water music

In honor of the balmy weather, I reinstated my long-neglected habit of taking a brisk lunchtime walk around Jamaica Pond today. The pond is still roughly half-frozen, but in most places, the ice has already melted in the two-foot shallow band along the shoreline. As I was walking along, I kept hearing a lovely, shimmery, unearthly sound. On further inspection, this turned out to be the result of an odd melting pattern along the pond's edge; instead of uniformly transforming into water, the ice had melted into hundreds of tiny shards that were floating together in a miniature arctic ice flow. As the wind blew across the surface of the pond, the resultant waves jostled the ice shards together, creating a delicate silvery music of a sort you'd expect to hear being broadcast from Neptune.

It made me wish I had a little recorder with me to capture the sound. The ubiquitousness of digital cameras has made casual photography a plausible method of recording the visually beautiful moments in one's daily life, but there's really no good technological equivalent for preserving the auditory ones. Piggybacking on the appeal of photoblogs these days, I'm keen to attempt a soundblog - a place to showcase all the beautiful and unexpected little noises of everyday experience. I'd need the right tools for the job though, and -there- I'm at a loss.

Ideas, anyone?

i found your blog to be very inquisitive

I haven't been to the blog for...well...a while. So when I came back to air out the place and take the dust covers off the furniture, I was startled to find several dozen new "comments" (read: spam), many of which are careful to inform me that "I found your blog to be very inquisitive".

????? Help me out here. Please.

(Although I have to admit that this particular post is, in fact, very inquisitive, in an oblique sort of way...)

pinky, we hardly knew ye

Not the exact same baby squirrel I found at Jamaica Pond yesterday, but the spitting image of him. Even down to the nubbly white washrag he's lying on. Too bad he didn't make it; I guess walking around outdoors can't always be baby ducks and healthy hawks. I can't seem to get him off my mind, though. It's funny; I lost two clients this year, but the predictable (though certainly unfortunate) death of a newborn squirrel is the one that has made me feel the grimmest. Something about the tiny helplessness of it, breathing its last breath in the palm of my hand, has stirred a sadness in me that I can't distance myself from like I can the others. Or, more likely, the relative lack of investment I had in him compared to my human charges has conjured a grief in a manageable size, whereas the other two are just too big, too scary, and too sad for me to feel as viscerally as this. Anyway, I don't think I'll be walking around Jamaica Pond for a while. At least until I feel a little less raw about the whole thing.

long drought

It seems like a really long time since I've posted anything here, and I guess it has been. I feel like I've gone from 0 to 60 in the past month - all more or less good - but have had little mental energy (or time) left for blogging. Or rather, for coming up with coherent sentences in long enough strings to be worth blogging.

To be honest, I'm considering putting the whole blog down for an extended hiatus - more on this soon when I have the aforementioned resources to handle it with the level of thought and writing quality I think it deserves.

In the meantime, to all my faithful readers (about four) and sometime-visitors: sorry for the long silence, and for the wishy-washy nature of tonight's re-entry. I'll do my best to have something more definitive here in the next few days.

tenant blues

I woke up this morning
And the water was off
Yes I woke up this morning
And the water was off
I had to buy some water in a jug
To make my morning coff
(ee)

(I've been promised it'll be back on by this afternoon; the landladies are putting in a new bathroom upstairs, and the water was off for plumbing installation reasons. Still, a 90 degree July day isn't the best time for these things to happen...)

blue night

For no really good reason, I feel pretty down tonight for the first time in a while. I actually had a fairly terrific weekend; much of it was spent lazing around with a new friend in the hammock, and I saw Gribley for the first time in ages for a belated birthday celebration. I even got a fair amount of Arboretum time in, in between socializing. All day long at work, I've been looking forward to coming home and spreading out into the luxury of a little down time; I've got fresh veggies, a newly tidy apartment, and a 10 inch pile of books just waiting for me to enjoy them all. But instead of relaxed, I feel vaguely sad and worried.

Usually when I feel like this, I find out in a matter of days that some relationship in my life (with a friend, a coworker, etc) has gone sour, and my mood has picked up on it before my brain has. Sometimes it's nothing more than a blue Monday, a passing funk that doesn't signify anything more than the fact that it's my turn to harbor one the bleak moods that overtake the best of us now and then.

I'm gonna go through the motions anyway: good dinner, comfy chair, and a stimulating read. Odds are that by acting out my gentle, low-key evening I'll soon find that I'm no longer merely acting once I get into it.

And if not, well, what is this blog for but to provide me with ample evidence that blue moods come along every so often, but never last longer than I can handle them?

the beautiful boys of bluegrass

A friend and former bandmate got married yesterday in a lovely outdoor ceremony. I didn't think I'd know anyone else at the wedding, so it was quite a surprise to see the rest of the (now defunct) band in attendance. The four of us haven't all been in the same place at the same time since last summer; one moved to NYC, another faded from view into the wilds of Somerville, and I've been typically bad at staying in touch with either of them. So to have everyone present and accounted for all at the same time was especially nice. Could a reunion tour be next? Well, no. But it was great to see everyone again. And between the good company, the natural festiveness of the occasion, the well-stocked open bar, and the irresistibly beautiful setting between the night sky and the sparkling sea, it's safe to say that a good time was had by all.

Plinka plinka plinka.