Greetings from Mystic Arts

On Saturday we drove to Connecticut to meet Kristen and Laurie and the latter's family for the Mystic Outdoor Arts Festival, which is in tents all along the river on either side of the boardwalk. We looked at lots of crafts, including wood and resin cutting boards, glass jewelry and ornaments, decorated picture frames, and nautical pottery, plus lots of other things, and we got to see the ships around Mystic Seaport. At lunchtime we walked past Mystic Pizza to Cucina Al Pantheon. 

We stopped in the Polish pottery store and watched the drawbridge open to let a tour ship through, then drove home in the late afternoon and saw most of the Woosox game with Adley Rutschman catching. Then we started the Orioles game, but it was not going well, so we watched The Dink, whose cast is better than its script but so many of my friends play pickleball that it was fun watching tennis players complain about it. We had another thunderstorm which hopefully will make tomorrow less humid.

Greetings from the Customs House

Friday was extremely hot and humid here. I didn't sleep well and woke up with a headache, so I was dragging all morning. I did some reading and watched a couple of Lestat fan vids, then after lunch I got a pair of boot stretchers delivered and spent an hour oiling and stretching my Renfaire boots. I also did some computer and photo stuff and went looking for a set of dice I had put away so safely I couldn't find them. We ate dinner early and took a walk when the temperature had dropped a very little, though it remained humid and didn't really become tolerable until after the huge thunderstorm we just had. 

I watched this week's Strange New Worlds with Cheryl -- okay, it's crack, but it's also pure joy with original series references everywhere (Tribbles! Mugato! "It's green!") and the most canonical Kirk/Spock scenes we've ever had in canon, with references to everything from "This Side of Paradise" to "The Naked Time" and that's not even including "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in the original Klingon. We saw the Orioles lose, then watched the season finale of Sugar -- best episode of the season -- and now this week's Silo. The Custom House, where Hawthorne worked, with old and new eagles, in Salem:

Greetings from Salisbury Pond

Quick post, my regular Thursday night chat ran late despite the fact that only three of us made it there because we were following the Red Sox, now in the 12th inning against the White Sox. My day was fairly uneventful anyway -- it was very hot so we didn't walk till after dinner, I just did some organizing and reading and a few chores. Here are some of the bunnies of Institute Park plus a photobombing swan: 

Greetings from Institute Park

Wednesday was pretty hot here, though the rest of the week through the weekend has a heat advisory so it's going to get worse. I spent most of it indoors anyway, chatting with my high school friends after lunch and watching the first half of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim with Cel and Laurie, plus doing some writing and folding some laundry. 

We took a walk in the evening when it got cooler, ate dinner, then finished watching the uneven final season of The Bear (plenty of great stuff for Carmie, Richie, and Sydney; not nearly enough of anyone else), and now the new episode of Lucky, in which her father better turn out to be the secondary villain and William Fichtner must die. Swans at Institute Park: 

Greetings from Revere Beach

I spent Tuesday morning working on my photos and organizing some clothing, then ate a bagel with cats supervising my use of cream cheese and did some reading. In the afternoon, I talked to Chris, took a walk to see bunnies, and watched a little post-trade deadline baseball. Paul ordered Papa Gino's pizza for dinner, always a good choice. 

My DS9 group watched "The Die Is Cast" -- Garak! Tain! Odo! Eddington! So much of consequence for the rest of the series! -- and we've spent the rest of the evening after the Orioles and Red Sox victories watching the final season of The Bear, which is intense but I don't feel like it really digs deep into the characters. Gulls of the delightful Revere Beach:

Greetings from City Hall

It rained all of Monday morning, so I spent it doing exciting things like laundry, working on a book review, and cleaning the counters. Then the mail came and I got two packages I'd been waiting for from overseas, the Beatles Tarot deck from England via Kickstarter and my own reprints, after scanning and editing, of the Star Trek Tarot deck that Paul drew for me in the early 90s -- they were expensive to print and so very worth it, since I've always been afraid to shuffle the originals or risk smearing the ink with my fingers! 

My afternoon was fully distracted by the MLB trade deadline, before which the Orioles had traded a significant part of the team -- at least Ward is going to the Mariners, my side team, and Rutschman is coming here to the Red Sox, so I'll get to see him a lot sooner than I was expecting. We took a walk and started watching the second season of Citadel after dinner, but it was so insanely violent that after an episode we put on the new season of Futurama instead. Here's Worcester Common, City Hall, the Continental Army cemetery, and memorials:

Greetings from the Blackstone River

Sunday was a gorgeous warm day. We thought about going to Sturbridge Village, which was having a battle reenactment, but after how far we drove Saturday, we decided to stay closer to home and went to several parks in Worcester -- first Blackstone Gateway, which has a new visitor center with a museum about local history and culture, plus a long boardwalk through the wetlands from which we saw frogs, turtles, ducks, a bunny, and the dreaded spotted lanternfly, then Worcester Common, which encloses City Hall, has a cemetery of patriots who died in the American Revolution, and features several war memorials plus a Celtic cross commemorating the Irish immigrants to the area. 

We stopped at Cool Licks for ice cream since we had to pass by it to go to Institute Park, where we knew there were a couple of swans but didn't realize that they also had two cygnets who came within a couple of feet of us in the water. We also saw the Canada geese we met as goslings a couple of months ago, a big flock of ducks, a couple more bunnies, and a great blue heron. We stopped at Shaw's on the way home for food for the week and got home for the end of the innings played in the terrible horrible Orioles game, plus the very end of the Mariners walk-off win. Now we're watching the end of this season of A Good Girl's Guide To Murder, which has a bit too much hysteria but remains interesting.

Greetings from North of Boston

I had a great maritime Saturday in Salem and Revere north of Boston, seeing ships and at the beach! The Salem Maritime National Historical Park was having its Heritage Days festival, with people demonstrating historic crafts like aspects of shipbuilding, lace-making, furniture carving, and traditional cooking, plus there was a band singing sea shanties and a Cardboard Boat Regatta which I'd thought meant people tossing models into the water but was actually cardboard boats crewed by several people in a race. 

There were food trucks (Paul got fried Twinkies) and since Salem's tall ship the Friendship is being restored, Pride of Baltimore II was visiting and letting people tour the deck. We had brought a picnic and ate it at a table behind the Custom House, which was also open for tours and had an actor dressed as Nathaniel Hawthorne talking about his work there. We got to see the scales and measuring equipment, the public stores for items no one could pay duties on, and the original wooden eagle that adorned the roof. 

Since we were in Salem, we also visited several of the witch shops -- lots of Tarot, crystals, herbs, crafts, and statues, though I didn't buy any -- and walked through the downtown before driving in the late afternoon to Revere Beach. The water was much warmer than I expected and there were clam shells, mussels, and some snails, plus many seagulls and a few pigeons looking for dinner. We were at the nearly empty north end of the beach and I got so much sand in my toes that I rode the rest of the way home barefoot.

 

We ate cheesesteaks for dinner and watched part of the terrible horrible Orioles game against the Phillies before giving up and putting on the start of the second season of A Good Girl's Guide To Murder, which is pretty well written and acted but very dark. And we discovered that the rain last week stained one of our windowsills, so we cleaned that up. Now I must sleep after a really nice day!