Charlie and I visited my dad today!




Fannie Stebbins Wildlife Refuge is a flat stretch of public land in Longmeadow Massachusetts along the Connecticut River. We went there two years ago in the spring.


This time the main feature was the still glassy water, and the subtle colors of the dead plants and grasses.


We saw a lot of signs of beaver activity, but no beavers.


The old 12:02 came roaring through.

I cleaned the flying insect traps earlier this week. (Then began deploying them.)

I don't know if you follow Kinky Friedman on twitter, but I wanted to share what he said today. "During the VietNam war, I was in Borneo with the Peace Corps helping farmers who'd been farming successfully for 2,000 years learn to farm." I thought that was pretty damn funny.

Also on twitter, but also also on LiveJournal, I learned about a music video for an incredibly boring Bruno Mars song (that's not redundant, the man has some talent) starring Leonard Nimoy. You will believe an 80 year old man can be hilariously cantankerous without uttering a word! Google it, I won't link to it here.

And finally, from our good friend @MichaelPollan, here's a short video showing a small market in what must be an unbelievably densely populated corner of the world. Is there no place to sell vegetables nearby that doesn't feature regularly scheduled risk of death?

The D train on its way to Brookline Village.

On the train to Poole, having dropped off Andy and the car back at Heathrow. The photos are going to be in strange sequence from here. The snapshots and urban nature pics will continue in sequence, but they are ahead of the regular vacation pictures, owing to laziness lack of time to fix them up.

Red-tailed hawk with crow carcass, Hammond Pond Reservation. When we first saw the hawk, it was flying up from the ground holding the carcass. Its ascent was so laborious that I momentarily thought it was a turkey.

( more hammond pond )

Twilight in the Riverway.
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You can so much more in the winter. The street is Longwood Ave, the big building is part of the storied and controversial Longwood Towers. You can also see the trolley tracks and the train tunnel under Longwood Ave. The big trees are northern red oaks, old enough to have been standing by the river when Olmsted designed the park. The little ess shaped tree is a flowering dogwood I've tried to photograph many times.

On our way to get Alexis' car this morning we discovered a fresh new bloom of oyster mushrooms!

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Another series of photographs as a result of me messing with the shutter speed on my camera.



A new hospital building under construction in the Longwood Medical Area (formerly, a neighborhood).
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