The Turkey Chaser strikes again!

I finally had the opportunity and presence of mind to get my phone ready to videotape Todd chase turkeys.  I was about to go outside and put away some firewood when I saw two of them at the back of the garden and another half-dozen in the back left corner of the backyard.

I apologize ahead of time for the fact that you can't really see the turkeys fly away.  If there's a zoom on this thing, I didn't know where it was when I needed it.  As the camera pans to the left, you can see one of them start to take flight but there's at least 6 more ahead of him flying towards the trees on the left.  The dark background of the trees is why you can't see them, but some are a good 20 feet off the ground flying all the way to the trees at the back of the field.

He loves to chase them, as long as he knows it's okay and he'll stop when you tell him to if necessary.  But as you can see in this clip, he doesn't have to see them to chase them.  He takes off around the right side of the garden when the turkeys are elsewhere.  And he wasn't as aggressive in his pursuit this time as usual, and you'll see why at the end of the clip.  Hope you enjoy this nonetheless.

Zebster-1 Brambles-0

before

After I'd hacked down 1/4

I've had this "mission" in mind for a couple of years, hacking down my mother's raspberry and blackberry patch.  The raspberries have not been doing well lately and the blackberry bushes are getting so tall they fall out into the yard and grab my ass when I'm mowing.  Seriously, some are as tall as 12-15 feet.  And to complicate things more, the whole patch is "overrun" with a kudzu type vine that's intertwined amongst these very prickly stalks, especially the blackberries.  Some of the thorns are 1/4 inch long.

So with the help of my trusty implement of destruction, I started after it at about 9:00 this morning.   After about two and a half hours, I was pretty much done but the patch was only 90% cleared.  So with the help of another friend, see pic below, I managed to bull through to finish it.  One end of the patch was about 12-15 feet wide and the other end was 25 feet wide, and it was probably 50 feet long.  I should probably say that we'll check the final score of this battle in the morning, just in case it took a toll on my back.  Stiff right now but should be fine.




implement of destruction

 

done

Deer-1 PT Cruiser-0

This is a misnomer since the poor deer did get the worst of it but this is how I was feeling about the following incident yesterday as I posted it to Facebook.  What follows is my explanation of what happened after I got home last night, followed by a few pictures that I just took this morning.

The deer hit me instead of me hitting it, 5 seconds after I'd avoided her boyfriend who'd run across in front of me. She glanced off the middle passenger's side, then hit the rear part of the rear wheel well and bumper pretty hard. She laid in the road for 5 minutes trying to get up while I was directing traffic and calling the police. Then she completely laid down, thought she was dead; but when I got to her, she walked back onto the lawn she came from and stood there for 5 minutes, looking like she was going to give up at times, then she laid down and after a few minutes put her head down.. So I finally had a chance to walk back and quickly look at my car. I looked at it for 60 seconds, looked back and she was gone. I went to the tree line and couldn't see her. The officer came, and he and I and another guy spent 15 minutes combing the woods for her, to no avail. So I have a dented car and no deer meat. Hopefully she's in better shape than she looked. I'm thinking her hooves hit the side of the car, which caused her to fall towards the rear wheel well. Instead of a broken neck, maybe a concussion and shoulder injury. (probably wishful thinking)
 

 You can see my squatting reflection taking this pic better than you can see the scratches from her hooves but they're there.

From the last 3 pictures you can see the back part of the wheel well is folded over, the bumper is knocked back and out towards the picture, and there's a hole in the inside wheel well.  So the combination of those things is going to make that hole and back bumper act like a sail going down the road.  There's also a piece missing out of the hub cap.

Popham Beach to Reid State Park

Despite a weather forecast that predicted, at best, overcast and windy weather and likely rain in the afternoon, we (being yours truly and his two best friends) struck out to do some sightseeing at parks on the coast of Maine, specifically at the mouth of the Kennebec River.  As it turns out, the weather was much better than predicted.  It only got windy and a little cold at our last stop, which served to make the ocean waves more dramatic crashing on the rocky coast.
As I've done before, you can see all of the pictures I took yesterday at the link, and I'll share a representative shot of each place we went.  Mixed in between we found a neat hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in Downtown Bath for lunch (hole in the wall in the sense that the place was maybe 12 feet wide with a counter against one wall that sat four people and a two-person table in the corner) and finished our day with Blizzards from DQ on the way back through Bath.

Popham Beach State Park above at low tide.  This shot is taken along the beach but I took others looking out toward the ocean but I've never been anywhere where the beach, meaning the sand, was so wide, upwards of a 1/4 mile at low tide.

Fort Baldwin, with three batteries and a tall observation tower.  I took a couple of shots standing atop these batteries looking toward the ocean but the trees are now in the way.  Back in the day you would've been able to see for miles.  If the trees hadn't been in the way, I would've been able to take pictures of Fort Popham, which replaced Baldwin, that lies between this fort and the coast.

Standing on the site of the Popham Colony looking eastward over the bay.  The first ship built in what is now the United States was built here, called The Virginia.  The entrance to Fort Baldwin is behind me by a couple hundred feet.

Fort Popham, where I also took some pictures looking out toward the ocean.  I think these old forts are kinda neat.

Reid State Park, where I took several pictures of the coast.  They came out pretty good, I think, particularly of the little old bridge near the entrance.  At the end of the pictures you'll see three taken at a place near Reid State Park called Todd's Landing, named after our furry, four-legged friend -- well, not really but it's a pretty place.

A trip around Franklin County, Maine

I may have mentioned this in a previous post but Shel and I picked up a "passport" at one of the State parks when we were out sightseeing -- you find the lock box at State park, the combo is in the book, unlock the box and stamp your passport.  So this past Saturday we struck out to collect three of these in the northwestern part of the state, with a few little detours along the way.  Of course we brought our four-legged furry friend with us.
I shared these on FB but not all of my friends are on there and since this blog isn't used nearly often enough by yours truly, I thought this a good excuse to use the blog and share the pics.  I'm getting better at taking pics with my new smartphone, which I love by the way and would highly recommend, especially to anyone getting one for the first time and already accustomed to Microsoft products.  Mine is an HTC Windows phone.  You can see all the pics at this link (let me know if you can't) and I'll share a couple samples below as well.


Small's Falls, near Madrid, ME.

Mooselookmeguntic Lake (yes, that's a place)

Weld General Store, about to get her first Moxie!

My two best friends, at Mt Blue State Park in Weld, ME.

 

Gentlemen of the Road

Several months ago my daughter had turned me on to Mumford & Sons and it's no surprise I like this band given how much I like folk music, rock music and harmonies.  Well, several weeks ago I just happened to get an email from a ticket service hinting that there was going to be a rare show coming to Portland around the same time I heard mention of a rumor that Mumford was going to be coming to the States.  I mentioned this to my daughter, who was excited; and I told if she could get tickets when they went on sale, I'd pay for them.
Well, the rumors were true and the tour was rare, not only in makeup but in number of stops -- only four in the US.  Click on this Gentlemen of the Road link to learn more about the tour.  The tickets themselves are unique because they're like passports, with multiple pages describing the show and places to get stamps of each of the bands playing, and a beautiful plastic, almost holographic ticket inside.  Best of all, when the tour is over, you have a code for a free download of an "album" created from the live performances of this tour.  Oh, then to add more anticipation, just a couple of weeks before the show it was announced that the Dropkick Murphys would also be on this stop as well as headlining an aftershow concert at the State Theater.  This tour selected unique cities and venues to do these shows; and the shows are like festivals -- outdoors with multiple bands on two stages playing all day and early evening, followed by multiple shows that evening at intimate indoor venues...in this case in the quaint and historic Old Port area of Portland.  (We never intended to go to these but in my younger days, maybe)
On to the show:  Shel and I get to Portland to meet up with my daughter and her boyfriend who arrived earlier in the day.  The whole Eastern Promenade area of Portland was closed off.  So we chose to park at a garage near the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, which was offering free rides on the line that runs up the bay to the Eastern Promenade and the show.  As it turns out, immediately after turning onto Fore Street to get the parking garage there was a parking lot advertising $6 parking all day.  Woo hoo!  So we had a couple of blocks more to walk to the museum...no bigs, it was a perfect Maine August day.
At the museum we learned about the narrow gauge railroad history in Maine, looked around the museum and got onto a couple of cars...not a bad way to kill an hour waiting for my daughter to arrive, only 3 bucks apiece.  Then at 1:00 we hopped onto one of the renovated old cars being pulled by these little engines and rode up along the beautiful harbor to the show.  (there will be pictures!)
We arrive at the venue and what a gorgeous place for a concert...high on a hill that overlooks the bay.  We had a great time listening to the bands and enjoying each others' company.  My daughter is now 21 and these moments don't get to happen that often, which was really the whole point for me in going.  The show itself was mostly secondary.  Good thing because it wasn't managed well by whomever.  The lines to everything were insufferably long.  There weren't nearly enough vendors and the layout was not conducive to freedom of movement.  So you had a situation where there's hours-long lines to everything with people having to walk through those lines to get anywhere.  I don't know what they (whoever they were) were thinking when they laid it out the way they did.  But the music was excellent and the company even better.

