep a nervous eye on Hurricane Lee, which may have Eastport as a target. We’d rather Lee go out to sea, well to the east of Nova Scotia to our east. We’ll see.

~*~

The lead headline in the Bangor Daily News the other day touted another development:

Eastport Set to Host Record 15 Cruise Ship Visits This Fall.

The first ship arrives tomorrow, ahead of the autumn foliage.

Quite simply, Eastport is being discovered as a unspoiled destination, in contrast to crowded Bar Harbor or the state’s biggest city, Portland.

Here’s hoping the rogue hurricane season doesn’t disrupt this trend.

~*~

Here’s also hoping for fine conditions at the end of the month and the schooner cruise on my schedule.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of writing I need to attend to, not all of it mine.

Best wishes to you all.

Here I am living in a most photogenic terrain

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Others have pointed out that most of the places I’ve resided in have been rich in natural beauty. While I’ve dampened that with an argument that you can find beauty wherever you are, or at least visual stimulation, I do have to concede how rarely that’s the case.

Many places, in fact, are brutal on the eyeballs.

Part of the attraction to Eastport for me was, after all, its access to wilderness and a rugged shoreline. Good shots seem to be waiting everywhere.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m overwhelmed by the number of solid photos I’ve been taking. How on earth is one supposed to organize them, much less share them?

It’s not like the old days of light meters, F-stops, film, or even focus, either.

Digital makes it a snap. All you have to do is look and see something.

And, yes, sometimes the camera – or cell phone – sees something more.

Eastport is a pedestrian-friendly village with old houses and storefronts, meaning more variety and detail than you’d find in the average drive-by suburb. It’s surrounded by forests, shorelines, and streams that present more opportunities. No wonder we see people pointing their lenses everywhere, and not just for selfies.

Where are all of these images going to go, anyway?

Opa!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In relocating from Dover, I do miss its annual Labor Day weekend Greek festival – the food, conversations, dancing with live music, and overall happy vibe. What they call kefi.

For Greek Orthodox congregations across North America, these events have become a traditional way of celebrating their culture, welcoming the surrounding community to sample it, reenforcing the bonds of their membership, and conducting some needed fundraising, sometimes for local charities as well as the church itself. The deep commitment of the volunteers and the overall organizational skill always amaze me, and it has been fun to be part of the food-serving line some years.

Earlier in the summer, neighboring Portsmouth usually has its own, similar but also with differences, and both weekends draw big crowds, jammed parking, and partisan comparisons. Dover’s has free admission, unlike Portsmouth, which has more dance addicts.

The festivals closet to Sunrise County are in Portland and Lewiston, downstate five or so hours away. Or, for variety, Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has a four-day schedule but is a six-hour drive away – or seven if you take the shortcut ferry ride across Fundy Bay.

~*~

For the Labor Day weekend, Eastport has a much more low-key observance, the Salmon and Seafood Festival.

Things get wilder the following weekend, then the pirates invade for what’s our blowout to the summer tourist season.

What are you doing special for the holiday weekend?

Our annual salmon festival has me thinking of sardines

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The American Can Company factory, now a hulk out over the water, had a daily output of more than a half-million cans for sardines. It employed 300 people. It was at the end of the line for the railroad, too.

In the adjacent canneries, sardine-packing women had hands moving so fast in cold water you saw only a blur, according to a friend who was a teen at the time and couldn’t begin to keep pace when he worked there.

I still have no desire to eat a sardine, though. Consider that the statement is coming from someone who’s learned to appreciate anchovies in his old age.

The Salmon Festival always takes place over the Labor Day weekend.