Last Friday evening in Maine Arlene heard a loud noise that we couldn’t identify. Half an hour later I looked around the house to investigate. Oops! Should have checked right away. There was two inches of water in the middle of the garage. The pipe leading to the outside faucet had frozen and burst from …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Global Warming Birds
Two of the less common birds we’ve seen this week are uncommon precisely because they shouldn’t really be where we’ve seen them. Thirty or forty years ago they were out and out rare in Massachusetts. By now they’ve extended their range northward (presumably as the climate is getting more to their liking farther north) so …
Synthetic mp3
Hey, I found out that I could output an mp3 from Finale. Here’s the second song the Prozdor klezmer band played in the concert back on December 23, Der Zeyde mit die Bubbe, orchestrated in Finale by me.
Crossbills
Arlene has been seeing Massbird reports of white-winged crossbills at Salisbury recently. On our way north yesterday we stopped at the Salisbury state park and looked around the pines. Nothing there, but a guy who was walking down the road told us he had seen them twenty minutes earlier (that’s the way it always is …
Materials science in the kitchen
I just ran into “an introduction to the fracture mechanics of spaghetti” on the BBC news web site and liked it so much I need to share it here.
Wild and Woolly postcard
There was a postcard advertising a sale at Wild & Woolly, a yarn shop in Lexington (actually, on the street I used to live on. I walked past that spot on my way to junior high school and high school all the time, if I wasn’t bicycling or taking a short cut through the parking …
Birds, by the way
I neglected to post a picture of a pileated woodpecker which, very cooperatively, worked on a tree across the driveway in Casco for long enough to let me get my camera, step out onto the front porch, and take a few pictures. Most often these guys are pretty shy, but occasionally they don’t seem to …
Art and Art Supplies
On Friday we went to Portland first to the art museum at the University of New England to see the show of Alice Spencer’s paintings (that link is to whatever is the current show at that museum, so it won’t be for that show if you’re reading a few weeks after this got posted) inspired …
Plunge Router
We stopped at Marden’s (“I should’ve bought it when I saw it at Marden’s”) (don’t click that link unless you want to hear their jingle!) in Gray on the way to Casco on New Year’s day. Someone was talking to his kid (or more likely grandkid) about routers, because there were three big boxes, each …
New sweater started
I’m under way on a new sweater, this one for Arlene. It’s inspired by one of the sweaters in Kaffe Fassett & Zoe Hunt’s book Family Album, the brushstrokes sweater. I guess that’s what I should call it, even though I’m not really following the pattern but rather just trying to use what colors of …