asakiyume: (glowing grass)
You know when you photocopy something from a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy--you know how generations down from the master, the results get a little weird-looking? The image or text is shrunken, and bits have somehow ceased to transfer, and other bits get blobby, and maybe the whole thing is streaked or gray, or misaligned now? That's what my mind-on-pandemic-and-Trump feels like. In an effort to get back to the master copy, I've been doing things like ....

New chalk drawing! I copied the seal of New England Central Railroad, the freight line whose tracks I interact with all the time. NECR's storied history extends back to the distant year of 1995, when the former Central Vermont Railway got a name change after being sold by CN (Canadian National Railway) to RailTex, a transportation holding company specializing in short lines that five years later was itself sold and became part of RailAmerica--another transportation holding company specializing in short lines. (Thank you, Wikipedia!) (Now it's owned by Genesee & Wyoming, another short-line freight company .... Thank you, NECR website.)

Here is the seal:



And here is the chalk drawing:

seal for New England Central Railroad

... It is on the concrete by one of the places where NECR rests sidelined cars. A sign declares the town:

IMG_0755

Sidelined cars, carrying "forest products"

train tracks


Other things I've been doing include collecting Concord grapes from where they spill over the chainlink fence around the supermarket parking lot ...

concord grapes

And doing portraits of the apples from our apple tree ...

apples from our tree
asakiyume: (misty trees)
Rainbows
prelude: a train )

The ninja girl and I were reminiscing about walks between worlds that we took in England, when the ninja girl was only six and seven years old. "Do you remember," I asked, "When we walked along footpaths through fields and woods, to get to the festival in Netherbury? I really did feel like we were coming out of faery and crashing a human celebration."

"I remember it was a very long walk, and we found a pheasant feather," she said.

"Do you remember going to the Stoke Abbott street fair and getting your face painted so beautifully?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "there were rainbows that day."

Rainbows, plural.

I didn't remember about the rainbows.

Then we remembered how, while we were living in England, she took it into her head to help our neighbors with the morning milking. (They had a herd of dairy cows.) Without telling anyone her plan, she got out of bed, pulled on clothes, climbed over a tumbledown spot in a stone wall, and walked into their dairy barn, announcing that she was there to help. The wife let her hose down the floor.

wild Concord grapes

You can get drunk on the scent of Concord grapes, I'm sure. And probably somewhere someone will try to charge you for it, like the greedy tempura shop owner who tried to charge the poor student for flavoring his rice with the scent of the tempura.

Here is something else you can do with wild Concord grapes: Make a pie.

you take the skins off but...
making a Concord grape pie, 1

you save them (they're on the left), and after the pulp is cooked and the seeds strained out, you add them back in
making a Concord grape pie, 2

finished pie (not quite enough pie crust for the top)
making a Concord grape pie, 3

delicious
eating a Concord grape pie

wonderful research tool

A site that will give you high and low tide, predicted fish activity, and sunrise and sunset and moonrise and moonset, for coastal locations all around the United States. It's tides4fishing.com

So now I can know exactly when the houses in Mermaids Hands are floating and when they're resting on the mudflats. I know what moon M-- is looking at and whether she's getting up in the dark or daylight--all thanks to one site.

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asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
asakiyume

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