When we visited New York City in 2016 (my first and so far only visit) we hit one tourist site after another, including, of course, the Statue of Liberty.
I found the visit to Liberty Island and Ellis Island to be particularly emotional. And with Lady Liberty there, it really would be tough to take a bad picture there.
Filed under Photography, Travel
My reaction to the news was a string of expletives that would have shocked a sailor and would have killed my saintly mother, and even then it felt inadequate.
So we need even MORE calm this evening.
There’s a lesson that I heard early and often when taking flying lessons. “Fly the plane!” Things happen, things that are unexpected, things that catch you off guard, things that surprise and distract you. You have be prepared at a cellular level to remember tha no matter what happens (a door flew open, the engine quit, there’s a fire or smoke, a bird strike) the first rule has to be to “Fly the plane!” The reasoning, in short, is that while bad things might be happening that will be disasterous in five minutes or ten minutes, if you lose control of the plane you now have two overlapping emergencies and losing control of the plane can kill you in seconds, so you’ll never have a chance to solve the unexpected problem.
This happened to me a couple of times. One time the door latch cut loose and the pilot side door popped open when I was just taking off, just a couple hundred feet off the ground and slow and climbing. Suddenly, tons of noise and wind and stuff blowing around the cabin. The plane will fly just fine with the door unlatched, THAT won’t crash you. Stalling the plane by climbing too steeply, or turning to bank, losing control when you’re low and have not room or time to recover, THAT will leave you the first one at the crash site in a ball of fire and a small crater. So “Fly the plane!”
Similarly, in 107 days we absolutely must prevent a psychotic rapist, felon, and traitor from getting anywhere near the Oval Office, and it would be really helpful to take honkin’ big majorities back in the House and Senate so that we can get legislation throught to fix some of the problems that have come up in the last dozen years. SCOTUS reform and accountability. Women’s reproductive rights. Trans rights. Voting rights. Repealing Citizens United.
Those are the things that we need to accomplish and winning the election in November is how we get them done. We got a surprise today, we’re caught off guard, we’re distracted. “Fly the plane!”
We have a lot of work to do. The initial signs seem good as of this evening, order is being restored. It might almost get exciting, as opposed to terrifying.
But we have to stay calm and “Fly the plane!”
Here’s some calm. (Ascutney again – DUH!)
The path ahead might not be flat or easy, but it can be beautiful and we can have a fantastic time travelling on it, working to reach our goals. It will be worth it. You know what to do.
Filed under Flying, Photography, Politics, Travel
Sherman, set the Way Back Machine for 2014! From the date, I’m guessing we were on our way back to Springfield for the 40th high school reunion, but this time instead of flying direct into Boston and driving north, we flew into Burlington via O’Hare and drove south.
One of my favorite places in the Burlington Airport is this pedestrian bridge between the main terminal and the parking garages. From here you get a nice view of the gates and runways (it’s not that big of an airport, a small fraction of the size of someplace like LAX or ORD, and even smaller than someplace like MCI or SAN) and to make it comfy for you while you’re waiting and watching planes, they have this row of extremely comfortable rocking chairs to use.
If you’ve rushed to get ready for your flight and hustled to get there early and have time to kill and unwind, or if you’re worn out from a long flight in and just need to breathe before your brother-in-law from Monteplier gets there to pick you up, it’s a perfect place to kick back and watch planes.
It’s almost enough to make it worth changing planes in Chicago or Newark to go into Burlington instead of Boston.
Filed under Flying, Photography, Travel
It was daylight! (Sorta) Why is it so blurry? (It’s handheld.)
1/25 second exposure?? It should have been no longer than 1/250 second at most, and 1/2500 second wouldn’t have been unheard of.
Oh, yeah. That really makes that much of a difference?
Huh!
Filed under Birds, Photography, Travel
I’m talking about the world, folks, US politics specifically. We have a long way to go before the November elections and even if we get a best case result out of that (I’m eternally optimistic, but I remember 2016…) it’s going to be insane and chaotic.
So, again, here:
Go find a place like this! There were birds and fish and trees and grass! Turn off your damn phone! (These pictures were taken with a DSLR, not my phone.)
There were folks swimming and kayaking and fishing. (And waiting for the eclipse on this particular morning, but let’s focus on the big picture here, folks!) You can do that too.
It will lower your blood pressure and make you less likely to stroke out. Which would be a really stupid way to go, especially since it won’t make one iota of difference to the evil bastards that are screwing up the world. So stay calm, live to a ripe old age, and if necessary, do it to spite them!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Health, Photography, Travel
Time to step back, take a breath, and let some of the adrenaline burn off. Let’s go to a happy place.
Mount Ascutney in Vermont, of course. Maybe a third of the way up the trail from the parking lot to the summit, still on a reasonably flat stretch, there’s a spot where the tree canopy opens up and it’s sunny and the ground is covered in ferns.
