The Life in My Years

Friday Fotos: Buoys Will Be Buoys

Paul

August 29, 2019

Friday Fotos is back! Back after the technical issue of a crashed photo editing program and my subsequent foot dragging on deciding on a new program.

This reboot celebrates a fixture that Cora and I saw almost everywhere we went in the beautiful state of Maine. It’s quintessential Maine. It’s a tool that can be used as a unique, colorful ornament and it symbolizes one of Maine’s most popular culinary contributions – lobster. It’s the lobsterman’s buoy.

The buoy is attached to a lobster trap or set of traps and marks the spot where a lobsterman has placed his traps. The distinctive colors and patterns of the buoy identify its owner. Each lobsterman’s buoy has his own distinct color pattern. Think of it as an aquatic version of a cattle brand. Not only must the buoy display a distinct color pattern but the owner’s fishing boat must also display the same color pattern. The color design can be displayed on the hull’s two sides.

To see lobster buoys in Maine you don’t have to go to the docks. Mainers use them as ornaments and you can see the buoys hanging out just about anywhere; at restaurants, storefronts, from trees, lampposts, mailbox posts and porches. I’ve even seen them made into birdhouses. And they make for colorful photo subjects!

I got the lowdown on lobsterman’s buoys from the website Lobster Anywhere. If you want to learn more follow the link to their article Lobster Buoys Mark the Spot.

The Dying Art of Dining Out

Paul

3 comments

August 28, 2019

“Dress up. Montrealers take pride in their appearance, always preferring to be over – than underdressed. If there was ever any time to pack those fancy designer heels or stylish slacks, this would be it. No running shoes please. Men should wear a jacket for restaurants in the $$$$ range.” ~ Fodor’s Travel; Montreal and Quebec City.

“I think fine dining is dying out everywhere… but I think there will be – and there has to always be – room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.” ~ Anthony Bourdain

There was a time, back in what many in my advanced generation call the “olden days,” when dining out was an event that included a whole series of formal elements, one of which was dressing up. The whole rite could seem just short of a coronation; reservations made a month or more in advance, the laying out of clothes, dressing up, and arriving at the restaurant with an anticipation that was fitting for the special experience.

Entering the restaurant we would approach the maitre d’s station as if it were a judge’s bench and announce ourselves. With a stern, officious manner he (it was always a HE) would run a rigid finger down the list of reservations glancing up now and again in appraisal of our appearance. Once satisfied that we were worthy of gaining entrée he would snap into an about face and, walking ramrod straight as if it were a changing of the guard, lead us to our table. Once at the table he would pull out chairs for the ladies and present each of us with a menu, treating the bill of fare with all the reverence befitting an official document.

The server, often outfitted with a starched white apron and a white linen napkin draped over an arm would take the cocktail order and explain the specials in a manner only slightly less affected than the maitre d’s. No there would be no perky, server bouncing to the table and chirping, “Hi I’m Brittany and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.”

How I Spent My Vacation – Or A Trip to a Tire Fire

Paul

16 comments

August 14, 2019

Tire fire; (chiefly US, idiomatic) A disaster; a chaotic person, thing, or situation. ~ Wiktionary.
Before all you travel bloggers, all of you friends of travel bloggers, all of you who read travel blogs, all of you apostles of Rick Steves, all of you who watch Travel Channel 24/7, all of you who travel extensively, all of you who travel vicariously and all of you who possess a measure of common sense and caution pose the question you’ll be aching to ask after reading this post, let me give you the answers.
Yes, I was penny wise and pound foolish and next time I’ll buy travel insurance. I know I’m uprooting the fun of clucking at me for a conscious blunder that cost me a couple thousand dollars. And yep, I’m admitting to my financial malfeasance and in promising never to do it again I’m pooping the “I told you so” party before the first chips and dip have been set out, but to quote that annoying new fangled phrase, “Sorry, not sorry.”
Waldoboro, population 5,000 give or take, is classic, serene, vintage old coastal Maine. It’s a downtown strip of brick buildings. It’s the inescapable, at least in rural Maine, whitewashed Protestant wooden church fronted by a whitewashed steeple tucked in a surrounding green countryside. It’s a bucolic place dotted with farms, worn barns, aged homes and white picket fences all frequently and unabashedly splashed with the red, white and blue of American flags, banners and bunting. It’s a clearly proud patriotic area with a history that goes back to the 18th century. Located on the Medomack River, Waldoboro became a shipbuilding city where tall ships were constructed in the shipyard and then at high tide floated to the mouth of the river and out into Muscongus Bay.
Le Vatout is a bed and breakfast located just outside of downtown Waldoboro. Our innkeepers Dominika and Linda are gracious hosts running the inn housed in a former farmhouse that was built in the 1830’s. There’s a bit of charming funkiness to the place, particularly the large garden which provides a small green nook where I relaxed one evening with a mystery novel. The grounds are decorated with an assortment of colored lights and gewgaws, particularly the ubiquitous colorful lobster buoys that lobstermen use to mark the location of their traps. The buoys are a common decoration, seen hanging in gardens, from lamposts, on front porches and anywhere else that might seem appropriate to display this symbol of Maine’s crustacean bounty. It was here in this ideal of quiet Americana on a muggy early morning that our vacation turned into a tire fire.

