Category: Outside

My god what is that burning orb!

Why We Gave Up

So Colin and I were going to do The Master Cleanse. Which is a great way to lose weight, but not the reason why one should do it. It’s a cleanse, after all, designed for clearing out toxins and getting you healthy. Day one was yesterday and as mentioned in yesterday’s post “Hungryland”, I spent…

Home, Here and There

Whenever I stop myself from trying too hard and whenever I look and see what it is I am searching for, it Is almost certainly the long, wide flat spaces of home, the first. It is easy enough to reason away life in the mid-hinterlands. How can I ever get the culture or the speed…

Roadkill Relations

We’ve got the fatties back in our yard, and I am responsible. Squirrels get happy around Halloween here– they love to snack on our jack-o-lanterns, 5 times their size. I encourage it, really, sort of hoping that they will end up just too slow to move, and find themselves trying to dodge the car tires,…

How We Love Long Beach

If anyone is wondering what I was doing on election day, have a look at this photo… This is LONG BEACH, an image taken from the air a few years ago, of one of the beaches owned by my town, Stratford, CT. On election day–all but about two hours, anyway–I spent the day at Wilcoxson…

The Perfect Marriage: TiVo and Netflix

My husband, maybe to mock my attachment to my typewriter, or maybe just to give me the good news, sent me this article, today. It breaks the much-awaited news (at least around our place) that two of the greatest entertainment inventions: TiVo and Netflix, are going to join forces. This is akin to the Wonder…

The Smell of Mums

My Romanian dentist gave me a bouquet of pink mums today! Why would a dentist do that? I was admiring the vase of flowers on her front desk and she said “Would like like some to take home?” I blustered and said “Oh no really, I couldn’t” but she took me directly outside, to her backyard…

55 Miles Further Along

A Befuddled Poem About the Fact That I Rode 55 Miles on a Bike in One Day by Elizabeth Howard My butt hurts still today, But not as much as my knees do. Which goes to show you… Having all that padding isn’t Such a bad thing after all. I’m brain fried, 24 hours later,…

Shona’s Run

Super news from my fleet-of-foot Phillips relatives, Greg and niece, Shona, in Kingston … “This morning, after exactly three months of training, Shona ran the Thousand Islands Parkway Half Marathon (21.1 km). I ran beside her as coach and moral support while Karen played chauffeur, cheering section, and chief photographer. “The weather was reasonably good:…

Dusting for Exercise

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again. — Dorothy Day I feel as if I have disappeared again. This was the transitional week, the time I had “free” to get ready, to get things done. School…

British Columbia Tour, Part two

I forgot to post the rest of our photos from our trip to Canada, so if anyone is interested, here they are. After we left Jasper, we took the Skeena train (two days) through Prince George and stayed overnight there, (Hi uncle Lloyd and Aunt Jackie!) then on to Prince Rupert. There we picked up…

The Company of Songbirds

Something in the new birdseed has songbirds clamoring at the brass cage around my feeder. Wild songbirds– sparrows, chickadees, blackbirds, nuthatches, purple finches, tufted titmice, cardinals– they have come to visit me at my back window. When my family was here these past weeks, it made me tired. Feet on the floors above, the water…

Summer Ending

After the hail storm, the summer seems to have given in. The days are noticeably shortening, cooler… the humidity still clings, but something within the sunny days isn’t full of the same hope that it bannered in the early part of June. The clouds have come and are bringing the first longings of autumn. Time…

Tree versus the Tide

I got trapped out on my screened porch the other day during a very bad storm. I locked myself out of my house. My neighbors on both sides were home and they had keys but my trees were casting their branches off into the wind. I huddled in the corner of the porch and hoped…

Roadtrip, Alberta and British Columbia, 2008

Colin and I travel a lot, but usually in fits and starts. The last long, proper holiday we took was to Egypt. This time around Colin took me, along with my parents, on a tour of western Alberta and British Columbia, his homeland. Below is a slideshow of the images of the first half of…

Hiking at Weir Farm, Wilton

I went hiking at Weir farm National Historic Site recently with some friends from a hiking meetup. The site includes old farm buildings and a huge acreage of gardens and forest. We hiked around Weir Pond and into the woods. it was early evening in the summer and the light was very pretty coming through…