I always make a point to stop there for a while. It’s quiet and beautiful and very, very green.
There are insects and bugs flitting about and I could hear birds (cardinals), but other than that it was dead quiet. I was lucky – while I was there, no one else was hiking along the trail to interrupt my reverie.
Behind me to the left the hillside climbs very steeply and there are some “small boulders the size of large boulders,” and through the trees you can see the mountains off in the distance (looking toward New Hampshire and the Connecticut River to the east, I think, maybe?).
Even if we can’t go to the “Ascutney Sea of Ferns” in person tonight, perhaps we can go there in our heads for a while and leave CNN, NYT, WSJ, and Twitter behind. They’ll be there when we come back, but in the meantime, our blood pressure and anxiety levels can drop back down to safe levels.
I’ll see you on the trail!
Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Photography, Travel, Video
Normally I post reduced sized files on this site, just because I’m paying for storage space, I’ve been posting for a long time, and I don’t want to use up all that I’m already paying for. But today, because I love these two images so much and want to share them with you so badly, I’m going to give you the full-sized files of the two panoramic views I took from the top of the observation tower on Mount Ascutney three weeks ago. Where normally I’ll post files between 1MB and 2MB in size, these are 16M and 17MB files. Click on them, blow them up, go looking at them in all of their glorious detail.
This covers about a 300º field of view. On the far left, the microwave towers are to the southwest of the observation tower. Moving to the right in the image, we’re looking toward the east, over the Connecticut River valley into southern and central New Hampshire. You can see all of the ski trails on Mt. Sunapee, and the small town is Claremont, NH. Moving to the right hand side, the Franconia Range of mountains is visible in the far, far distance beyond the foreground northern shoulder of Ascutney. On the far right side of the image we’re looking back to the west into Vermont.
Again, about a 300º field of view, so there’s a lot of overlap between this picture and the first one, with the view to the west on the far left of this image and the far right of the upper image, the microwave towers to the south in the middle of this image, and the view to the east into New Hampshire on the far right here.
I could have sat up there with a pair of binoculars and a backpack full of cameras all day long.
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Travel
Thank goodness for the multiple steps forward in our lifetimes, because it feels like we took a HUGE step backwards today. It’s scary enough to see the damage, racism, incompetence, and outright treason being carried out for the last decade or so by one of the two major US political parties, which led to the deaths of over a million Americans from COVID in the last five years among other small details, but even with some of the evil, stupid, vile decisions that have come out of the increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court in the last few years, today’s tops them all. By a number of definitions, we are no longer a democracy. If the President is above the law, then we don’t have laws, and if we don’t have laws, we’re a failed society.
That’s on top of some of the personal angst going on, including the annoying pain and dental problems that don’t seem to be getting better.
It seems that my feeling of impending doom about July 2024 might have been justified. It’s not like we can’t expect the worst from the evil chucklefucks in the GOP and far-right white supremacists who want to take us back to the Fifties. (And that might be the 1850’s.)
So let’s stop doomscrolling and just breathe and calm ourselves. The Calm app helps, and here’s a picture of a peaceful, warm, beach and seagull, to help.
Tomorrow’s another day, I still (deep down) have faith that folks are good, and together we’ll get through this.
Filed under Photography, Politics, Travel
While there was definitely “room for improvement,” (I’m looking at YOU, dental health!) I’m trying to accentuate the positive, so I went back through the month’s pictures. There were a few high points and things that didn’t suck.
(Photo: Ronnie Willett)
Mid-parade – tell me again why they start down at the bottom and walk uphill (it’s not THAT steep or that much of an elevation rise, maybe 50-75 feet or so over two miles) when they used to do it the more sensible other way around?
Never ignore the moon.
Always go out to a play, even if it turns out to be a bit on the “Meh!” side. (I was NOT the target audience.)
The stairwell where ten years ago I almost woke up the entire hotel in the middle of the night, wanting to scream and yell when the Kings won the Stanley Cup in double OT.
(Photo: VT park ranger Pat)
At the top of the observation tower on Ascutney, sweaty and probably smelling bad, but unbowed.
NEVER turn down a window seat and NEVER sit there for the whole flight with the window shade down.
I wish that I didn’t have such a feeling of impending doom about July.
Filed under Photography, Travel
While walking through Springfield, I found this:
It’s a telephone pole near the town Commons (where the baseball field & park is) and across the street from the cemetary.
Did this get hit by a car or some piece of heavy equipment or is there a rogue beaver wandering around town?
Our old house was only about 200 yards down the hill – I’m about 99.999% sure there isn’t any water around that might be home to a beaver, so I’m going to go with something man-made or accidental. It was the only pole I saw with this sort of damage and it did leave me wondering.
A small town Vermont mystery!!
Filed under Critters, Photography, Travel
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 