{"id":1227,"date":"2021-03-20T22:38:16","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T03:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2021-03-24T11:58:24","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T16:58:24","slug":"walked-along-charles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"Walked along Charles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We met Charley’s family at the Shaw’s parking lot on River Street in Waltham and walked along the river. The shopping center (strip mall, more like it) there was built back when I was a first year (maybe second year, but I don’t think so) graduate student, back maybe in the spring of 1966. That was on my route from east Watertown to Brandeis, so I saw it a lot. At any rate, we had a good wildlife day, seeing a muskrat, a pair of wood ducks, and a female hooded merganser with some prey that she was shaking vigorously for a long time before she swallowed it. It didn’t look like a fish to me; I thought it was a crayfish. [added on March 22: I looked up Hooded Merganser on the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s web site<\/a> and read that it eats crayfish along with fish; so I’m sticking with that ID] Charley got some photos which may show whether or not that’s right. If it is, I hope she has some good gravel in her crop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We stopped at Russo’s, which was originally a fruit and vegetable stand but has grown to a major food store and something of a garden center, and bought a couple of flats of pansies which Arlene planted, a couple of big bags of potting soil which I am thinking of for grafted apple trees next month, and a pineapple — we go through a pineapple every six days like clockwork, and were down to one day’s worth. This was a BIG DEAL! We have been to stores very rarely in the past year. There were a couple of weekends in the fall when we were in Maine and ventured out to Big Lots in Oxford, which is a big place and a location with relatively sparse population and low COVID-19 incidence, and we felt reasonably safe in it; but we have only been to a supermarket once in the past year (Trader Joe’s in West Newton). Arlene wanted pansies to plant, found some outdoors at Russo’s, and sent me (fully vaccinated me, that is) inside to pay. I spotted the pineapple and took advantage of the opportunity to get it rather than putting in a delivery order to Whole Foods specifically to get the pineapple on time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I baked a devil’s food cake recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We met Charley’s family at the Shaw’s parking lot on River Street in Waltham and walked along the river. The shopping center (strip mall, more like it) there was built back when I was a first year (maybe second year, but I don’t think so) graduate student, back maybe in the spring of 1966. That … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Walked along Charles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,14,17,11],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-birding","tag-cooking","tag-nature","tag-pandemic-year","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1239,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rollingonone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}