Day 19.061: Heat wave

It’s turned cooler now, but a couple of days ago, daytime highs hit the 70’s. As you can probably imagine, snow melting has been rapid. These are from Tuesday. There’s even less now. 

Day 19.060: Stereophonic

Exile #2 and I drove down to Boston, to the Emerson Colonial Theatre yesterday evening to see Sterephonic - a play about a fictional rock band making an album in 1976 - which is on currently on tour after a Broadway run. The play has some strong parallels with Fleetwood Mac around the making of the album Rumours but without the weight of representing the real people and relationships and with excellent original songs to work with.

Here's a picture of the theater:

And here's the excellent set:

The music was excellent, and the cast really shone during the musical parts. The whole stress of the process of making and recording music in the studio was represented very convincingly - honestly as people who have experienced that (albeit in small and relatively low-stress ways) it was a bit too real at times! The play as a whole has some odd pacing and at times intermittently loses its emotional weight. We also struggled at times with the patchy British accents, but overall, it was a great experience and well worth the trip.

Day 19.059: Mid-semester concert

On Sunday evening, we went to E5N1's mid-semester choral concert. It had been delayed by snow storms, but they eventually managed to find a window when it could happen. You can find it here if you want to see (or perhaps more-so hear) it. E5N1 is in the first section as part of the University Chorale, but the second part is also excellent - especially the modern pieces at the end. The Chamber Singers have been working with the composer of those pieces and - we discovered afterward - E5N1 had also attended a composition masterclass with her while she was on site.

Day 19.058: Sunday birding

Our Thursday morning nature group that usually meets on Saturday mornings met on Sunday afternoon this weekend at the mouth of the Kennebunk River in Kennebunkport. Here are some of the birds we saw:

Our first sighting was bittersweet. This is a thick-billed murre. A life bird for many of the group including us.

However, this particular bird was - we suspect - not doing well and seemed rather listless, eventually getting beached on the mud as the tide peaked.

Mallards

We saw several common loons, some in various phases of developing adult plumage

Common eider

Common eider

Common loon

Common goldeneye

Rock pigeon

Horned grebe

Red-tailed hawk

Common goldeneye

Red-winged blackbird - first of the year for me

...and this was the second

Surf scoters and white-winged scoters

Day 19.057: Exile #2's Sunday Column #546

Exile #2 writes...

From time to time we receive adverts from local real estate agents, wondering if we might be in the market to sell our house. Of late, however, things have taken a turn and, getting no reply from us, they’ve taken to mailing Exile #4 instead. We’re expecting to see Exile #4 this week, as they’ll be on spring break but it sounds like we might have to keep on eye on them while they’re here...

In other news, I couldn’t let the weekend go by without mentioning this rugby moment. So, Wales might not have won (still) but it was a moment of pure joy to watch Rhys Carre thundering towards the line with a big grin on his face, like he could hardly believe it himself.

If you didn’t see the try, you can watch it here.

Day 19.056: Last weekend's goldfinches

We had a lot of goldfinches to try to count last weekend for Project FeederWatch. In the end, we claimed 32, but suspected more like 40.  These photos suggest we were conservative.

The easiest times to attempt to count were like this:

but - as before - they were skittish and didn't stay long.

At other times the tops of the trees were dotted with them like this:

How many do you count? I think 29, 36 and 24 respectively.

Day 19.055: Small victories should be celebrated

…like beating Wordle Bot at its own game: