Category Archives: Whatever

Whatever

Navel gazing

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You know that Wendell Berry poem about despair for the world?

I’m trying TV instead.

I’m not exactly sure where to find a wood duck at this time of year anyway.

Other than its mind-numbing effects, the TV isn’t doing much to make me feel any better. On the one hand, NCIS reruns (more specifically Mark Harmon) and House (Hugh Laurie!) do have a way of making me smile.

I’m wondering what it is about grumpy almost-gray-haired men that I find so amusing.

On the other hand, watching an episode of What Not to Wear this afternoon and seeing a little too much of myself in the awkward, she-really ought-to-wear-some-makeup woman, that didn’t improve my mood much.

Are there any normal, well-adjusted people on TV? Are there any normal well-adjusted people who watch TV?

God it bores me.

I found a neat little used bookstore and self-publishing place in Asbury the other day. I went in shopping for a retirement gift and came home with this, and this, and this.

So much for not buying any new books. I felt a little guilty, but happy to have discovered a book shop where the proprietor was a reader herself and capable of making book recommendations. Probably I’ll go back there often.

My clients are one-by-one going off the deep end and threatening to take me along for the ride. I can probably predict the full moon by the number of phone calls I get on any given day.

I’ll save that rant for another time.

In the pizza place the other day, a man “selling” toys out of a very large duffle bag approached me by asking if I had grandkids. Grandkids.

Pfft.

I gave him some friendly sales advice.

😉

Probably my camera lenses are “for sale” in a similar fashion in some other pizza place or chinese restaurant.

Still pissed about that.

Anyone use Pandora Internet Radio? It’s very neat.

So what are you all watching or reading or listening to lately?

Small truths, Whatever

Your empty office

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Dear Kathy,

I snuck away during your retirement tea this afternoon for one last look at your office. Already it was mostly empty of any trace of you, but for the umbrella on the desk.

I wonder if you did that; looked back on your way out the door. Or did you just walk, with a smile and your balloons and that silly plaque the county gave you, to do whatever it is you’ll do now that you’re not doing this anymore?

How does it feel to look back on thirty-five years, I wonder?

It goes that the best things said come last. I hope those words reached you today and that you leave knowing the respect and love we all have for you. That your example and your influence, by means of the mentoring you’ve provided for many of us professionally or personally, extended well beyond the confines of your sunny corner office.

In the span of years I’ve known you and worked for you, my perception of that office and of you has reshaped itself a number of times. I’m glad now to be far from those first nervous days when I was a trainee in your unit, seated in rows just outside your door like a schoolkid, under your watchful eye. To have come from that, to where I was invited in these last couple years with the door closed behind me, like a trusted friend, is possibly the greatest compliment you could ever pay me.

Thank you for that and for your confidence in me. Thank you for being there with Deb and Linda and Cathy M. to hold me up when my dad was dying and I didn’t know how to manage it all. Thank you for quietly letting others help me when I needed help and couldn’t get out of my own way. Thank you for encouraging my move to a promotion in social work without making me feel too guilty for leaving my *home* in Unit 425. Thank you for welcoming me into your office as a friend, even though you were my boss. Thank you for cheering me on, in this, now.

Your office is empty. I’m lingering at the door with a rush of words, too late.

Wanderings, Whatever, Wildflowers

Exploring the Red Road

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If yesterday’s pic wasn’t a clue… I went on a pretty intense botany trip to the Pine Barrens on Sunday. MevetS was nice enough to invite me along, but probably didn’t properly prepare me. Sure, he said to bring lunch and bug spray and the directions led me to an unmarked sugar-sand road in the middle of the Pine Barrens, but…

Seeing this really scared me. Adding to the fashion faux-pas of tucking their pants into their socks, these folks were using packing tape around their ankles to further geek themselves out/protect against chiggers.

Chiggers? Huh?

Yesterday was brutally hot and the pines in the pygmy forest did little to provide any shade from the sun, but we wandered and wandered, with the promise of a ‘wetland’ somewhere along the way.

After a couple hours walking in the blazing sun, I was fantasizing about a cool blue pool of water and cabana boys, but…

These people were all about plants… and most of them weren’t even flowering plants!

😉

I’ve learned that plant people, as they progress and learn more, get really into sedges and rushes and grasses. This is kind of too much for me just now, kind of like shorebirds and gulls are too much for me as a birder.

I need colors and blooms and flashy stuff that catches my eye!

Digging up a sedge to be able to identify it based of the shape and fibrous nature of its roots?

