"A duck...."

...that's what Milo would say, as we drove past these things.

All over town, we began to notice, there were these ducks. Okay, really, loons. Over time, we noticed more and more of them.


[this one is right down town, near the library]


Certainly, the first one we noticed was the one at the top of our very own street. Day after day, we'd drive by, noticing, but never stopping.


Finally, one day in October, I decided we needed to go on an adventure. Find them, photograph them, figure out how many there were. Pay a little more attention to them. I think Ray was away that day, and I hucked the kids in the car, and off we went, for a local drive.



We stopped first at the one that we consider "ours". Closer inspection revealed that it was the "Bass Shoe Duck". This town used to be home to the Bass Shoe factory, and this particular duck commemorates that, with its cobbler's apron, pictures of factory workers on the side, and, a tiny painted picture of one of the factories in the loon's eye.





All in all, we counted seven, I think. Later, we were at the town hall, and asked a few questions about the loons, and discovered that there are a total of twelve, though some of those are privately owned, and therefore might not be visible to passersby.

[this one resides outside the town hall, and has "blueberry" as its theme.]

Sometime in late October, they suddenly disappeared, gone for the winter, just like many of the real birds... We'll look forward to their return in the spring.

Obligatory Fall Foliage Post

The strip of trees outside our house was spectacular, for days.

I actually think I took some of my best and most interesting fall foliage shots the weekend we went to Hancock Point to close up the house.

Then, we moved into the more brown and dull stage of fall, but even that has its beauty.

Including the beauty of taking our children out for a little walk, on a rainy morning that got less rainy and allowed them that classic childhood pleasure: throwing rocks into water.

Time to get blogging again

We've been back for months now, and have I posted? Not once.

Need to change that.

Lots of time spent getting ready for winter. Gathering food and wood. Two essentials.

Unfortunately, I don't actually have any photos of the "food gathering" efforts. But, one of the major ones was blueberry picking. We went, a number of times, to a local pick your own blueberry place. Picked pounds and pounds. In the end, between the blueberries picked this summer, and ones picked this fall, I think I have somewhere in the vicinity of 30 cups. Just the other night, after our quick weekend away to the south, we came home and ate blueberry waffles for supper (and watched ski movies, as we get psyched for winter...).

It's Summer

So, I'll be taking a break from here.

You can find me here for the summer.

I'll be back in the fall.

Blue and yellow flower combo from the side of the road at Hancock Point. Just growing wild.

Reny's

Ray was feeding Milo some pretzels the other day. Or, at least sitting with Milo while he ate some pretzels. He randomly started reading the label on the pretzels, noting that they were organic, and, then, with a slightly shocked tone, he says “hey, these are organic, and they came from Reny’s??!!”

I reply: “Yup. Amazing what you can find at Reny’s.”

I have to say, I was pretty damn excited about moving to a town with a Reny’s. For the last few summers, while at Hancock Point, I have been having a growing love affair with the Reny’s in Ellsworth. Just from an architectural standpoint, the one in downtown Farmington is way nicer looking – right on Main Street (which is actually called Broadway) and in an older more interesting looking building.

The Ellsworth Reny’s is right smack in the middle of one of the yuckier parking lot/strip malls. Oh well.

A partial list of things we have gotten at Reny’s this year includes:

Boots for both boys (one of the more expensive items - in the $30s. But, given the amount of snow we had, well worth it).

Snowpants for me and Ray. (I loved my snowpants this winter, and I think they were $20).

New juice glasses (69 cents a piece. Not kidding).

Sun hat for Milo ($3.99).

And on and on and on. You can find almost anything you want at Reny’s. And, it's cheap. Really.

Green :: Spring

Note: this post may just be a shameless excuse to post more pictures of the flowers and lawn I am currently enjoying so much. Its content may seem on the lame side. The real post I've got cooking in my head (just wait, you'll see, it'll be so much more deep and full of substance than this one) has to wait till I get the photos I need.

After moving to Colorado (back in the summer of 2002), we returned to Seattle the following spring, for the shorebird migration. I still vividly remember driving south from Sea-Tac (the airport), heading out towards the coast of Washington, and being amazed by how green it was. Coming from Colorado, it was a striking difference. Sure, Colorado has some green times, early in the spring, when the hot dry summer has not yet set in, and there is still some moisture left over from the winter. But, on the whole, you could not characterize Colorado as a particularly green place.

Here in Maine, this spring, I have been struck by the green, the quantity, the variety, the lushness all around.

And, of course, all the flower and bush blooming activity.

Ray was worried that our lawn was too much of a hill, too steep for good play activity. But, it turns out to be just fine, and he and Alden mowed their own little soccer field in the lawn.

Finally, Ray on his "portable deck", talking on the phone to his brother (portable deck: also known as the wagon-soon-to-become-a-woodshed... For the full story on that, see flickr. Really, the story starts here: at crowbar, and then on towards "destruction".).

Introducing Ada and Lula. Or, a little bit about pond life

Alden yelled to me, one morning a little while back, to come and look, there were "some ducks on the pond." We have this little pond at the bottom of our backyard. Alden has a view of it from his bedroom window.

I loved it that he was doing a little birdwatching out his window, and up I went, to see what he was seeing. I figured it would be something boring, maybe not even a duck… I looked, and I looked again, and some more. Got the binoculars out and, after looking through them, decided that what he was seeing was something way more interesting than I ever could have imagined: mergansers. Wow. We made Ray get up and come look and his determination was a pair of hooded merganser hens.

We continued to see them for days, just in the early morning, before the day had really begun. After a number of visits, I said, "one more day of seeing them, and I’m going to name them." and, indeed, they showed up again. So, I give you Ada and Lula, our very own backyard hoodies.

Don't bother squinting: they are not in the pond in this picture. Sorry, never managed to get any pictures of them.

They did then stop coming. Sad. Although, as the days get longer and longer and the sun rises earlier and earlier, maybe it is just that they are there at dawn, but head out before we get up. Ray and I are also both pretty sure we saw at least one of them on a nearby body of water.

In other pond life and pond sightings: we have at least two resident turtles. The one I have seen is impressively big and suns himself on the edges of the pond when there’s good sun for sunning. Ray has seen two of them at one time, so we know there are more than one.

Wandering around and looking in to the pond we have seen fish and crayfish, quite a good number of them, in fact. Then of course there are the frogs, quite a few, cute little things. And, finally, our best recent sighting was of a pair of wood ducks, again, pretty early in the morning. They stuck around for a good long time that morning, and we were able to really get a good look at them. Sadly, they were only here that one morning (so far.)

Note: Ada and Lula are old family names on Ray’s sides. Once upon a time, if we had had a baby girl, we might have named her Ada. Some of you may also remember Esme, our resident nesting mommy robin, last spring in Colorado. Esme was another choice-name for a hypothetical baby girl. Apparently I am still trying to figure out ways to use those names I loved. So, if there’s a bird hanging around my backyard for more than a fleeting moment, I’ve got a good name for her!

New note: Closer inspection of the bird book (I prefer National Geographic), and a bit of actual reading of the labels reveals the possibility that this was not a pair of hens, as we suspected, but rather a male/female pair, with the male being "first spring", and therefore not yet in typical male plumage. So, perhaps Lula is not in fact Lula, but rather Lou, or Louis, or something like that.