All washed up

There's a lot of sand being washed up onto beach number one, and the wetlands beach, right now. Part of the annual cycle of storm, erosion, rebuilding?

Fury found this little guy on the wetlands beach. Tiny, perfect, but no longer swimming.

The Great Brookhaven Cleanup

From April 5th to May 31st. Everyone, join in and help!

More information here: http://www.brookhaven.org/

Volunteer sign-up form here: http://www.brookhaven.org/Brookhaven/KeepBrookhavenBeautiful/tabid/477/Default.aspx

April 5th and 12th are cleanup days. May 17th will be the Great Brookhaven Plant-in.

If we all do a little, it adds up to huge.

Strange boat

The tug-like boat was pushing the raft with crane on it. I guess some dredging is planned?

Quote of the day: battlefield boob?

"Eighteen is certainly an age where we're putting men and women in uniform on a battlefield," he said. "I think they can decide if they want larger breasts."

From an article about the increase in the number of young women/girls having "cosmetic" surgery.

Well, Mister Plastic Surgeon, maybe BOTH are wrong.

Full article here: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lisurg0327,0,3741500.story

Very seedy

Went to Home Depot yesterday evening to buy some more weedblock fabric to put down in front garden before wheel-barrowing more of the pile of woodchip, leaving spaces for the plants-and-trees-discovered-under-the-strangling-vines-and-poison-ivy. Found the fabric, and some staples... and also the seeds. All those pretty packets of flower seeds. And each packet is so cheap!

Came away with herbs: cilantro (really Coriander), two sorts of basil, "common" chives (what did they do???), vulgar oregano (not putting origano next to chives, might end up censored), spearmint (to grow in a bucket), garlic chives, curly parsley and lemon balm (will buy thyme and rosemary as baby plants, already have some lavender). Flowers: poppies (of course), (did I really buy four more packets???), four sorts of sunflower, lots of sweet peas, giant columbine, some crimson morning glory just to be different, and several varieties of nasturtium (if the turtle is still around, he will find them). And a set of those little peat pellets to start them off indoors.

Must resist temptation to plant seeds before soil is warm enough. Resist, resist....

Two-by-two

The birds are all aligning two-by-two today.

Two ducks going bottoms-up in the creek opposite the bedroom windows. I don't know if they are having fun or sending a message.

Two swans on the wetlands beach.

Two grebes floating serenelyon the bay.

And two beige doves, sitting on my deck railing, peeping through the window and eating from the bowl of seeds. I think they are Mourning Doves (http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/163/_/Mourning_Dove.aspx) but am not sure. They are about half the size of town pigeons, but pigeon/dove shape, very cute.

I hope they are all two-by-two because it is spring. And not because they are expecting Noah.

Numbers game

Woke up at four a.m. with a head full of numbers. Bills, birthdays, estimates; dates, train times, blocks of streets. Went to kitchen, drank water by the orange street-light coming through the window. Back to bed, back to sleep to the sound of the village siren (fire? ambulance? they are all volunteers and summoned by siren). Alarm went off at six-thirty. A little light seeping in, but a cloudy dawn, not bright. Switched on the lamp... nothing. Switched on the overhead light... nothing.

Immediate thought: another problem with the electricity, another electrician's visit, another oversized bill to pay.

Looked out of windows. Street lamp was off, but that says nothing, as the sun was on its way up. Neighbour's lights were off, but that says nothing, they leave for work before six-thirty or get home later. Checked the fuse/trip switches: everything looked fine.

Wondered if I'd need to drive to Melville or Manhattan to find an office with power and internet for work....

Called the power company. Recorded message: "outage in Mastic Beach, a crew has been despatched, estimated fix time 8 a.m." Cool. In time for first meeting of the day.

Decided to drive to Shirley and buy coffee at Dunkin' and take it to beach and watch sun come up. As that thought appeared, so did the dog. Most unusual. She usually sleeps until at least nine. Thought that dog plus coffee wouldn't mix, don't have enough hands. Decided to do dog-walking first, then coffee on beach.

Just as we were walking out the door, the power came back on.

Walked the dog, paid the bills, found the street directions, decided what to do about estimate and birthdays, and made coffee... all before eight.

