Greetings from the Blackstone River Greenway

Quick post after Thursday night chat -- only three of us were there but it was delightful as always. My Thursday was fairly uneventful and involved chores and some computer cleanup, plus some reading, then a walk in drizzle when Paul got home (his morning train broke down and it took him over four hours to get to work). 

We did get to watch "Level Five Transporter Accident" (this week's awesome puppet episode of Strange New Worlds, so much fun) and the new episode of Stuart Fails To Save the Universe (pretty hilarious and directed by Jonathan Frakes). Here's some Worcester history from the Blackstone River Greenway Visitor Center:

Greetings from Phillipston

We had absolutely perfect weather on Saturday. We thought we were going to Gloucester for a festival and to meet a friend I haven't seen since high school, but it turned out he had relatives visiting and I had the wrong day for the event, so instead of the long drive east, we went to Red Apple Farm for their sunflower festival. There were, as expected, two big fields of sunflowers, and also early apples and pumpkins, live music on multiple stages, local craft tents, apple cider donut sundaes, bees and finches in the flowers, and goats, donkeys, and bunnies out greeting visitors while begging for food.

 

We stopped at Shaw's on the way home, then switched back and forth between the Orioles and Red Sox around dinner (they both won, though it was a near thing for the Orioles and the Sox were only up by one until the ninth). Then we watched Office Romance, the Jennifer Lopez-Brett Goldstein rom-com with a cast (Bradley Whitford, Tony Hale, Amy Sedaris, Edward James Olmos, Michelle Hurd) that's vastly better than the screenplay, but it's worth watching to hear Betty Gilpin (playing very on type) and Jodie Whittaker (very not on type) snark at everyone they come into contact with; not good if you hate cringe though!

Greetings from Hollis Hills

After two days of rain, Wednesday was a warm day. I did chores in the morning, then after lunch my usual chat with my high school friends got canceled because all the rest of them were busy with family stuff so I did some reading and wrote what was supposed to be a short Facebook post that turned into a longer blog rant. 

Kristen and Laurie and I watched some second season Good Omens, including the whole episode with Job and then Aziraphale thinking he's a fallen angel, which is my favorite of the whole series. Then we took a walk in the late afternoon and had frozen pizza for dinner during the unfortunate end of the Orioles game. 

We've been spending the evening watching the rest of the second season of The Agency, which has been excellent, although I wanted more Fassbender and Turner-Smith; the cast is all superb, it's surprisingly emotional for a spy story, there's no contemporary BS politics. From last weekend, animals and scenery at Hollis Hills Farms:

Greetings from Blackstone

Another night running late because of The Vampire Lestat, which again had me screaming three seconds in ("Picture the dingy seat of the Lioncourt family at the fag end of a thousand years of aristocratic decline") even before it got to the Oedipiphany ("You are being very patient regarding the vampire incest factor"). Lestat and Gabriella hunting together remind me of the beginning of The Hunger with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, and this week I feel he's more Jim Morrison than Iggy Pop. And Twilight references -- baseball! Grace Jones in Gucci! "Va te faire foutre!" So much love! 

It was otherwise another gorgeous warm day and we spent most of it out, starting at the Stanley Woolen Mill at the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park. The mill building now has an antique shop and the canal trail has frogs, turtles, at least one snake, many birds...it resembles the C&O Canal towpath. We stopped at West End Creamery for ice cream before heading to Purgatory State Chasm, where we climbed down into the gorge and hiked up onto the cliffs. Eventually we came home for sloppy joes and family Zoom. We missed much of the day's baseball, though we saw a bit before Lestat.

Greetings from 'Detroit'

Quick post because I'm watching The Vampire Lestat: After Dark after the first episode of the new show, after waiting with wild impatience after Interview with the Vampire; this was my favorite of Anne Rice's books and the show thus far is everything I adored about it plus extra (the sex! the incest! contemporary songs!). Anne Rice so overdid the Immortalverse that I fell out of love with it, but kick a season off with the auction from Phantom of the Opera, have Daniel call Lestat the Cuntessa, toss in some Taylor Swift insults and give me Sam Reid playing Ewan McGregor playing Iggy Pop from Velvet Goldmine -- saying lines like "MDMA and LSD, the Torvill and Dean of hallucinogenics" -- I am going to be screaming aloud on my couch. 

