After the stars, before the sun

There's about an hour between first light and sunrise and, in that dim time, our caravan set off to PEI. We all remarked that there was a lot of traffic at the early hour. Traffic was light, but steady, until a midpoint between Portland and Augusta. There was, as we'd expect, more traffic on Route 2 at 5AM than at rush hour in Moncton.

Sandra drove her parents' Blazer and I drove our Subaru, Sandra in the lead. Our wagon is better suited for Marley. He was more pesty than usual, such that I needed to put the back seats upright and have him ride in the wayback for the last four hours of the trip.

Woody and Marian took turns as passengers in each car. We talked a bit, sharing observations of this ride and stories of trips past. In between stories, we listened to recorded books and the radio.

The weather was fine, the bright sun a problem in just a few places. There were patches of snow in the culverts from the Maine Turnpike to PEI. Just south of Bangor, an eagle circled overhead. There's an eagle preserve just past the Irving station in Calais, Maine; we saw a mother feeding eaglets in a tree-top nest. Along the Airline Route and beyond, farmers were burning their blueberry fields to make ready for this season's crop. The Airline Route, where there are more wheels on houses than on cars, was a gravel road when Woody was a child. Now it's well-paved with generous passing lanes on the hills.

We have our favorite and familiar stops along the way: the first rest area on the Maine Turnpike (near Kennebunk), several near Bangor/Brewer, the Irving station just outside of Calais, sometimes the duty-free shop at the border, either Tim Horton's or Carman's diner in St. Stephen, the Grey Fox just west of Magnetic Hill, and so on.

The Grey Fox is a large Irving truck stop atop a very breezy hill in Salisbury NB. The food and coffee are good and they sell an amazing array of strange stuff suitable for the road-weary trucker or the bored child. Even better, there's a Dairy Queen across the street. (Remember when you order your Blizzard that they use Smarties instead of M&Ms as the mix-in.)

When we used to have to take a ferry for crossing to the Island, family lore required that you pass 15 cars from the Elgin rotary to the port at Cape Tormentine. No more. We can drive at our leisure because the crossing is now by bridge. We had some excitement, nonetheless. We'd put three suitcases on top of the Blazer, held in place by rope and bungee cords. While on the road to Tormentine, the large yellow suitcase decided to take a different route and flew off the car and onto the road. I was driving a safe distance behind, but, because of traffic, I had nowhere to go but over the suitcase. Damage was minor, with just tire tracks on the suitcase. We met up with Sandra and Marian a few kilometers down the road. We made room for the three suitcases in the cars. We had good fun imaging that, had the suitcase opened, we might have had someone's underwear scattered across the road and newly-tilled potato fields.

The house is in pretty good shape. The house having settled over the years, the outside doors are sometimes difficult to open. Inside was nice and even better when with a fire in the wood stove. The bladder in the water tank developed a leak and needed replacement. The repair guy came out first thing this morning and quickly had water flowing in only the places that it should.

I did a bit of maintenance work on Marian's computer. (Anyone remember how much fun it is to download a Windows service pack on a dial-up connection?)

The Island is starting to get ready for the summer tourist season. Many seasonal businesses won't open until Mother's Day, but some can't wait. The sign in front of Gillis's drive-in restaurant, on the outskirts of Montague, says:

Mmm. Fries with gravy
Open April 26

What the yard brings

The back yard has dried out from last week's 5+" of rain, letting the ants rebuild their hills in the sandy soil.

From my grandmother's knitted, crocheted, woven, and sewn work, you'd never suspect that she had what she called arthuritis. (My father could, we as might suspect, be a bit of a pain at times.) She couldn't use the spring-loaded clothespins, relying, instead, on the push-on kind. We've inherited those clothespins and use them when we dry towels and such on clothesline in back near the wood pile.

One of my doctors remarked that, while I am out of work, one of his treatment goals for me is to ensure that I do not become a regular viewer of the Jerry Springer show. The only daytime TV that I watch is CNN and then only on days with significant news. Last week, for example, brought the tragedy at Virginia Tech and the Gonzales hearings, along with the ever-increasing death toll in Iraq that's become wallpaper for our news channels. (In another post, I'll collect my thoughts regarding TV, radio, print, and the web, looking at contemporary media through a McLuhan filter.)

So, instead of watching Wolf, I line up tasks that are well-defined, such that I know what to do, know how to do it, and can report on what I've done and how well I did it. My daily task list includes chores such as bring in firewood, make various phone calls, pick up clothes at the dry cleaner's shop, stuff like that. This morning's list includes a task that's more vexing than it might seem. We have a thermometer with a wireless outdoor sensor. The challenge comes when I try to find a spot that has the least exposure to sunlight. It should be a foot above the ground (or snow), open to the sky so that cold or hot air is not trapped around it, and, as mentioned before, away from direct sunlight as much as possible. In the spring and summer, all 360° of the house receives some sunlight; the northeast corner receives the least solar warmth. Unfortunately, the wireless path from that corner to the base station passes through the MacGregors' laundry room. Washing machines are not very transparent for radio signals. This task, then, combines aspects of meteorology, astronomy, and radio science into a bit of fun.

By the way, we can always rely on our favorite three-alarm nutjob to take us down the path of heavenly distraction: "Only one policy has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws."

We have red-winged blackbirds visiting our feeders, reminding me of the only book that I know of that features a technical writer as a major character: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.