AND SHELLY TOOK THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS:

the conductor

Yarmouth Clam Festival

The Yarmouth Clam Festival is one of the best known and popular summer festivals in Maine, and I've always managed to remember it was happening either the weekend of or the weekend after it happened.  So I had never been until last weekend because I'd decided this year I was going come hell or high water.
To be honest, I'm not sure what the big deal is...it's a festival like most others -- yes, there's clams and lots of them but, other than that, it's just way too crowded.  It's held in downtown Yarmouth, a small, quaint southern Maine town, which is great; the problem is that they don't close Main Street.  So thousands of people are walking on the sidewalks because the street's not closed and the tents are on the other side of the sidewalk from the street.  It would be much more enjoyable if it were held in a park or someplace a little more open so that you didn't always have to be wading into endless waves of people.
We did have a good time for a few hours (the shuttle bus service is a major plus) -- did I mention the clams?  We looked at some nice artisan stuff -- loved some stuff by a guy who was reusing old wood from torn down old mills, for instance, and turning it into furniture; and I did buy Shel a nice picture of a lighthouse.  (She has the particulars and maybe I can get her to take a picture of it to share)  Basically he took a shot of a lighthouse with water between himself and the light, then made the whole picture black and white except for the reflection of the lighthouse in the water in the middle of the picture...very well worth the 50 bucks.  And I did buy a t-shirt, which you'll see in the photos below.  You'd have a good time but how good is dependent on how much you hate crowds...waves of them, and you'll love the clams.

Yours truly, waiting...

The street was closed for the parade only.  New t-shirt, yellow and purple

A Day of Sightseeing

Shel and I had originally planned on going sightseeing on Saturday, since the weather report was great for the whole weekend; but then the weather report seemed to show Saturday might be iffy, we were missing my cousin's daughter's graduation party and we could use a day to chill first.  So we decided we would do our sightseeing on Sunday and that decision was rewarded with perfect weather -- in Maine that means sunny, in the high 70s and very little humidity.
We wanted to get out and enjoy the outdoors and also be able to take our furry, four-legged friend with us.  So we chose to go to Fort Knox, Maine, to look around the fort and also for me to ride up to the observation tower of the new Penobscot Narrows cable stay bridge near Bucksport.

Observation deck at the top of one of the towers holding up the new bridge

Todd and me at the entrance to Fort Knox

The photos taken from the tower were taken by yours truly, the rest were taken by Shel, who got tired of taking photos.  So I have none to share with you from the second half of our trip, which was to take her around some of the cute coastal towns I'd been working in lately, show her some of the great views of Penobscot Bay and visit Holbrook Island Sanctuary, a small state park in Brooksville, ME.  I do agree though, how many photos of the beautiful coast of Maine can you share without getting boring.
All three of us had a very good time, one of the highlights being to grab lunch at a little seasonal stand called Bagaduce Lunch, which is located on the town line between Penobscot and Brooksville, overlooking an inlet of Penobscot Bay that becomes a little river separating the two towns.  I do wish we had snapped a shot there.  I had the obligatory and expensive (10 bucks) lobster roll and Shel had the haddock sandwich, which was basically a whole haddock between two buns.  Great stuff!
If you would like to see the remainder of the photos we took and I encourage you to do so, you can see them at the following link.  They include photos I took from the observation tower and those that Shel took of the fort and the area around the bridge, including this one:

Old and new bridges, looking from Fort Knox toward Verona Island

Oh, the Maine Park Service has this little booklet that's free that has a page for every state park, where you can add your attendance stamp.  We crossed off two this day and plan on trying to visit many of the others.  Maybe we'll share more photos later.  Please let me know in the comments if you cannot access the rest of the photos.  They're at Facebook but my account is open.  You should be able to see them.

Looking Up



The barn at the family farm --
symbolic and relevant

 As a testament to the philosophy that, if you just keep grinding in life, good things will eventually happen or at the very least turn around for the better, I give you the first quarter of 2012.
After a completely horrible 2010, I never would have thought 2011 would be even worse but it, in fact, was, having spent the entire year unemployed.  While there is a certain freedom in not working, it is not something I recommend.  Not knowing when that job will finally come is a harrowing experience.
So enough of the past, which I've never had much problem forgetting luckily, and on to the future.  The turnaround began with finding a job I could afford to take, which was doubly lucky given the fact I would've had to take it anyway since my WC was running out; but other than the fact I had to drive 60 plus miles to get to this job, it paid enough to pay my bills.  In the midst of that happening I got the love of my life back and that relationship has never been better.  If you know me, you know how important to my happiness that development is.
Those of you who know me know the bitter details of all the things that happened over the last couple years (and you all deserve thanks for the support) and so you know how far down that was and how far back up it is with just those two things happening.  Now add to that that two weeks ago a much better job fell in my lap, which I will start tomorrow.  Not only does it have a significant pay increase, it does not involve selling anything.  I'm very much looking forward to it.
The icing on the cake is that I became a grandfather for the first time a few days ago (yes, I'm still not sure how I feel about that LOL), though I suspect I'll warm up to the idea -- having a grandson, that is, not the getting old part.  Also, my daughter, son-in-law and grandson will soon be moving into the family farm that has been in my family for generations.  Knowing that your children are healthy, happy and grounded in the family tradition is arguably the most important of all.

Me and PJ, taken at the family farm.

If you look to the left of the barn, you'll see a canopy of sumac trees.  That was cut down last fall and yesterday I threw it all into one brush pile to burn later.  I'll try to use this blog a little more often to update on my projects around the farm, which will include a family get-together area using the foundation of the old silo that used to sit where you see that canopy, and the progress of the next generation moving in.