Baby cardinal

This baby cardinal was in the scrub trees outside my bedroom window for about half an hour earlier. First he was looking around, then he (or she) took a little nap, did some feather maintenance, then hopped off to a more open location. I realized within seconds that the move was so the mom cardinal would know where s/he was ... she arrived, fed baby and after a while, they both moved on. I have 2 feeders hanging off to the right of where the baby was (outside the living room window).

Our Starbucks is safe (for now anyway)

Bad news, foes of our Starbucks: the Newburyport store is not slated for closure (see the list, by state, here on the Wall Street Journal site). No surprise, since they just did that remodel.

But for those of you who love Starbucks, the piece accompanying the map also talks about the Save Our Starbucks campaign.

One woman in NYC, Kate Walker, a facilities manager for software company SunGard Financial Systems is "devastated" by the slated closing of the Starbucks in the building where she works - she is in charge of consolidating people from 7 other locations to that building and used the presence of the Starbucks to "psych people up" about being re-located.

I'm not sure that would be enough to psych me up, but hey, to each his or her own!

I find it interesting that none of the numerous Starbucks stores in Boston are on the list. In that 3-block radius I often mention around Copley Square, there are, or were, 5 Starbucks stores. Compare that to two Dunkin' Donuts shops (three if you count the one in the Back Bay MBTA station) and one (or maybe 2) Au Bon Pain - not sure if the one in Copley Place is still there.

Were all these Starbucks always busy? Yes, mostly. The one on Newbury St. was less busy than the one by the T station, but there was also one nearly right across the street, in the Westin. The one further up Boylston St. (towards Mass Ave.) had comfy chairs and tables, which was nice.

But it's still a reflection of a lifestyle that I am inclined to reject. As you know, I love my lattes, but there's nothing to replace the ambiance (or the aromas) at a Caffe di Sienna or a Greta's. I do have to say, however, that the Newburyport Starbucks is a lot more friendly than the ones in Boston, which makes sense.

I don't know if that comes down from corporate or not, but whoever instructed the clerks and baristas to chat with the customers made a good decision.

Not that I ever go in there. Well, I have not been in there since it re-opened. And now I notice that Abe's is offering espresso drinks (I used to go to Abe's for my bagel and Starbucks for my latte).

I got that info off an A-frame sign ...

Is this the ruination of us all?

I mean this, right here, this blog - and all other blogs - and the Internet in general.

Finding that I, for the most part, spend more time on this blog than I do on work that nets me an actual profit, I realized the other day that maybe it is (or ultimately will be) the ruination of me. If it can be so negatively categorized.

And I have to think that many of the people who read my blog are doing so at work.

Speaking about the former point with a friend yesterday, he pointed out that professional bloggers can make big bucks off their blogs.

The thing is, do I have the inclination (or even the savvy) to be a "professional" blogger? I mean, maintaining a blog that will attract thousands upon thousands of visitors and make it so I have to hire people to moderate comments for me?

(As the weeks crawled by after I started this blog, I remember one night looking at SiteMeter and saying "Come on!" when the hit count for that day was at 99. When it finally turned over to 100, I was overjoyed.)

I check this blog in between calls I'm making for a story; I respond to comments left on here more readily than I return calls having to do with actual income.

I feel about me being a professional blogger the same way I feel about me writing a successful book: no way, Jose.

I'm a little angry that the mayor (or Lois) never returned my calls about the Wood Waste preliminary injunction in Everett. More angry than I am at someone who hasn't returned my calls about a story I'm doing, for which my deadline is tomorrow.

So then I start thinking about when I first heard about AOL, and chat rooms. Once I was on, I was on, baby ... I checked for messages before I left for work, I checked during work, it was the first thing I did when I got home from work. I had more "friends" on AOL than I had in my real life.

In an AOL chat room is where I met my last boyfriend (hey, it worked for nearly 9 years). I knew a couple, with her in NH and him in Scotland ... he flew over here to meet her, and he IM'd me about how nervous he was, and how he feared he wouldn't be able to find her at the airport; and I was telling him how to get to where she said she'd be standing, knowing the international terminal at Logan Airport as I did.