Good start to the day :-) And no numbers in head tonight :-)

Easter Sunday, early but springing

Been a busy weekend. The sun was shining, the air calm and clear, and it was time for the garden. Started by cleaning up that-what-the-dog-had-left-behind. Yuck. Once that was out of the way, did some major tidy-up: trimmed the pampas grass down ready for new year's growth (I don't know if now is the right time or not--some people did it early in the winter, some later, and some still have last year's grass all brown and dead--maybe there isn't a right time?) Pulled weeds, trying not to disturb the bulbs (it is almost a joy to weed here, after Sacramento, where every tiny root was concreted inside heavy clay; here the earth is sandy and light and easy and probably lacking in vegetable matter, that can be fixed).

Then, carried away by the loppers, started trimming all the dead stuff from the bushy/rambling/vinelike bushes at the end of the pond. Found that they were entangled in a chainlink fence, whose support posts had rotted, and which was only kept from splashing into the pond and giving the fish a heart attack by the way the bushes had wriggled through the mesh. It's gone now. Three large plastic bins-full of "brush" and several black bagsfull too. Two reels of rusting chainlink and three rotten four-by-fours. All out-of-the-way. The bush will grow back, I had to trim it nearly every week last summer, and it has roots all over the garden. Wouldn't be surprised if it's the reason the pond is leaking.

Planted some pansies: pink, purple, blue and white. In the "upstairs" garden, where deer don't go. And some new roses: "Rose de Rescht", a pink shrub rose; "Intrigue", a purple-plum flowering, everblooming floribunda; "La Reine", a large-flowered, pink bourbon rose, and two "Climbing Coral Dawn" everblooming climbers (these two in the "downstairs" garden, against the east-side trellis where they will see the afternoon sun.

The roses were bare-root from Home Depot. As usual with HD, these dry-rooted plants had been kept somewhere wet. They were already budding and needed to be planted immediately. Sometimes I think you don't so much buy roses from Home Depot, but rescue them, but that's a rather presumptuous thought. The prices are good and the roses have always "worked" for me. There are two Lady Banksia ramblers probably flowering all over the top of the hillside in a garden in Sacramento about now that were once dying in too-small pots at the end of the summer in Carmichael Home Depot. Sold off for a couple of dollars each, and eighteen months later they were huge and beautiful.

I used to think roses were boring, difficult and not worth bothering with. Then I saw the climbers and ramblers, old-fashioned and fragrant, at the Priory in Manton, and realised what roses really could be.

All the roses in florists here are pretty, perfect, scrolled buds, with absolutely zero perfume. I'd rather have ugly, petal-dropping, inconsistent blooms that smell like roses are meant to smell. Or a flamboyant coat of colour all over a trellis or fence for two or three weeks a year before being replaced by shiny, clean leaves. That's what roses should be.

Gave the pond some more water, the pump and filter running all weekend to clear some of the winter debris and give the fish some oxygen.

Watched the fish for ages. No sign of the big guy, my koi. All the baby black fish seem to be turning orange--pond guy was right when he said most goldfish are born black. This is good feng shui, apparently: goldfish represent riches. (Send by PayPal please.)

Watching the water like Ahab, waiting for the white whale.

And then, around three o'clock, there he was. Rising out of the murky depths, like a silver ghost, he showed himself and then disappeared under a floating water hyacinth. Moby! He survived the winter! (Looks like he now has a golden streak along his flank--and he has grown.)

Queequeg, no harpoon needed here, OK?

No, THIS is the full moon

It is now shyly hiding behind a veil of cloud.

Can anyone explain why I seem to get a red circle around the moon? Was using 300mm zoom...

Full moon?

Almost... just a little nibble gone from bottom left corner. Or maybe that's cloud.

The moon rises over the water and lays down a path of silver for itself to travel over. The geese fly by, singing in the dark.

And then someone drives screechingly-fast down the road, misses a turn, skids and fishtails and almost, but not quite, ends up in the creek... then drives away with the car making embarrassed clunking noises.

Quick walk-on-the-beach

Looking west towards the pavilion and the TWA memorial. Can't walk that way with a dog.

A little different to summer, when it's crowded with people sunbathing, and the lifeguards sit on their tall chairs and have rowing races round the beach buoys.

