Category: Family

Walking Through Goldsmith Woodland

Alpha child and I took our cameras on a walk through the Goldsmith Woodlands.

marsh and trees reflected on waterI have a new camera, an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV.  (Their new naming scheme is kind of terrible, but the cameras are still good.)  The last camera I owned was an Olympus OM-4, so using a digital camera is taking some getting used to.

Over time, Alpha has adopted my old OM-4, a Canon EOS DSLR from 2005, and a small number of truly vintage cameras.  Today was a Canon kind of a day.

All of these photos were taken by me on my OM-D.

tree truck with insect and woodpecker holes
One of a number of dead tree trunks in the Goldsmith Woodlands. The grounds are carefully managed, and that includes leaving dead trees in place when possible.
sun through tree branches
Filtered winter sun through tree branches
lone cattail with pond in background
The remains of last year’s cattails, also known as typha
bald eagle in flight
We watched a bald eagle parent taking off; it’s juvenile offspring was still standing on the ice

SCIENCE!

I wanted to see what happened if I poured water off the deck in -7° weather. The result wasn’t an instant steaming cloud, but it was pretty fun!

Remember – this was boiling water. It would have done some damage if it splashed back at me, so I chose my location carefully, and didn’t dump the whole thing at once, but did a slow pour.

Still really cool!

Six

We all went to see Six the Musical on Broadway.

theater stage prior to start of show
Waiting for Six to start at the Lena Horne Theater

We’ve been listening to the album since the spring of 2020, which is when we originally had tickets to see it. (until COVID-19 cancelled everything across the world.)

We did a lightning trip into NYC, driving in mid-day Saturday for a 3 pm show, and leaving the next morning.

I also brought along my newly-purchased camera, my first digital camera that wasn’t part of a smart phone, so I had to take some artsy-fartsy pictures.

new york city street view

Clothesline

Inflation is high, making electricity expensive.

Our dryer died, I’m lazy, and the repairman is expensive.

But worst of all, humanity is polluting the world in crazy ways.  We collectively need to cut back on how much energy we use so we don’t make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves.  Climate change is expensive.

Enter the humble clothesline.  Two posts and a post-hole digger.  150 feet of cotton rope, three tensioners, and six pulleys.  Fifty clothespins.  About an hour of solid effort.

new clothesline

It’s a small thing, but it neatly solves three problems at once.  Plus, the clothes smell nice afterwards!

COVID Strikes the House!

covid-19 illustration

After two years, much of the world seems to have given up on keeping a pandemic posture.  I haven’t touched on COVID-19 in the blog in a while because I find it to be so frustrating. In the United States we’ve had strong anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-science movements.  They’ve really hampered efforts to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations and keep COVID-19 from overwhelming the healthcare system.

Infection and hospitalization rates have dropped recently, so even the most vigilant have relaxed.  Few people wear masks into stores; most employers are cajoling people back on-site.  If there is going to be another resurgence of the virus, now is the time.

So, of course, the entire family is now COVID-19 positive.

We fell in a fairly orderly fashion: Megh, Alpha, me, Beta, one per day.  The only family member not affected appears to be Butter-the-dog.  I don’t know how to even tell if she is infected, but there’s evidence that she can.  So far she seems fine.

We think we’ve traced it back to an outdoor event the past weekend in Concord to re-enact the “Battle Road” from the American Revolution.  There was a crowd, and not everyone was masking – sadly, including us.

There have been a number of COVID-19 variants, and we seem to have caught a fairly recent one, Omicron, based on both the speed of infection and nature of symptoms.  It’s been fairly mild for us overall.

We also visited Baba on Sunday, after infection but before contagiousness. Megh has been feeling guilt over the possibility of infecting her, but (so far) she has tested negative and seems fine.  After this much time it’s unlikely she’ll contract it from us.

As a side note: my boss Terry, and his mother, also both tested positive for COVID-19 this week.  I work from home so it’s just coincidental timing.

Witness to a car crash

We witnessed a crazy car crash tonight.

The gold car blew through a T-intersection and t-boned the pickup truck. The gold car’s front end was smashed, radiator fluid everywhere. The truck had some impact damage between the cab and the bed.

That isn’t the crazy part.

The silver Honda drove up at a high rate of speed and very decidedly boxed in the gold car (which wasn’t going anywhere) and the occupants got out and started yelling at the gold car’s driver about how she hit them and they’ve been following her for miles, honking their horn while she ignored them. She seemed to mostly ignore them and kept apologizing to the pickup truck’s driver, who finally said “I’m just an innocent bystander!”

I had stopped to see if anyone was hurt. Everyone ignored me – silver car, gold car, and pickup truck drivers.

I decided that things might go south. I had my family in the car and didn’t want to be involved so we split right after the end of this video.

Personal Best Walking

I’ve been on a speed-walking binge for the winter, in an effort to get/stay fit and lose a few misbegotten pounds.

I walk Aka Lana Lana nearly nightly, though a little less often during the winter.  No matter how much I coax the dog along, though, dogs will be dogs and our average speed tends towards a reasonable 25+ minutes/mile. So I started going out after dog-walking to get some real speed on.

I started walking, and tracking, at the end of November 2021 with a 28:26 average around the lake – about the same as walking the dog.  Admittedly, I wasn’t pushing too hard at the time, but I wouldn’t have done significantly better if I had.

Just over three months later, and the same walk is now a 14:22 per mile average, or 4.17 mph.

runkeeper screenshot showing 14:22 minute walking mile

Ignore Runkeeper’s “3rd fastest” headline, I’m pretty sure I’ve never walked so fast in a long, long time – and this has been most decidedly walking, not jogging or running mixed in.

4 mph has a certain significance in my psyche, because I grew up thinking that it’s a reasonable walking speed for the untrained, after reading The Long Walk, not a breathing-hard kind of pace.  In retrospect I think Mr. King got that particular detail of the story wrong; I’m not sure you could expect people to last very long at that pace, and maybe 3.5 mph would have been more realistic for walk that should last more than 24 hours.  Then again, I’m the one who might be wrong.

I’ve also dropped a few pounds along the way, but I won’t publish figured on that quite yet.

Nature Is Metal

Driving home, down by the lake, we spotted a bald eagle at the water’s edge of the beach, with… something.  We thought it was a fish.

Pull into the parking lot to snap a picture.  Before we could get a camera on the bird, she took off with her lunch in her talons.

Her lunch was a seagull.

We’re not that far from the sea, seagulls like to come hang out on the lake during the winter for some reason.  There were hundreds yesterday, while Megh and I sat and watched them during our lunch.

There were none today.