Then there was this other guy, who was in the military out west somewhere (I forget where). He was leaving the military and had been offered a job here in Mass. I was giving him names of realtors and suggesting towns where he and his family could settle in.

I gave him my work phone number and told him to call me if his business ever brought him to Boston, and we could have lunch. He never did.

There were a host of men and women that I "talked" to every day, shared thoughts with, consoled or was consoled ... only ever met the one.

I lost track of all of the others, so I don't know what ultimately happened with any of them.

That's the thing, you see, you lose track of people when they're not actually present in your life.

So back to ruination. I don't know the answer to this question, either (if I knew, I would tell you). The Internet, and blogs, is where I get most, if not all, of my information. It's not necessarily where I get my friends (or lovers) anymore, but it's a big part of my life.

I just spent nearly an hour writing this post, for example ...

Reflections from my yard: the monarchs

(The monarchs also like this purple thing, that's growing in a big pot outside the house. I can never remember the plant's name!)

I was sitting on the enclosed porch this morning (once I'd killed off the population of greenheads that had appeared in there since yesterday, of course), looking at the garden.

Suddenly, this tiny bird appeared, hovering around the blooming coral bells (meaning they are in bloom, not that they have angered me in some way). Before I could even register that it was a hummingbird, a much larger bird (what isn't larger?) swooped down and chased it away.



I'd never seen that happen before, with a hummingbird being the 'victim' (although I've only ever seen a hummingbird in the yard one other time in the 4 summers I've lived here).



Which reminds me, when I posted about the monarchs, I didn't say there were 2 of them. The other one kept chasing the one I was photographing away, but it always came back. This morning I looked out my kitchen window and there were 2 of them on the butterfly bush.

I never saw this because I guess I get up too late, but my neighbor told me last summer that while walking her dog at like 5 a.m., she saw my butterfly bush literally covered with monarchs.



Last year I wrote a story for SeaCoast Scene about monarchs and attracting them to your garden. At a lovely home and garden in Newbury, I learned that they lay their eggs on milkweed. I used to pull all the milkweed up out of the yard - after talking with her, I stopped doing that.

Since I put the garden in, the second summer I lived here, I have all kinds of butterflies. I also really like the little yellow ones, but I don't think they're here yet.

Note that the only other sighting of a hummingbird was also near milkweed (I wasn't so rabid about pulling it up from the back yard).

When the rain comes

I left my yard earlier (after taking butterfly and garden pics), literally with sweat running down my back. There was, however, a distant rumble of thunder.

As I drove closer to town, the wind was picking up and twigs and such were blowing across Water St. It was noticeably cooler.

I got to The Tannery (heading for the ATM) and the wind was really gusting. There was this nice man in the ATM room with me and he was giving me updates on the approach of clouds as I extracted money from the machine.

(Of course, if I had been Triple-D, I would have turned on the charm and finagled some kind of commitment to dinner or otherwise out of him. But I'm me, so I wished him a good night and left him to conduct his own transaction in peace.)

I wandered over to The Nutcracker, which to my dismay now closes at 7 p.m. It was 7:05 according to the clock in the Jetta when I left The Tannery to head back home.

Tooling up the PI Turnpike, I made the snap decision to stop at Bob Lobster for ice cream. The wind was howling over the marsh and there were people stopped along the road taking pictures of the clouds.

Five minutes later or so I was back in the car. I thought it prudent to wind up the passenger side window at this point. I saw a vivid bolt of lighting over in the general direction of the cottage.

Bob Lobster is, what, a mile from the cottage?

As I drove up Old Point Road, rain began to spatter the windshield. As I came around the curve, rain was obscuring my view through the windshield, and when I got home, the storm was in full force.

That was about half an hour of my life. Forty-five minutes, max. - it all started about two hours ago, and although I can see flashes of lighting off to the south, I don't believe it is raining here any longer.

I don't think it rained long enough to be of benefit to my garden.

Such is life out here on this little spit of sand.

The monarchs have returned

This is why I keep the milkweed and why I have a butterfly bush. Of course, the furball had to assist with the photos (he was getting a big kick out of the butterfly flitting from the milkweed to the bush).


