It’s getting warmer here in Mattapoisett, not warm enough walk on the beach in the evening without a jacket, but warmer nonetheless. Tonight I walked down to Brandt Island Cove with Jazz and took a couple snapshots of the things I’ve been coming across on our walks lately.

First, for the last couple weeks there have been at least two American Oyster Catcher (also here) birds on our small stretch of beach. They don’t let you get very close to them and I don’t have a great zoom lens, but they’re a distinctive breed: the large orange beak makes it stand out from every bird I’ve seen on our walks and it seems to prefer hopping to flying (it hops until Jazz spots it and chases it away). I’m only a novice birdwatcher, but apparently there are only about 7,500 of these birds left in North America, so I guess it’s a privilege. Here’s a quick snapshot I got of one of them:

Second, Jazz pulled either an Atlantic Stingray (Dasyatus sabina) or a skate (Raja eglanteria) out of the water yesterday, luckily she didn’t try to chew it up like she does everything else she finds on the shore.

Finally, the sun was shining brilliantly on the water and I’m still no good at taking pictures, but maybe someone in a landlocked state will appreciate the view of the ocean:

and of this amazing tree that reminds me of a something you’d see under an electron microscope:

Found in my server logs today:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Win32; U; FreeBSD 5.X i686; tw-TW; rv:1.0.0; hi, Mom) Gecko/20040604"


About 3 miles from our home in Mattapoisett is this great piece of land donated by Paul Munn, now called the Munn Preserve. Chris and Sara introduced us to it a couple months back as a great place to take the dog and it is. Jazz (our labrador retriever) goes bananas when we turn onto the road that leads to the beach. Sometimes I think I enjoy it more than she does though. I took a couple pictures of the walk 2 weekends ago; it was near freezing, but the sun was setting just as we got to the beach (there’s about a 1/2 mile walk through the woods to get to the beach), which, with the sunset, painted pictures of the most amazing color:



It must have gotten really cold one night because there were these huge chunks of ice that washed up on shore; the only way I couldl describe them to Karen was ‘scalloped potatoes’:

And then there was this sunset:

which, if I had to choose a favorite color… well I’d pick all of them. All of these pictures made possible by Jazz, who won’t sit still long enough to get a picture of her:

You can view the entire set (good and bad) here.

We got a relatively large dump of snow this past Sunday night and then experienced one of those bitterly cold and blindingly bright winter mornings that make the hour or two or shoveling all worth it. I snapped a couple of pictures (the one below is of the sun setting from our back porch) which you can see here.

I’m a proud father. Here’s proof.

In my continuing quest for free stuff, I *helped* a buddy transfer his ASP based website to my movable type installation and we had the launch party… um.. actually there was no launch party. No free beer or pizza. Nada. Ahem. Anyways, you can check out the new Mikedotnet.com v2.0 now. Also, I figure by mentioning Mikedotnet a couple times on my blog, I will continue to rank higher than he does for his own site, which means he must continue to give me free stuff. You too Patrick Owens!

The Thanksgiving 2004 Cooking Adventure is online now courtesy of yours truly and some nagging by my mom to put something new on the homepage. Oh, and she wrote part of it, so I guess she deserves some credit.

Hello friends! I’ve been ignoring you: the house, the new dog, the kid (due in December), a bulging disk in my lower back (ouch) and a new site (http://blackberryblog.com/) have been taking up 100% of my time. I promise I’ll be back soon.

I was out of commission all last week because of what may turn out to be a herniated disk in my lower back. Last Sunday I stepped out of the car and felt something go wrong. I took Monday off, tried to go work Tuesday and only made it to 3pm. Wednesday I worked from the floor, Thursday I finally made it to the doctor. The doctor told me to stay in bed for 48 hours and gave me Flexerall, which put me to sleep for 36 of the 48 hours. Lots of Tivo, a couple books and a couple DVD’s later, I feel a little better. I had a MRI taken this morning, I’ll go back to work tomorrow.

By the way, if you ever have a bad back, check out the Nada Chair, it’s a life saver.