Day 19.186: Apocalyptic

The skies for the last two days have been looking rather foreboding thanks to wildfire smoke all the way from Minnesota and Alberta. 

This almost certainly had nothing to do with England’s loss in the World Cup semifinal today - but that was also not the end of the world. 

Day 19.175: Birthday; cemetery

Well, it's the birthday of the nation today and it's a strange one for a variety of reasons. One reason has been the weather in this part of the country that has been unusually hot and has resulted in us spending most of the time indoors. 

Anyway, I still have outings to recap. Last Sunday, Exile #2, Exile #3 and I went to Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. This is some of what we saw.

Pickerelweed

American bullfrog

American bullfrog

Eastern phoebe

Mallard ducklings

They were retreating rapidly from a small dog that charged into the shallows where they were hanging out 

There were some very tiny ducklings in the group

Eastern kingbird

Belted kingfisher

Red-eyed vireo

Red-eyed vireo

Great crested flycatcher

We watched it bashing its catch on the branch until the wings fell off...

...presumably that made it more palatable...

...and it was soon swallowed

Common snapping turtle

Ready for his close-up

Day 19.169: Exile #2's Sunday Column #557

Exile #2 writes...

Norway turned out to be a fun little town, with a surprising number of artists’ studios on its Main Street, plus a number of nice cafes and restaurants. One was called Pizza XChange and something about the vibe of the town, or maybe because it was on the same block as the town’s cooperative market, it had us wondering what might be considered an acceptable exchange for pizza.

This building, however, intrigued us the most. The US is home to many societies: Freemasons, Shriners, Elks, Odd-fellows and more, I’m sure, but we’d never come across a Weary Club before. I couldn’t help wondering if their membership had increased lately...

Weary Club of Norway, Maine

Day 19.145: Not entirely according to plan

After I worked a half day, we packed up the van and Exile #4’s car and set off for their new apartment in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, about 3/4 of the way there, a large truck, illegally using the left lane thought that maybe moving into the middle lane was a good idea, but chose the bit of the lane currently occupied by Exile #4’s vehicle. One side-swipe and a 180 degree spin later, and our plans were a bit derailed. 

I met them at the yard where they were towed to. I was a few miles ahead of them when the incident occurred. 

Amazingly, we managed to get Exile #4 and the contents of the car into the already quite full van and we were able to complete most of the plan for the day after a two hour delay. We skipped some of the planned furniture construction, but at least put the bed together. 

The apartment seems very nice and the insurance company will provide a rental car for the next few days, so things are not too bad all things considered. 

Day 19.139: It’s artificial anyway

This is your reminder that AI doesn’t always get it right:

No papercraft - intricate or otherwise - was used in that video. Or maybe it was and I didn’t have “intelligence” enough to detect it. 

Day 19.133: Black vultures

Our nature group gathered this morning at Rotary Park in Biddeford and we had a remarkable encounter that turned even stranger in retrospect. 

At one point we saw a group of turkey vultures circling an d then spotted another bird above them. At first we assumed it was another turkey vulture then someone suggested it looked like a much rarer (in Maine) black vulture. It was already flying away. I tried to snap a couple of photos and then it disappeared behind some trees and our attempts to get a different angle failed. 

We decided to backtrack a little way to get a better view of the sky, hoping the bird might circle around for us to get a second look. 

A few moments later, two black vultures flew towards us and right over our heads, heading in the same direction as the first bird. 

The strange thing is, when I looked at my photos from the original birds, they were all of turkey vultures. So either, I I photographed the wrong bird (very possible in the scramble) or we didn’t see a black vulture at all at that point but reacted as if we did and then were rewarded with an excellent view of two of them. Either way, it turned out extremely fortuitously for us. 

Here are a couple of pictures from the undoubted flyby:

Day 19.097: No Smokin’

Spotted at the airport on our recent trip back from the UK:

Day 19.096: Posted; goats

Occasional lapses in my blog posting schedule have occurred over the years and are attributed to technical problems whether the technical problems were computer or human in nature. One such lapse happened this week. A fully written and illustrated post about our nature group bird sightings sat in draft form for 36 hours for reasons I can’t explain. You can see it now anyway. In addition to the birds, we saw a pair of goats at the farm across the road. 

Day 19.095: Special Weather Statement

This morning, I opened up the weather app on my phone and saw there was a Special Weather Statement. My experience of looking at the was something like this:

Moderate severity, threat to life or property… 

Execute a pre-planned activity…within the next hour… Wait, perhaps I should read the block of text labeled description that I skipped over…

Oh…it’s a bit foggy and I should allow more stopping distance while driving. Noted. 

Perhaps I should have read that first. 

Day 19.089: I didn’t really think this through

I captured this yesterday. 

It was remarkable because I’ve been trying to get my streak back to 128 for significantly more than 128 days and I finally succeeded in stringing that many hard-mode puzzles together again. Of course the screenshot doesn’t prove that I got to 128 twice but I did. As of today it’s 129. I still have a way to go to catch Exile #2 whose maximum streak is over 180. 

Day 19.087: Snow?!

This happened this morning:

Both the remote Exiles reported snow at their locations too. 

Day 19.064: Exile #2’s Sunday Column #547

Exile #2 writes...

I went down to the basement this morning and discovered this sad sight.



All Brits will know the sorrow of a forgotten cup of tea that has gone cold but this is next level. It’s a fair representation of what has been a mostly good but very busy week. Exile #1 didn’t even get round to mentioning that we had lunch and a fun afternoon playing games with Exile #4 and their friends, who were spending spring break at an Airbnb nearby.

Nor did he mention the all too exciting drama generated by a stolen phone and the absolute need for us to be in communication with each other this week. So it is that we now have a family burner phone...

Day 19.051: Bad plumage day?

We spotted this bluebird with a wayward feather on Saturday. We saw it several times during the day (unless more than one was having a very similar issue!)