Otherwise, I had a quiet Monday. I was up late talking to Daniel (it was his anniversary yesterday), so I got up, did laundry, cleaned 2/3 bathrooms, sorted a bunch of photos I took over the weekend, took a walk and discovered that our neighborhood now has teeny baby teacup bunnies out running around on the back cul-de-sac by the unfinished houses, enjoyed the gorgeous weather. We ate dinner around the Orioles' loss to the Mariners (I had a bit of a dilemma because I can't root against Josh Naylor, but I wanted Baltimore to come back), then we watched the episode of The Way Home that we missed during the Tonys last night; it was fine, but let's face it, that time slot is going to vampires for the rest of the time travel show's run. Kangaroos at the Franklin Park Zoo: 

Poem for Saturday and Stone Zoo

For the White poets who would be Indian 

By Wendy Rose 

just once

just long enough

to snap up the words

fish-hooked from

our tongues.

You think of us now

when you kneel

on the earth,

turn holy

in a temporary tourism

of our souls.

With words

you paint your faces,

chew your doeskin,

touch breast to tree

as if sharing a mother

were all it takes,

could bring instant and primal

knowledge.

You think of us only

when your voices

want for roots,

when you have sat back

on your heels and

become

primitive.

You finish your poem

and go back.

-------- 

My friend Roger posted this poem by his friend, the poet, who sadly passed away a week ago. I had not read it before and was really struck by it. It's from her book Lost Copper. 

We went on Saturday to the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, which is part of Zoo New England along with the Franklin Park Zoo. My friend Meredith met us there, and we saw lots of animals in big wooded yards -- a lynx and snow leopard, macaws and flamingos, gibbons and tamarins, reindeer and fennec fox, tortoises and porcupines -- we did not see the family of wolves hiding in their enormous enclosure nor the ringtail hiding in its many hidey holes, but we did see bunnies that had snuck into several pens, and many, many birds. In the late afternoon we tried to get ice cream, but the parlor was closed, so we got drinks at Dunkin instead. 

 

We came home to feed our starving cats, eventually ate a small dinner, and, having missed most of the sports we cared about during the afternoon, watched Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. I don't even know what genre to put it in -- crime caper? action comedy? buddy time travel? gangster sci-fi? -- but it's really funny when it's not extremely violent and worth watching just for the debates about Disney movies and Gilmore Girls, plus Vince Vaughn has better chemistry with himself than anyone in Bad Monkey with him. Now we're watching the first episode of Discovery's second season, and I'm glad to see Pike but the Sarek retcon irritates me as much as the Klingon retcon.

Greetings from Franklin Park

I had a quiet Friday -- wanted to scan one thing, so figured it was as good a time as any to catch up on all the scanning since we moved here (some receipts, some cards, some old photos that turned up during packing). In the middle of this, I learned that Anthony Stewart Head had died, which I'm very sad about, and when I went to look for a photo of him from many years ago, I realized that I had never scanned any of the autographed photos I had saved back in the day when fan clubs were sending out autographed photos, so I scanned those, too. 

We took a long neighborhood walk when Paul got home (it was a four-bunny day, three of them together), then watched the Orioles' come-from-behind win around dinner. This is the last Friday for a while that's a busy TV night, but we watched the excellent season finale of Your Friends and Neighbors, the atrocious mid-season finale of Rivals (I think I'm done), the very good new episode of Star City, and episode 14 of Discovery (yep, still watching without Jason Isaacs). Some of the birds we met at the Franklin Park Zoo:

Greetings from the Pool

Adam was in Worcester on Monday morning for a meeting, so I got to take a walk with him around the neighborhood unexpectedly afterwards. It was a chilly, drizzly morning, but it turned into a nice afternoon by the time I walked again. In between I did some more sorting in the garage -- I found a bunch of stuff we can probably give away, but I also found sweaters my Grandma Fan knitted when I was a baby, quilts made by my mother-in-law, and a throw stitched for our wedding by Paul's aunt, none of which I've seen since we lived in Maryland. 

The bunnies were hiding, maybe because we have a great blue heron that now flies between two ponds, or maybe they don't like the smell of chlorine now that the neighborhood pool is open -- see photos below, though it was too chilly to swim today. We caught up on Rivals after dinner with its atrocious men and questionable women, and now we're watching more Star Trek: Discovery, still episodes I saw my first go-round, though I'm liking it better mostly because Jason Isaacs improves everything with everyone and he's definitely fun to watch with Sonequa Martin-Green.