tourisme

I don't often get the chance to be a tourist in my own city, so it's fun to do it now & then.

One more day before school starts; it doesn't seem to matter since the weather is not the kind you'd stare at longingly out of classroom windows.

I am sure we'll all be feeling much differently about the fall grind when it actually hits, though. I can't believe the summer is over. I spent it mostly by giving myself a huge break from worrying about the things I usually worry about. I really enjoyed it. And, now it's over.

I think I could count on two hands

how many times I got out of the city this summer... you would have to include going to a rest stop off of the Mass Pike as one of those times. And the two times I went one town over to go to a friend's for dinner. But we made those few times count.

(for the record: Somerville is considered Urban Core in my database)

Here is a photo from yesterday's commute. I was on the Gilmore Bridge going to Charlestown. There is a new condo development going up next to the bridge to the right of the picture (matching a big luxury condo development in the godforsaken patch of land on the other side of the bridge). To the left are commuter rail tracks and the purple building is some kind of train maintenance shed. I have often seen a black & white cat patrolling the edges of the big puddles.

Back to it

I've had an alternately tiring and restful summer. I took some time off from blogging because I was working on portrait projects with kids that I couldn't post, but we did have an exhibit that I was very proud of. Here's a sample from that project:



Also did some traveling, had some intense family-of-origin time, maintained my home a little bit and did double workouts while Sidekick was away with her grandparents.

And did lots & lots of biking in very unphotogenic places.

Getting back into taking pictures & blogging, slowly.

New View

It has stomped on my will to take pictures. The suburbans at the office find the view a curious novelty. This is the good side on a good day.



This is turning toward the bad side on a bad but interesting day. Most days the sky is as flat as a tub of gray cool whip. The bad side overlooks a long stretch of the main north/south highway. Lots and lots of cars and trucks going by all the time. It sucks the good chi right away.



We did get this epic green ship in a couple of days last week. It's hard to take pictures through the windows of the office building, but you can see almost all of it in almost all of its green glory. Imagine how many hours on the high seas it took all the junior ship staff to paint every inch of it that color.



Fortunately, when I get into a creative drought, I can hijack the afterschool kids to do a project to get the ideas flowing again.

Cormorants

My springtime migratory route has taken me along the river for the last couple of weeks. It's a longer route and a better workout than riding straight through the middle of the city, and the first time I rode it I thought "what's that noise?" and realized it was my breath... when you're stopping for red lights you don't get such an aerobic workout.

In another month or so I think the night herons will return to the spot where you could always find them in years past. Right now the cormorants are occupying that territory.

When I first came here I couldn't figure out what these weird birds were. They don't really float above the water... they float on the same level with the water, kind of, and Wikipedia just told me that their feathers are not waterproof so maybe that's why. The other weird thing is you can be looking at this oily-looking, low-riding bird in the water and the next minute it's not there. They dive for fish, and they stay under a long time and come up somewhere else. I was fascinated with this when I first got to Boston. I had only heard of cormorants because of a book I read as a kid, about an Eskimo girl who got left behind on her own and survived by eating cormorants among other things. While they're above water, cormorants gaze upwards into the middle distance like aloof movie stars. After they dive, they hold open their wings to dry them... makes them look a little ominous, like vultures, but they're still gazing into the middle distance, as if nothing above the water can possibly interest them.

Cormorants don't surprise me anymore, but it surprises me that they're just part of the landscape. They are strange birds.

Can't wait til the night herons come back.

p.s. that yellow floaty is a boom to keep runoff from the road confined. No one who ever rides next to a big road could ever thing there is any such thing as a clean car or a green car. Cars shed black grime and grease, and it pollutes the river. It's easy to think if you've got a nice shiny car in a suburban garage that that shit don't stink, but it does.

Wrong

I have a talent for doing things wrong. I say the wrong things, interpret things the wrong way, zig when it's zag time, and even if I do the right thing I do it at the wrong time. It's at the point where I feel like I *have* to do things wrong before I can do them right. I'm like the Watership Down bunnies, tharn in the road because I can't escape the oncoming wrongness.

So the challenge becomes: how can wrongness be rehabilitated? Like when you pull a muscle and can walk upstairs fine but it hurts like heck to walk downstairs, or your handlebars get knocked askew and you have to steer right to go straight, how do you compensate? I still want to get to where all the people who do things right end up.

(p.s. this is a firefish)