Feels too much like aging gulls based on primary molt or whatever.

😉

TMI, especially when it’s 95 degrees and you’ve been walking for hours looking for the pool – which turned out to be nothing more than a mucky stream we had to bushwack our way through.

I’ll share a couple pics tomorrow of the few flowers we did manage to stumble across. I sound like I’m making fun, but mostly I’m almost awed by the knowledge and enthusiasm I witnessed with this group and wonder how long it’ll take me to be ready to tackle (and get excited about!) sedges (or gulls).

😉

In the new neighborhood, Remembering, Whatever

Clearwater

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The Clearwater Festival is an annual event; the state’s largest and oldest environmental music festival. I usually always find an excuse to go, even if it’s just for an hour or so to stroll among the vendors or listen to the music at the circle of song (pictured here).

I first remember going when I was in high school and back then the festival took place at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, right along the bay. A much nicer setting than where it is now, I think.

Anyway… there’s always an interesting mix of people to make for fun people-watching: hippie-types straight out of the sixties, kids with their faces painted like butterflies or flowers, today I even saw a young couple, multiple tattoos and body-piercings among them, strolling along with a rather large and vocal parrot on the woman’s wrist.

😉

Birds, Whatever

Birds at the beach

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I wish there were something prettier to follow up that last post with, but…

I spent an hour or two at the beach after work yesterday and as much as I love it, I’m kinda scared to swim in the ocean and so mostly I just wade in a ways and try not to drown. The lifeguards here are so militant anyway, I guess because of the riptides, that they hardly let you go into the water deep enough to actually swim.

So I sat in the shallows with the gulls, letting the ocean fill my bikini bottom up with sand, just like a little kid. Fun! Gulls are pretty tolerant of people in the summertime, especially if they think you have food. They’re interesting to watch; the way they eye you over as you approach, how they watch each other and give chase if another finds an interesting morsel in the surf. They especially like pizza flavored Combos and will swallow them whole. Something really cool I saw yesterday was a bunch of those little fish the terns catch started jumping up out of the water… I guess to escape some predator down below (maybe a bluefish?)… and the gulls all got up at once and were grabbing those tormented fish right out of the air! I’ve even watched the burly gulls try to sneak up on a lone sanderling… explains why sanderlings are so flighty, I guess.

Terns are my favorites; probably I could watch them all day. I guess their young have recently fledged and the parents are still feeding them while they learn to fish for themselves. It seemed they were fishing in pairs and the adult would return to the sand with a fish in its bill, young one following behind, and land to feed the baby… sweet! Anyone else ever see that? I would think terns are acrobatic enough to be able to do a fish exchange in mid-air and wonder why they bother to land at all.

The laughing gulls are starting to look all disheveled… the summer’s drawing to a close, I guess.

Anything interesting happening with the birds in your neighborhood?

Whatever

Gratuitous

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Add this to the list of Things I Didn’t Need to See

(but had to blog anyway)
(fair warning: it’s about to get worse)

(grateful for having laid my towel sidewards of him)

😉
Can we girls offer some advice like, “No. Don’t ever. Please.”

In the new neighborhood, Small truths, Whatever

A doorway into thanks

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For terns and their fast wings
and the silvery fish that vanish beneath them.

For the little that I have
and less now, even, that you left me with.

For the oddly striped and sunblocked
and our ritual weekend-wash in the sea.

For my books
and your eye that didn’t discern their value.

For this memoried vessel
and its wealth of beauty in bloom.

It draws my eye from what’s been broken and dusted over;
a greasy black powder to name my fear.

For the comfort of neighbors
and the part of me, despite this, that wants to feel ok here.

For the perfect pink end to this day
and its voices that animate the darkest corners of my heart.

For your lack of any real malice
and the small brown bunny left in peace to be a witness.

For all the familiar things that mock me, unseen
and the Kingbird’s solemn regard.

For having no one, really, to run to
and surviving, anyway, this first of disasters.

*This post was created on a Mac!… the only happy result of my laptop and most all of my camera gear being stolen early this week. I’m working my way through being angry… and trying to find that thankful place in my heart again.

Whatever

A new blogger among us

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Please go visit my big brother’s blog…

He FINALLY has an actual post up… some two years after threatening to start a blog of his own and leaving the occasional comment here as The Reluctant Chicken Farmer. Some of you know him from Facebook, too, and so know of his good sense of humor and tendency to rant. It promises to be a fun chicken blog once he finds his voice.

Stop in and welcome him to the blogosphere!