Other shots are of my little garden. I got nothing on Mary from SouthEnd Blend for photography, but I figure it's worth a shot ... *ahem*

Congratulations are in order

Tom Ryan sent out his first query emails to literary agents for his book proposal on Tuesday and this morning signed on with an agent in New York City!

"The only drawback is that she is…GASP!...a Yankees fan; but that is mitigated by her 28 year marriage to a Red Sox fan," Tom writes to his email group.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking (Ryan's former news journal/paper, the Undertoad, riled up more than a few people in town) - and I don't want to hear it, by the way - but if you read his blog, you will see that he is a great writer and can wring some tears out of you if you're not careful (especially when he's writing about his dog, Atticus, or his predecessors).

Speaking of Atticus, this agency he signed on with last year handled the best-selling "Mockingbird," a biography of Harper Lee, who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird," the main character in that book being Atticus Finch ... but I'm sure you all knew that already!

I'm happy for Tom, but I'm also happy that there are still agents out there who recognize good writing. So much of what I read these days is drivel ... well, not so much since I started acting on recommendations rather than "winging it" or relying on best-seller lists.

But congratulations again, Tom!

I try Oregano (at last)

I had two different but related experiences today.

First, I went to Oregano for lunch (more about that later). Then I went to get gas in the Jetta.

My newest gas station of choice (although it was always in the top 3) is Kelley's on High St. (next to The Natural Grocer). They give you a lower price if you pay with cash.

So I went in knowing I only had about $15 in cash and thinking they maybe had a $20 minimum to get the good price. The kid who was pumping the gas confirmed the minimum.

"How much do you have?" he asked.

"Fifteen."

"Ah, I'll give it to you."

"That's why I come here!" I said to him as he collected my $15. The young guys who work there are really good at checking things, topping off fluids, etc. One of them got down on the ground the last time I was there, to check if I had 4WD (he said the Trek model with 4WD was a hot commodity right now).

Anyway, before that I was at Oregano. When I walked in, at a little after 1, the place was fairly full. I had a hard time getting through to the hostess that I was waiting on another person, who I was supposed to meet outside, but I was just checking inside because it was so hot.

One very minor blip.

So I was seated, and at the next table was a man eating some kind of pasta .... oh, hell, long story short, the service is still lacking.

By the time my lunch companion got there, I was so hungry that I over-ordered. I ordered a Middle Eastern appetizer, the Tripoli Dip ($9). Did not care for it.

The three dips had olive oil on them in the style of making a crater in your mashed potatoes and filling it with gravy. The pita bread was like store-bought (but that's what I get for ordering off topic).

The reviewer for the Globe had talked about the Louisiana pizza, which sounded similar to a BBQ chicken pizza I had at Villaggio in The Tannery. I enjoyed Villaggio's so much, I wanted to check it out.

Hmmmm ... it's hard to say what my opinion would have been had I not had the one at Villaggio first. They both had barbeque sauce, an "exotic" cheese, carmelized onions and chunks of chicken.

Subtly-flavored goat cheese vs. smoked Gouda; heavy barbeque sauce vs. (again) a lighter sauce - I could barely see the carmelized onions on the Oregano pizza, never mind tasting them. All I tasted was BBQ sauce and the strong cheese; the Villaggio pizza was a light blend of flavors and I could taste everything (keep in mind that I smoke).

Plus, the one at Villaggio also had red onions and mozzarella cheese. Not sure if the Oregano pie had mozzarella.

I liked the crust, though, on both.

Both of us had a person pizza ($10 for his mushroom pie, $11 for the Louisiana0, although my companion was charged $1.25 extra for asking for red sauce over white sauce on his, I had the appetizer, an iced tea, and a beer afterwards. The total bill was a little over $39.

Now my first point. I tasted the ice tea, and I thought it tasted funny. I drink a lot of iced tea in the summer. My companion said it looked more like Coke (cola) than iced tea, and I thought maybe there was some residue of Coke in it. I asked the waitress if she was sure it was all iced tea because it tasted funny, and she assured me it was.

No offer of "let me get you another one." I still drank it down, but it was weird iced tea. And I thought the room was way too noisy; I could barely hear what my companion was saying without dipping my chest into my sauce-covered plate. Conversation, music ... it was all a little too much.

Once it started clearing out, I was able to hear him.