Preflight Checklist (Or Tales of Travel Trauma)

Paul

9 comments

July 23, 2019

“A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking.” – Earl Wilson
Here it is late July and I’ve done almost nada as far as the blog goes. Life gets in the way. I would add work but I’m retired. Now work consists of household chores. The jury, being my own whims, is still out and arguing about whether or not I like retirement. There are times when I feel like my time can be better spent than puttering about the yard and cleaning the toilet bowls. And when I’ve grown sick of chores and projects there are times when I want to tear my eyeballs out just to relieve the boredom. And then there are times when I think retirement is a gift from god. Okay let’s give credit where credit is due because god had nothing to do with it. Retirement has been a gift from FDR for Social Security (such as it is) and LBJ for Medicare.
One of the definite perks of retirement is being able to take a three week vacation and not worry about all the work related madness. For the first time in over 40 years I’m taking three weeks. There’s only been one time in my work life when I took three weeks off and that was to take a trip to Italy. I was single at the time and the job wasn’t one that I was particularly married to, so when my boss denied my request I told him I was going anyway. I added that if he thought that he could hire and train someone to my experience level before three weeks expired then he was certainly a better man than I. He bade me bon voyage and told me my job would be waiting for me when I got back. I never again had the sand to try to pull off that kind of power play.

Truths That Should Be Self-Evident (but often are not)

Paul

25 comments

July 7, 2019

The long (for some) Independence Day weekend is approaching its waning hours. Independence Day and the long weekend (for some) that goes with it is our yearly observance of all that is perceived as good in America and is supposed to honor what has long been called the great governmental experiment. Characterized by picnics, parades, barbecues, concerts and fireworks (both legal and not so much) we’re encouraged every year to take a moment and put down the hot dog and beer and reflect on The Declaration of Independence, that groundbreaking document that started it all.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…begins the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. Two hundred and forty-three years ago this weekend that document defined those truths; men (and women since at some later point in the continuum we decided that women are people also) are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The whole notion of self-evident should assume that these truths are the low hanging fruit of rights. But it seems that we’re struggling, can’t seem to snatch the apples right in front of the national face. I could turn this into an elaborate treatise about how we’ve been buggering that part of the Declaration for two and a half centuries….but I won’t. I’m leaving that to the pundits and bloggers who like to get their hands (or any other parts) dirty.

Instead I’ve taken a more tongue in cheek route and challenged myself to come up with some other truths that should be self-evident to any reasonable person with manners and taste.

A Running Story – Love and Friendship

Paul

2 comments

June 25, 2019

“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other.” ~ J. K. Rowling

This is a story about running.

For most of my life, beginning in high school you could define me in a number of ways; many of them somewhat tainted I would imagine. But above all, since the day that I joined my high school’s cross country team I could best be defined as a runner.

It was what I did; before work, during work, after work; in the city, through forests, on beaches and in foreign lands. I got lost in New York, took an early morning run through the Gettysburg Battlefield, watched the sunrise over the Washington Monument in D.C and ran between the columns of the Piazza San Pietro in the Vatican. Running was rooted in who I was. It both satisfied me and frustrated me to the point of throwing away a few pairs of perfectly good running shoes and swearing I would never run again. At times the ups and downs of running strained my marriage.

Unlike many runners I’ve never romanticized running. The whole notion of crediting running with opening some mystical window that reveals the meaning of life has always made as much sense to me as pouring a fine old single malt Scotch into the toilet. While I’ve loved the highs of running and hated down times with a blind rage I never bought into the mumbo jumbo, that absurd sports voodoo, of running as some sort of spiritual panacea. There’s never been any zen involved. It’s just exercise that occasionally provided the added bonus of sightseeing. It didn’t provide me with any philosophical insights or solve my problems or relieve stress. It certainly wasn’t going to get me closer to God unless I was unlucky enough for my heart to seize up in mid-stride and in that case there was never any guarantee that I wouldn’t end up looking for the ice water station in that other place.

