The delivery of cut, split firewood means I’ll be spending much of my upcoming time stacking it neatly. With luck, this will then season for a year before warming our house.
Alas, stacking it also means feeling my age. And how!
Tag: Tradition
Blue buoys
Isle au Haut, Maine.
Lobster gear gallery
Once quintessential and now mostly obsolete, collected along the shoreline. What one observer has dubbed an outdoor closet on a neighbor’s deck.
How to really play a Strauss waltz
Most conductors try to make it melodious and strictly in time, constrained by starched shirts and gowns. Seated audiences typically go for that tuneful approach, not that humming along is approved.
What I find more compelling and exciting, though, is when the performance is filled with bubbles, like champagne, and a tad tipsy. One dance partner stepping on the other’s toes. Even better, when there’s some tension between, say, the brass and the strings, with a hint of freedom within the beats, the way one dance partner is a hair ahead or behind the other. Yeah, a little swing, if you will. And a little playful unpredictability.
Well, here we go, in the air approaching another new year.
I’ve been mispronouncing it all along
The name of the reservation, I mean. The opening S is supposed to sound more like a Z.
As for the tribe? The anglicized version demonstrates how tin-eared most Americans have been throughout history. Makes me wonder what else has been lost in translation.
Dragging me out of the Stone Age
I was tempted to make that “stoned age,” but I was of a more tempered side of the hippie era.
When it comes to high tech, though, I’ve leaned more toward neo-Luddite. You know, face-to-face and keeping people employed. That’s why I go inside to a teller at the bank, rather than an ATM or drive-thru. Ditto for fast food.
One way my family has of nudging me in the other direction is in their Christmas and birthday gifts to me.
Well, my clumsiness therein is another matter.
Here are some examples.
- My first cell phone and then, a dozen years later, the big upgrade to my S22 Ultra, in large part for its digital camera abilities.
- That replaced the Olympus digital camera they’d presented a few years earlier. I have to agree it’s a huge upgrade.
- A coconspirator in all this offered some puzzling lenses and a lobster tripod for photography that made no sense until I learned about the S22 Ultra. I was so ignorant, but these are cool.
- Then there’s the LED ring lamp for Zoom meetings with its warm and cool light settings. The way it’s set up now, I use it for a regular light at my workstation.
- A Fire tablet. An ebook author really should have one, though I use mine mostly to stream music. Which leads to …
- A Bluetooth headset that works with the aforesaid cell phone and tablet plus my laptop Zoom connections. Didn’t know I couldn’t live without one.
- As well as my Tribit remote speaker. I love the flexibility of taking my music around the house or of having hands free during a phone conversation.
- My little weather station, the one that doesn’t require wires running out to the wind, temp, and rainfall gauges. Hey, living on a windy island puts the weather high on the awareness chart.
- The mustache trimmer. The rechargeable battery device really does the job better than a razor.
- Most recent is a set of wireless speakers to go with the new audio system. I started to say “stereo” but know how outdated that’s become. Still, this one accommodates vinyl, if you know what that means.
It’s called a dolphin
Our waterfront contains two sets of steel pilings each capped by a concrete structure that sits apart from the pier and above the water line.
In Eastport’s case, these are mooring dolphins, where lines from a ship exceeding the Breakwater’s 400-foot dock length can be attached to help secure the vessel in port.
Here’s one in action.
The line’s slack now but won’t be when the tide rises more.
Welcome to Cobscook Friends
As a small, rural Quaker fellowship, we’re especially happy to be worshipping together in one space every Sunday again, at least through the summer and early autumn.
Covid, of course, had us connected only by Zoom through much of the Covid onslaught and after that, coming together in a physical space on alternative weeks only. We do live at distances from the meetinghouse, so winter weather can often be a challenge.
Not so summer. We’d love to have others join us in our hour of mostly silent centering, beginning at 9:30 on Sunday mornings. The meetinghouse is in the woods along Maine Route 189 in Whiting – on the way to Lubec and many great outdoors trails.
If you meditate in some practice, you’ll fit right in – and if that seems foreign, it’s still a great time for personal reflection. I always find it renewing.
By the dawn’s early fog
For the first time since the outbreak of Covid, Eastport is being graced by the presence of a U.S. naval vessel at the Breakwater for the city’s big Fourth of July festivities.
The USS Oscar Austin arrived in heavy fog Friday morning and will depart for Norfolk on the 5th.
The community rolls out a big small-town welcome mat for the crewmen, especially when the landing gives them their first taste of American soil in many months. (Not so, this time; they instead sailed up the coast.) The arrival is rather quaint, actually, even if their focus sometimes seems to be on the local bars. There is a basketball game between the sailors and the high school alum, too, though I doubt the stakes are high.
Eastport does claim to have the biggest Independence Day bash in the state, and the Navy’s destroyer is just part of it. .
Many of the sailors are being joined by their families, who will then continue with them on the final leg of this voyage.
Bringing such a vessel to dock is no small venture. The skipper of such a ship doesn’t just spin the compass to see where he’s going next. Rather, the itinerary is planned months in advance, with many protocols to be observed. In our case, that includes both U.S. and Canadian officials. The pilot’s plan document reads like a small phone book, minute by minute, and it’s not just about tides and currents at the expected time of arrival.
Heavy fog was a complicating factor, and we could hear the ship’s bold horn booming long before we could see the massive vessel emerge nearly alongside the Breakwater.
Pemaquid Point
Jnana's Red Barn 