Overall, I might go there again to try out a pasta dish, but basically I was underwhelmed.

On Clinton, Patrick and safety

I remember when President Bill Clinton came to Boston's North End. My sister and brother-in-law lived there then, and I hobbled on over from wherever I was living in Boston.

What I was particularly struck by - aside from the obvious Secret Service men trying to "blend" into the crowd - were the men with rifles atop the buildings.

Which brings me around to Gov. Deval Patrick's visit to Amesbury Wednesday evening. There were some menacing-looking guys (who were actually quite nice, when I spoke to a couple of them) hovering around, but I checked the buildings and no men with rifles, that I could see.

I know I'm hyper-vigilant, but I kept scanning the area to see if there were any suspicious-looking characters, aside from the ones I know about in Amesbury who are mostly harmless.

Of course, nothing untoward happened and the Gov. was able to, from what I read today, enjoy dinner at Flatbread Pizza, just across the walkway from where he took questions from the crowd.

I was impressed with the way the Gov. fielded the questions, etc., and his wife is lovely (I had the honor of meeting her last December).

By the way, I would not have estimated the size of the crowd to be as large as did the DN reporter. But I was amused to see this correction in today's paper:

In an article in yesterday's edition on Gov. Deval Patrick's visit to Amesbury ("I'm here to listen to you," Page 1), Newburyport's Ron Klodenski was misquoted. Klodenski told Patrick, "We need you to strong-arm your Department of Environmental Protection," in regard to the Crow Lane landfill.

This is what I meant in my earlier post, about when I was a reporter covering the same events as the Daily - sometimes I wondered if the DN reporter and I had been in the same place! I kind of wondered when they had Ron's quote in there (since I didn't hear Ron say what they said he did), but I thought perhaps he said it during a time I was watching for snipers lurking in the bushes ...

Hyper-vigilance, btw, is what made me stop my sister from stepping out into a crosswalk on Massachusetts Ave. in Boston when the "Walk" sign came on - a car ran the red light and would have knocked her flying, possibly down onto the Central Artery.

Sometimes I like to identify that incident as prescience on my part, but I really think it was more the hyper-vigilance. It's identified as a disorder, did you know?

Clinton, also btw, has the brightest blue eyes I think I had ever seen. They were/are almost startling in their blueness.

There was a Secret Service agent standing next to me, and he sort of chuckled when everyone was exclaiming about the blue eyes (earlier, he had said to me, "This is exciting, huh?" It must have been a ploy of some sort to access if I had any evil intentions. Since he stayed put, maybe he concluded that I did! ... Nah, it's just that we were standing directly opposite Mike's Pastry, Clinton's destination.)

Odor complaints re-surface at Crow Lane

Well, bless my soul, who'd a thunk that something like this would happen?

The recent odors wafting gently over the neighbors of our lovely landfill mean just one thing - the gas extraction system is not working. I think that's the one thing ... oh, yeah, it is the one thing.

Today's most popular post was, coincidentally, the one about the Gov. answering questions about the landfill. Followed by greenheads.

No, the Governor wasn't followed by greenheads (not any that I noticed anyway; if I had noticed one, I would have whipped out my fly swatter).

I like comparing what I wrote down happened at a meeting and what gets written up in the paper.

"I'm not here to make a speech. I'm really here to listen to you," Patrick told the audience, a mix of families with young kids, senior citizens, the mayors of Newburyport and Haverhill, half of Newburyport's City Council, and officials from neighboring communities.

The meeting was covered by Katie Farrell, who is the Amesbury reporter. What, no mention of the members of the Amesbury Municipal Council who were there? Just in case you're wondering - Roger Benson (standing in for Mayor Kezer), Mary Chatigny, Stephen Dunford, Anne Ferguson, Robert Gilday (?), James Lavoie, Joseph McMilleon, Allen Neale, and Jonathan Sherwood.

I think they were ALL there. Check that; I only got to cover a couple of meetings of the Muni Council, as I always referred to them when I wrote for the Amesbury News, but I did not recognize Gilday, if he was there.

I like this second version of the Gov. talking to Ron ... they were smiling at one another. Not sure what Jim Stiles was up to, though! Perhaps getting ready to clap.