Day 12.117: Singers

We didn't go to the first night of the spring choral concerts tonight, but these two did!

Day 12.116: Grackles

I commented to someone recently (my Dad perhaps?) that I didn't remember having seen grackles since we moved to Maine. They were a pretty common sight at our house in New York.

So, when these birds caught our eye when we were investigating the roaring river last week:

I was quite surprised - three grackles at a feeder. They were quite a way away and I only had my phone, so the photo is not good, but they were unmistakable.

Day 12.115: Exile #2's Sunday Column #247

Exile #2 writes...

This weekend, Exile #1 and assistants finally managed some of the fall clear up. In classic Maine fashion, it snowed before most of us managed to get all our leaves cleared away and has been too frozen for us to anything about it until now. In fact, our valiant rakers uncovered a patch of ice that had still not melted, thanks to the insulating properties of a foot deep leaf drift.

May is the strangest of months here. Right now the buds are barely on the trees but by the end of it, it will probably feel like summer.

We have an busy week ahead. Highlights include Exile #3 and Exile #4 performing in their school choral concert on Tuesday and Wednesday and for Exile #3 her delightfully named APUSH exam (AP level US History). She locked herself away for 3 1/2 hours on Saturday morning to do a practice paper, so hopefully the actual exam won’t hold too many surprises! Exile #1 and I may need to employ her as a tutor afterwards for an upcoming test we are going to have to take.

Day 12.114: Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans died today leaving her husband and two very young children after a very sudden illness.

It's hard to believe now, but at one time I had a small but significant social media presence and there are people - such as Rachel - who are very linked to that time both in terms of my memory and in my twitter feed which was pretty much frozen in time in early 2014 after three or four years of active use. During that time, I read Rachel's first book and we followed each other on Twitter. She helped me to see that other people were on the same journey that I was on - leaving behind a particular way of understanding the Christian faith, but trying to hold on and not lose everything in the process.

I've been reading back over my tweets to/about her over the years. I contributed to conversations about young Earth creationism and the competition to guess the topic of her second book. I followed along with her adventures with a robot baby while they were considering starting their own family.

Of course, she became a properly famous person (in certain circles at least) and continued to tweet at an impressive rate, whereas I happily settled back into obscurity. I met many of my twitter acquaintances over the years, but I never met Rachel in person.

I have continued to see her tweets whenever I opened my feed. Three weeks ago I saw that she had been admitted to hospital - she was sad that she was going to miss Game of Thrones. She never went home. It's extraordinarily sad. I suppose things like this happen every day and a family's lives are changed forever.

In honor of Rachel and our brief internet acquaintance, I offer the closest thing to a conversation we had (on Twitter in June 2011):

RHE: The bird who lives in our carport is on her 2nd round of babies for the season; 4th in the past 2 yrs. Her name's Pip. Must be Catholic.

me: @rachelheldevans that reads even better with the British meaning of bird = young woman!

RHE: @the_exile lol!

Day 12.113: High waters

As we set out on Saturday morning for our trip to Boston, we noticed how high the river was - not too surprising given the rain we've been having and still plenty of snow melting in the mountains.

It took until Wednesday evening for us to go an take a closer look - but it was still quite impressive at the mill:

and below where the water falls into the tidal estuary:

Day 12.112: One down, one to go

Yesterday morning, I made E5N1 pose with one of his oh-so-natural smiles:

and then I dropped him at school where this was the second of two heavily laden trips from the car to get all his stuff transported:

Around lunchtime he was heading off for a two-night away Ecology School trip.

It's been quite strange not having him around, but tomorrow he'll be back at school around lunchtime and home at the end of the day.

Day 12.111: Harvard Museum of Natural History

It's safe to say that the hike on Saturday morning was not E5N1's favorite way to spend a few hours. So it was only fair that Sunday morning was given over to one of his first-choice activities - a museum visit and probably the best of all kinds of museums in his book a natural history museum.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a pretty good example - manageable in size with an impressive collection. It was very reminiscent of the University Museum in Oxford.

Here are some highlights - including a large amethyst geode, a giant squirrel and what E5N1 declared to be a "pyrite boom-box".

and here a are a couple of pictures of the extraordinary collection of botanically accurate glass flowers:

When we had had our fill of such wonders, we went out to wait for Exile #2 and Exile #3's return from their college visit. While we were waiting we sat in the grounds of the Divinity School watching some students practice Tai Chi and then E5N1 discovered the labyrinth: