Visiting The Parents: Forced Errors

by on July 20, 2016 at 7:27 am
Posted In: Art

Well my last full day in Maine was a bit of a comedy of errors. I went out to paint and chose a nice bit of cove the looked nice. It also had the benefit of having a dry place to sit. So I started to do the preliminary sketch and it went well until I reached for my paints only to discover that I’d left them at the house.

To move quicker I left my backpack there, after all it’s the middle of the woods, right? When I got back I met up with Finnegan a Golden Retriever I’d recovered a couple of times before, and his owner. Immediately I was asked if that had been my bag she had seen. While I knew she didn’t take it I was feeling chronically stupid for a second. (Not to mention Finnegan had a level of friendliness that could traumatize small children.)

The painting came out great. But as I was packing up I realized I couldn’t find my phone. Pulling on my headphones I pulled up what looked an iPhone made entirely of mud. It had fallen into the marsh and by the look of it had had a little time to marinate. At first I hoped the mess was just cosmetic but as I cleaned off the mud the screen began to streak. I shut it down and went back to clean it.

Unfortunately the streaking continued. Not to mention the battery was completely dead. I looked up a few forums to see if there were any ways to dry it but ultimately I had no choice but to give it time to dry and hope for the best.

I went out again to take more pictures and maybe do another painting. After taking a lot of pictures of an area called the Rock Glen, a very pretty stream with lots of moss covered borders, I filled up my camera’s data chip. While this was something I was hoping for it gave off a little bit of a “when it rains it pours” vibe, leaving me feeling a little bit burnt out and not feeling like painting.

My Mom and I spent the rest of the afternoon on another nature trail, which had a lot of stuff that I wish I had room in my camera to take. Including some amazing ferns. We spent an hour painting a view of the trail’s coastline.

We went home and I spent the rest of the evening packing and making sure everything was ready for the trip back west tomorrow.

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Visiting the Parents Wasp Wrangling

by on July 19, 2016 at 5:21 am
Posted In: Art, Rhapsodies

This day started with me having the morning to myself, as my Mom was helping with the wasp wrangling. That is to say the tiny parasitic  wasps my dad studies. This time of year the females have just come out of their pupa and immediately starts giving off pheromones. My Dad and his assistants have “lassoed” the females (yes it was a tiny rope) so they can’t fly farther than five feet. Then they monitor the males who come a courting.

Visiting Parents Wasp Wrangling, Clarks CoveI spent the next two hours taking more pictures and doing another watercolor of the one of the salt marshes. It came out okay.

When my Mom came back we went to a Nature Conservancy sight called Laverna which was the way to get to an amazing bit of rocky coastline called Brown’s Head. Unlike many of the other amazing bits of rocky coastline, here the granite strata had been pushed up in ways I had not scene before and was appropriately awed. Unfortunately my camera’s battery died before I could take even half of the shots I wanted. Visiting Parents Wasp Wranling Brown's HeadOn the way back home we visited an old friend.

Later after supper we went to a lecture on Colonial economics and taverns. (getting sloshed on Rum despite all the blue laws was something the founding fathers did)

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Visiting the Parents: Language Difficulties

by on July 18, 2016 at 7:30 am
Posted In: Rhapsodies

Well the morning started with a thunderstorm, but that’s okay because we really needed it. Because it was raining we didn’t have anything planned for the morning other than doing some errands in Damariscotta. But before that we had just a little bit of trail work to do. All it would be was us going to pick up some cookies (in this context a cookie is a slice of log that Mom puts in muddy puddles  so that people can walk on them) It would only take us ten minutes to get there and ten minutes to drop off the cookies at their destination. At this point we ran into some language difficulties.

You see in my admittedly rough vernacular of english “ten minutes” means the amount of time it takes to slowly count to sixty ten times. Apparently to Mom it apparently means something else since when we got there rather than just grabbing the cookies, Mom spent another half hour trimming some shrubs, straightening out the tarp covering the cookies, and all sorts of other forest feng shui things. She claimed that the ten minute thing was just how long it would take if the thunder started again and we had to run home again.

When we did move the cookies we took several trips (apparently there’s regional differences in the meaning of the phrase “Okay, we’re done, let’s go.) In the mean time it started to rain again and I got thoroughly soaked. After all I didn’t think I’d need boots or rain pants, it was only going to take ten minutes in and ten minutes out.

The after noon went better. We did our shopping then we went to Keene Neck Road, the place I spent my summers growing up. There we spent an hour talking to some old friends.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing with a very pleasant dinner party in the evening.

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Visiting the Parents: I get my Lobster

by on July 17, 2016 at 7:16 am
Posted In: Rhapsodies
Visiting the Parents I get my lobster

Lobster cooked the traditional way!

So today was one of the thing I’ve been looking forward to for the whole trip, my annual Maine Lobster! Lobster is a treat for me. Generally I find it rich enough that once a year is more than enough. So when I get my fix I want it to be good. Fortunately that’s not a hard thing. I’ve got several family members who specialize in such a thing. Since in Maine cooking lobster is like doing good barbecue in the rest of the world. My Dad does them great steaming them in seawater covered in seaweed.

This is what I expected them to be doing when we gathered seaweed today. So I have to confess I was confused when everyone mentioned “burn”

So anyway after a morning of photography and trail maintenance it was off to the clambake, the first real one I’ve been to since the seventies. It turned out that the burn was just that, the lobsters, corn, clams and assorted vegetables were baked in the seaweed over an open fire. I don’t pretend to be the expert on what good lobster is, but this was really good.

Also my mother’s famous Butterfly Bread went over very well.

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Visiting The Parents: Some Time in the Canoe

by on July 16, 2016 at 7:39 am
Posted In: Rhapsodies

The day started with Mom suggesting that we go out on a canoe. While I was mostly indifferent to the idea, at the time. I got dragged to the rental place. In the mean time Mom was telling the rental having trouble with a “skunk”. (This being the country I briefly took her literally. ) Actually the “skunk” was a business rival who put his rental place closer to the water.

Anyway we got the canoe and canoed slowly for about two miles through two miles of gorgeous marshland ending in a lake. It was hot enough that I was very tempted to dive in. I took lots of pictures. The highlights included lots of blooming water lilies, black ducks, some turtles and trout.  In my imagination I kept going back and fourth between Wind in the Willows and the Fellowship rowing down the Anduin.

All in all it was magical.

After that we were assigned to pick 15 bags of seaweed for a lobster bake happening tomorrow.

And then came a long awaited ice-cream social to celebrate a scientific illustration program the Darling Center puts on. I had two servings (with a root beer float on the side ) and looked at the art samples the students had done. All good.

By the end of that it was four and my Mom and I spent the remains of the afternoon chilling in the Darling Center’s Library

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Visiting Parents: More Painting

by on July 15, 2016 at 5:15 am
Posted In: Art, Test

More Painting The CoveI really didn’t really have much to report yesterday since I spent most of the day painting. I did three paintings in the morning, one of Clark’s Cove, One of a stream and one of some Chantelle mushrooms growing near the stream. Then I arrived late to a lecture about corral reefs did some paperwork and did two more paintings one of some cool boulders and one of the Damariscotta River.

Today started out much the same way. I walked down to Clark’s Cove and found another angle to work with and produced what I think at this moment I’ll consider the best one yet of this whole trip. I did another one of a milkweed in the middle of the field which I have mixed feelings about.More Painting Chantelle Mushrooms

A thunderstorm was predicted for the afternoon and the way the clouds were coming in made me sure it was only a matter of time that it would hit. Even though it didn’t it was really too windy to continue work. So my mother and I went to Freeport to shop at L.L. Bean to shop.

When we got back, I helped my dad with some problems with making charts in Power Points.

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