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2002.08.18 : 2002.08.24

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Observations.

1. The only thing worse than getting up at the crack of dawn is getting up at the crack of dawn to start an astonishingly long drive.
2. If you turn a garbage truck over on a major highway just south of Providence, Rhode Island, you can stop traffic on all the highways for over four hours.
3. The very best place in the world to get fried clam strips is Sea Swirl in Mystic, Connecticut, a little take-out dive that must have once been a Dairy Queen. They are light, tender, flavorful and altogether wonderful. Still, if the kids who work there kept the oil just a touch hotter, these same clam strips would likely be absolutely perfect.
4. I do not know the difference between clam strips and whole clams, but I adore the former and am not fond of the latter. Why is that?

 

Friday, August 23, 2002

Observations.

1. For some reason, there are several miniature golf courses in the small community that is our home this week. We patronized one of them today, which had no moving obstacles but did have extremely uneven terrain, making it unique in our limited experience. 
2. Taffy-making machines are utterly fascinating and are operated completely outside of OSHA rules. A single such machine must work nearly twelve hours a day simply to keep up with the customer demand that its presence generates.
3. Consumption of large amounts of lobster, onion rings, french fries, ice cream and taffy in a single afternoon is contraindicated.
   
   

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Observations. What do people in small Maine towns do? They certainly do more than I'm doing. It would be impossible to do less.

But what they do remains a mystery. I have seen no movie theaters, no clubs, no stage productions (and no, you cannot count the elementary school production of Annie, starring every talentless kid in the third grade). Other than the great Wyeth collection at the Farnsworth, some forty or fifty miles from here, there seem to be no real museums (I do not regard as "real" things like shell or lobster museums, sorry). It seems unlikely that there is a significant symphony orchestra or ballet troupe nearby.

Still, they must do something. I'm just sure of it. Well, pretty sure.

Here are some of the things that I suspect occupy their time.

1. They have jobs, of some sort. The puzzlement, though, is the complete absence of large employers. The largest in the area seems to be Dragon Cement, or maybe the quarry. Restaurants are almost all local; even the number of McDonalds is quite small. People repair sailboats, or fix small engines, or run jigsaw puzzle stores in a shack in their back yards. 
2. They catch lobsters. Everybody catches lobsters. It's Phil's Sailboat Repair and Fresh Lobster, Jimmy's Small Engines Fixed and Lobsters Shipped, or Jigsaw Puzzles and Lobsters for Sale. It is universal.
3. They paint their houses, perhaps continually, as the houses all appear to be freshly painted.
4. They groom their gardens. Many yards host large and meticulously groomed gardens. As anyone with a garden knows, this can take an arbitrarily large amount of time.
5. They attend meetings of the Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons (Thursday nights on or before the full moon, according to the sign at the edge of town).

Other than that, I have no clue.
 

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Observations.

1. We have named the two seagulls that sit on top of our roof Binge and Purge.
2. Once, yesterday, Helen tossed a chicken bone over the railing and into the bay below. A seagull, which moments before had been sitting on our roof, swooped down to the water, catching and swallowing the bone just an instant after it hit the surface.
3. Seagulls, scavengers by nature, often bring food back to their young where they regurgitate it, both to feed their young, and to teach them how to eat.
   
   

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Observations.

1. I turn out to be able to invent things in my sleep. Literally. It's weird. The particular thing I invented in a dream this morning was worked out in sufficient technical detail before I awoke that all I have to do now is write it down.
2. The Mel Gibson movie that featured this invention in a subsequent dream was quite good, and I recommend that you see it when it comes out in theaters.
3. Seagulls sound lonely; crows sound angry. Sunset over a placid bay seems peaceful; light rain at sunrise seems cozy. Yet none of these things is true.
4. People who do not name boats for puns name them for obscurity, as the names Thetis and Tensegrity demonstrate.

Monday, August 19, 2002

Observations. 

1. Fresh Maine lobster is really, really good.
2. Lobster is quite filling, especially when eaten in large quantity and accompanied by small mountains of French fries.
3. It is apparently not possible to actually explode as a result of consuming massive amounts of rich food (thus the Mr. Creosote episode may have been fictional). It is possible, however, to come really, really close.

Sunday, August 18, 2002

Observations. Today I did little other than:

1. Regret the past,
2. Revel in the present,
3. Fear the future.

Is that bad, or wrong? Could I have, should I have, done something else? And, if so, what?

© 2001-2002 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved