February 12, 2007

laundry list

We christened the list today of improvements that we want to make to our house. That’s right. Our house. Just got back from the offices of Coldwell Banker where we sealed the deal with our current landlady. So let the work begin! A sampling from said list:
Et cetera. Excited? Yes. Daunted by debt? Slightly. Buyers remorse? Not yet. Ready for a cold beer? Absolutely.

p.s. not sure why comments aren’t working. will try to remedy. sorry.

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June 13, 2006

more Hampden heron activity

I took a walk down to the herons’ nests again this afternoon (see here for my previous talk of these large local birds) and saw a few cool things. First, the light in the middle of the day is much better than in the morning. Next midday trip will be with the camera and hopefully some more photos with some more light will be up at the online Hampden Heron gallery before long.

Also, I scouted out the third nest a little more pointedly today, bush-whacking my way along the creek until I had a good gander at the nest. It looks like there are at least two, if not three, chicks in this nest. While I was watching them, something big flitted across the field of view. And sure enough, one of the babies from the populous nest (the larger one of the other two nests) was flapping around. This was the first sighting of any of the young airborne. Won’t be long until they’re gone…

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June 09, 2006

herons in wyman park

Inspired by gribley (who is visiting this weekend and who takes some sweet pictures up in Boston), I spent my first morning of post-first-year-of-grad-school freedom attaching a pair of binoculars (bungee cord) and my digital camera (1/4” bolt) to a wooden plank and venturing into Wyman Park.

For the last few months, we’ve been keeping tabs on a few Yellow-Crowned Night Herons that have set up camp high in some locust trees in Wyman Park (formal info on the birds available at whatbird.com and Audubon). We first noticed a few of them in mid-April (the 18th, as some archived emails suggest) on an evening stroll — they were busy pulling twigs off of neighboring trees and bringing them back to where they were building the nests. Over the next few days we got to watch nest-building activities and flapping, breeding fun every night that we went down. One evening we saw five birds working on three separate nests, but we have not seen more than 5 adults at any one time since. There are now three nests within 100 meters of each other along the path that runs along the western side of the creek. In the first week or so there seemed to be a lot of activity — the nests went up pretty quickly and each time we went down we’d see three or four adults hanging out on nearby branches. It got boring for a few weeks as they incubated the eggs and each time we’d come down it’d just be the mom sitting on the nest.

But a few weeks ago (around the 13th or so of May), we noticed that the mothers had stopped sitting on the nests all the time. Although we couldn’t get a good angle to see into the nests, we were hoping for some baby herons to start poking their heads over. Indeed, over the past few weeks, the chicks have emerged and grown like crazy to the point where they are now taking over the nests. One nest has at least five and maybe six chicks in it (I call them chicks, but really, they’re about 2/3 or even 3/4 of the adult size now). The other nest that we can see into has two chicks. The last nest has been mostly obscured by foliage since the first weeks of sighting.

In the last few days we’ve been lucky enough to catch some feeding times (the first sighting of a second adult at the populous nest in a while — bringing food for all), and the little guys are clearly getting restless and wondering what these large feathered appendages are for. And this morning was the first time I’d been there when there was no adult watching over the populous nest — the teenagers were home alone. It probably won’t be long until they’re gone, so I got inspired today to snap some photos. Hence the Rube Goldberg camera contraption. And actually, it managed to take some decent pictures. Some are more fuzzy than others, but I think you’ll get the idea…

As an addendum — a google on “wyman park herons” turned up documented sightings of YCNHs nesting on the western side of Wyman Park in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. The 2001 report said that no offspring were produced in 2000, so it looks like this has been a good year. Hopefully they’ll be back next spring too!

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January 19, 2006

last gulps of free time

It’s a quiet night at home, the last non-schoolnight weeknight for quite some time, as classes kick into gear Monday. As if to make up for lost time over break, I’m in mental cramming mode, trying to squeeze in all the little bits of everyday life that are sure to pass me by once the grind starts again. Here’s a selection of what tonight found me doing…

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December 17, 2005

decorations

We put up our humble holiday decorations (at least in comparison) last night with the help of my old Oakland housemate Rachel. I had scored a small trash bag full of spruce branches from a greenery give-away that I ran across by chance on the Hopkins campus Friday morning. A funny christmas scene of momentary materialist weakness: university faculty and staff engaging in semi-serious elbowing matches to get at the few precious Magnolia boughs in the pile of holiday greenery that the school dumped in the middle of the quad. It looked as though they had just finished the late-fall trimming of evergreens around campus and were looking for an easy way to get rid of the unwanted greenery. And they succeeded.

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I’ve spent the day cranking away on the last round of problem sets and take-home exams and essays. I’m five days from having the first term of grad school behind me. I’ll be glad when it’s done. It’s been fun. And really challenging. And I’ve learned a damn lot. Wikipedia has been my friend, clarifying most things when I get confused. Which has been often. It slowly comes into focus, and I have slowly learned how to attach my probability theory training wheels.

In one of my few study breaks today I walked north through Wyman Park, enjoying the bleach-y smell coming off of the unfrozen stream, the dogs walking their owners in the late-afternoon winter light, and some of the most intricate graffiti I’ve ever seen. Check out the scalloped circles around the edges and the cubist lite design of the letters. And the color!

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December 05, 2005

miracle on 34th street

I have been to America and back; walked into the sea of multicolored lightstrands, porchhanging icicles, waist-high candy canes lit up and planted in the ground like small totems, air-filled holiday icons (santa, rudolph, the grinch), and toy trains that patiently pirouette on on their wooden tracks; taken in the inflatable illuminated snow-globes complete with styrofoam snowstorm, santa and sleigh; seen the parade of cars a block long waiting without a hint of rushhour traffic impatience for a chance to steer their way onto the block, rubberneck from the confines of the vehicle (it’s cold outside, anyhow), and snap a picture with their downloadableprintableemailable digital camera; seen the (sweet) streetart of snowmen made out of old 28” rims, the christmas tree of hubcaps, the crab constructed of sautered shovel-head and garden trimmer blades.

Just one block away from my home, this is Hampden’s own most photographed barn in America. Where t-shirts are sold commemorating the event (“boh ho ho! Merry Christmas!”), people come to gawk because they’ve heard that’s what you’re supposed to do and we’re in the holiday spirit anyhow, and folks line up and file somberly past creshes as though at a viewing.

“What was 34th Street like before it was photographed?” I say. “What did it look like, how was it different from other blocks, how was it similar to other blocks? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

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November 07, 2005

fall in baltimore

It’s starting to feel like home here. I guess. School keeps me busy enough that there’s not a lot of time to think about much else, let alone blog about it.

So today, with Johanna home on a weekend for the first time in two months (damn frisbee!) we took a stroll through Wyman park, a wildly overgrown, surprisingly lush and quiet corner of Baltimore just around the corner from our house. The “park” is essentially a gully that separates Johns Hopkins from Hampden (our neighborhood). There is a stream that runs the length of the park, recessed into the landscape so that water level is probably thiry feet or so below the level of the streets and campus. This, coupled with lots of trees and kudzu vines encasing the trees (that second part according to Johanna) makes for a quiet retreat, insulated from the outside world of Baltimore.

The highlight of the walk this morning, was picking out a broad-winged hawk washing himself in the stream. We couldn’t get the aperture on the digital camera to open past 4.8 so the tree trunks are more in focus that the bird here, but you get the point.

broad-winged hawk

Also, note the cleanly sawed vine-trunks climbing up the left trunk here. Someone must be taking care of this path to keep it from being overrun by vine cover. But not from trash.

wyman park trash

We rescued a soggy but “professional” soccer ball from the stream but weren’t sure what to make of the rest of the trash littered in the stream and caught in the logjammed area just before the stream heads into a culvert, Chesapeake-bound.

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August 10, 2005

The eve of departure

Boston is in the past. The truck is packed, the address changed with the USPS, my credit card and the CIA. Okay, so I didn’t contact the CIA, but I bet they know all the same.

If you see a big yellow truck driving south, wave hello. You’ll know it’s us because of the unique padlock on the back of the truck: a fitting gesture of closure and security, a nod to those in the know as we leave a black ribbon of interstate in our wake.

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March 26, 2005

springtime rituals

Boiling sap in Leverett Last weekend my housemates Joe and Margot accompanied Johanna and I out to Leverett, MA, where my parents have lived for 20+ years and where I grew up. It’s the height of maple sugaring season and my family has for years had their own pint-sized sugaring operation. We tap about six or seven sugar maples around the perimeter of our property, hanging usually one bucket per tree (but on the bigger-trunks you’ll see two and, in one case, three). There’s always this narrow window of a few weeks in March and April when the nights are in the 20s and the days are in the high 40s and 50s. During these few weeks, the sap is running and you know you’re in the heart of sugaring season. A tree whose sap is “running fast” will play an adagio tempo (one or two drops per second) with it’s metal pail.

Joe (who, when I first met him quaffed a cup or more of a pina-colada mix and curry powder (to “impress me” he later says)) went straight for the sap, pouring himself a small glass of the sugar water, amazed by it’s similarity to normal water in appearance and tickled by the gentle sugar flavor. We stood in the shade of the three-bucket tree and imagined the water from under our feet being sucked into the little tendrils of roots and being filtered through maple fibers and delivered to us, through the metallic spout. Consensus: the tree likely is a better filter than our PurWater contraption at home.

This morning, I enjoyed some of the syrup we boiled down in my oatmeal. The final nectar of this labor-intensive distillation/boiling down process is usually best when you’ve achieved a 40:1 ration between initial sap and final syrup product.

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March 21, 2005

Decision point

Looks like we (Johanna and I) are Baltimore-bound. I haven’t sent the papers into Johns Hopkins yet, but they accepted me to their Biostatistics program for a PhD. Johanna’s looking into an environmental/community nursing program down there and is being individually wined and dined early in April by the director of the program. She’s not sold on this particular program yet, so she’s also looking into some opportunities that would keep her on the organizing side of things before bolting for the softer life in academia. Many things are still out of focus about the move such as when will it happen, which Baltimore neighborhoods are hip, how much vacation do we siphon off in the limbo period, etc…

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