This is also a story of my dearest friend Ivy (not her real name) who I met at a former workplace. She came from war torn Southeast Asia when she was a baby. When we met I was 45 and she was 25. I was a buyer and Ivy was the overqualified Microsoft certified IT person; both of us marooned on the dreary, godforsaken island of industrial distribution.

Not Friday Fotos and Not The Post on the San Francisco Botanical Garden

Paul

17 comments

June 14, 2019

The featured photo was taken at the San Francisco Botanical Garden and processed through my editing program just prior to the program croaking.
The original intent for this post was a photo essay on The San Francisco Botanical Garden, a 55 acre urban oasis of plants and flowers in Golden Gate Park. Try as you might though you’ll find no photos, save the cover, of the San Francisco Botanical Garden. That’s not to say that I was in any way lazy and put off taking the photos. It was two Saturdays of walking miles and taking well over a hundred exposures. So, yes, there are photos of the garden. They’re just, let’s say, still in fermentation. I will post no photo before it’s time. As a result I’ve changed the title from Friday Fotos – The SF Botanical Garden to Not Friday and Not The Post on the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
While preparing photos for my post on the S.F Botanical Garden that is now the Not Friday and Not The Post on the San Francisco Botanical Garden, my Photoshop Elements program went into convulsions before apparently expiring to that big hard drive in the sky. My own attempts to resuscitate the program all failed and so I combed the online forum, a resource which I’ve always found to be a running chronicle of good intentions, trial, disappointment and repetition. After pouring through the usual forum thread of frustration and with my PSE program in its final death throes I went to one final act of desperation and looked for a phone number to contact Adobe support. I was left speechless when I actually found a number. Speechless turned out to be the operative word because as the story unfolded there wouldn’t be much speech to speak of … so to speak.

As a result of that phone call this Not Friday and Not The Post on the San Francisco Botanical Garden is now just a venting of the spleen; billingsgate, to use one of my favorite words. And why not? A good venting is often a pleasurable thing. I’ve found that venting can be sort of like going without underwear for a few hours. It’s an airing out that has a refreshing quality about it. And what better place to take off my underwear than at Adobe.

Not Friday and Not The Post on the San Francisco Botanical Garden

Paul

17 comments

June 14, 2019

The Genius of Baseball

Paul

6 comments

June 7, 2019

“It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.”
Bill Vaughn, American author and essayist.

Coming out of the concourse at Candlestick Park I gazed on the greenest thing I’d ever seen. I was 8 years old when I caught that first wondrous glimpse of a sea of the most perfect grass you’ll ever lay your eyes upon. To an 8 year old that field seemed boundless. It’s a rite of passage, that first ever professional baseball game. Looking out at the field is only one of the colors of the sensory rainbow of that first game experience, a stamped forever memoir. The smells that you would forevermore associate with a ballgame; the spice of hot dogs and that secret brown mustard you could never find at the grocery store, the pungent odor of onions bursting from the bins at the condiment counter and the malty aroma of sloshing beer.

Oracle Stadium with a smattering of fans in the seats viewed from McCovey Cove. At game time the cove is filled with all manner of boats

The sea of perfect grass. Oracle Stadium, San Francisco

And the sounds. The pregame buzz of the crowd filing in; batting practice wafting up from the field, the crack of the bat, pop of the glove and the players’ banter. And of course there are the vendors, hawking food, drink and souvenirs in loud voices, all calling out in that singular ballgame peddler’s accent as if they’re all from some mythical land with a baseball language all its own.
“Prograaaams. Getcher prograaams heah. Hey-programs.”
“Hot dogs heah. Get-cher red hots.”
“Ice cold beah, heah. Getcher ice cold beah heah.”

That first step out of the concourse slams the senses like a bat crushing a 95 mile an hour fastball.

Friday Fotos – Happy Bougainvilla

Paul

16 comments

May 31, 2019

The overabundance of rain this winter and spring has created a deluge of color in the yard. When the flowers are in bloom as they are this spring Cora likes to say that they’re happy. The bougainvilla at the corner of the garage seems to be almost giddy with joy.

Instead of taking in the whole I decided to try some more intimate views.

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