It was a fast walk, because the wind is bitter! Beautiful late afternoon though... huge waves, sand in patterns, driftwood, shells.

Looking north across the bay from Smith Point towards Mastic Beach. Home is somewhere on the right of the picture, across the water.

And today's birdsong is American Robin

4 p.m., and the wetlands are back to their usual state. Floodwater gone. Amazingly fast.

The Drifting Deck (or is it a lost dock?) has turned up again in the small channel. I'd go and grab it and use it in the garden somewhere, but that channel is wider and deeper than it appears.

The American Robins are singing and singing today: they are bigger, brasher and more in-your-face than European robins... and they are late for Christmas.

http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/212/overview/American_Robin.aspx

The swans

... are reunited.

... and it starts draining away already

For a while this morning, Park Drive was completely covered in water, about SUV-wheel-high (based on visual measurement of a passing vehicle bravely driving straight through). An hour later, the flood on the road has subsided, and the wetlands are starting to re-emerge.

I have only seen one of the swans this morning, swimming slowly in the flood of the creek, then in the distance in the wetlands and now towards the beach. They cry when their partner is missing.

And then the tide came up and the water came down

High tide isn't for a couple of hours, but already the wetlands are... wet. Water flowing down from the island meeting water coming up from the bay and the ocean.

I don't think we'll be walking on the beach this morning: there isn't one. We might even have to swim to get there.

This is going to be interesting....

First day of spring, and it's sodden

A lot of rain overnight, and the marshes are full. The weatherman warned of being woken between 2 and 4am when a warm front passed over Long Island, and sure enough, at ten to four, the rain and wind hit hard. Only lasted a few minutes, but left a lot of water.

Doesn't stop the red-winged blackbird from singing, though. He is the Rod Stewart of birds, slightly croaky but still tuneful.

All photos and a bug

All the photos are on the site now: http://www.alisontoon.com/jpserver/web/default/

There is a bug in the photo album software: if you look at many of the photos, they will start to appear black. You can fix it by closing the browser and starting again, or by going to the thumbnail view rather than the slideshow. (The smaller your memory, the sooner it happens.) (Your PC's memory, not your own.) (I think.)

Yep, spring is on its way

The deer are frolicking on the wetlands beach.

Almost, almost spring

Even with the clock change, the sun is up really early. Beautiful sunrise this morning. Now the bay is silver and brilliant, dazzling... waiting for the arriving clouds to soften the sky. It will rain tonight and tomorrow, and maybe fog will follow, hiding the deer and quietening the blackbirds.

I need to work in the garden.

Offender list

Once again today, there's a list of local sex offenders in the mail. While I do appreciate being warned, value the access to information through Megan's Law, I wonder why we are given so much information about offenders who move into the area, and no information about those who leave.

We must receive one of these notifications every two or three weeks. I am sure that of all the people we've been notified about in the past few months, some must have moved away again.

This should be about information, not fear.

I am trusting in the justice system that the only people on this list are people that are truly a possible danger to others--and not young men who have fallen foul of the age-of-consent with their girlfriends (it's 18 here, versus 16 or lower in European countries).

More info here: http://www.parentsformeganslaw.org

Sunny day

'Tis beautiful today.

Blue and blue and sandy. Sky huge. Wind ruffling the stone reeds. A hint, just a hint, of buds on the trees, like they know something is coming, soon.

Several miniature iris have pushed up and are blooming, purple, in the front garden. They really are miniature--no more than three inches tall. Elsewhere, daffodils are a few inches tall now, still green.

Yesterday afternoon, I took a big black garbage bag and extracted some of the paper, plastic, beer cans, bottles, packaging and other stuff that had blown into the reeds and the undergrowth. Looks much better now. I hope everyone else will do the same with their bit of Mastic Beach... there's a lot of litter around right now, and it won't all fade or wash away.

China thoughts

Anyone who thinks the reason for offshoring to China is to cut costs has a very short-sighted view. You can be pretty certain that costs will remain competitive, because competitive prices make good business sense--but prices will not remain incredibly low. Better reasons for having work done in China are the large number of technical graduates, the large, available workforce, and the enthusiasm for learning and growing. China is producing twice the number of technical graduates per year as India, and many times that of the USA.

English is being taught from kindergarten onwards.
People are making business from anything and everything. If you want it, need it, think you might need it, perhaps may need it somehow somewhen somewhere.... you will be able to find it in China.

(Except for CNN news stories about trouble in Tibet. Those get censored out within a couple of seconds, leaving just a tantalising headline before the screen goes silent grey... "More protests against Chinese occupation in Tibet today" then the censor pushes the button.)

The business skills being displayed in China today are nothing new. Suppressed but never banished during the Cultural Revolution, they have reemerged and are evident everywhere, from the new, Western-facing businesses that have developed in just a few years from small offshore manufacturing and assembly operations for western companies to NASDAQ-listed software manufacturers. They are evident in the young girls selling in the Silk Street market, whose sales, marketing and negotiation skills will have you laughing as you walk away having paid twice as much as you would in San Francisco's Chinatown for something you didn't really need anyway. They are evident in the awe-inspiring architecture of the Beijing Olympic stadium, the opera house, and Shanghai's business district. Don't think of China as a cheap location for business, because it is anything but cheap--it's just lower-cost. For now.

Think this: Hong Kong was not Hong Kong because it was a British Colony. Hong Kong was Hong Kong because it was China with a free-market economy.

And then realise how big China is in comparison to the Hong Kong territories.

Think big.

China photos

I'm uploading the photos to the photoserver:

http://www.alisontoon.com/jpserver/web/default/

There will be several albums, as there are too many pictures to put into one. I've started with the people, more will follow tomorrow, after a few hours (or more) sleep... zzzzzzzzzzz.....

Back from China...

... and the roof has been leaking, again. The flat roof that I had FIXED just after moving in, because it had been leaking to fill a bucket. This time it hasn't leaked through one spot, but seems to have seeped through all over and made blisters and stains in the drywall seams. That means all the insulation must be soaked. Just spent a few minutes blindly sweeping water off the roof (too high to see from stepladder, can just reach the broom up there). This is what comes of not having enough cash at the time to replace flat with a slope and fix it properly. I guess. Though (in my humble opinion) a fixed flat roof should stay fixed for more than six months and four storms.

Animal count

Seven really-big deer, two swans (who followed us around towards the marina), many seagulls and one quiet fisherman, floating a boat on the bay.

And there are flower buds on a tree down the street--look like a type of willow. The small, clumping willow that I planted in the corner of the front garden may be struggling a little, but it has some definitely-still-alive, and very red, branches, so hopefully it will recover and acclimatise this springtime.

The wind is rising. 50 mph is forecast for tonight. And lots, and lots, of rain.

Google earthed

Just on the news, Google will no longer be able to show detailed photographs/maps of the military installation in my back yard, because protestors will use them to climb onto the Houses of Parliament.

At least, that's what it sounded like.

One man (or woman?) and a plane

He (or she) is at it again. The girls say it's Tom Cruise and his Christmas present... a new plane. It's a small propellor plane and it sounds like something out of Snoopy and the Red Baron. Doing aerobics over our house and the bay. Buzzing the seagulls. But it's a peaceful noise, like the summer drone of bees.

At night, we see a million stars, and the twinkling of still-high jumbos as they make their way to JFK or La Guardia.

The guest kitchen :-)

Can I go sleep now, please?

(Yes I know the skirting board isn't finished, and the door still needs painting, and the radiator needs a new cover... but I need a long nap....)

Unfrozen fishes!!!! And they have multiplied!!!

The pond is thawed! And the fish are... many. Bigger and I swear more of them. **And** some are definitely "preggie" (gravid?) with tummies full of eggs. The little black ones that hatched last year are now fairground-goldfish size. The small goldfish who survived the raccoon attack are now about half the size of the ones that didn't survive.

They were enjoying the sun and swimming near the surface of the water. I gave them a little food, and first the black fish ate, and then the bigger goldfish.

The one with the lacy tail is still there, and the white-and-spotty one, but I have yet to see "my" big guy, the koi. I hope he is lurking in the depths, waiting for a few more degrees of heat. It's too murky to see right now, as the filter and pump have been switched off for the duration of the ice age. If I haven't ruined them by letting them freeze, this summer will see a silent water run, not a noisy waterfall. Will hopefully keep the water loss down, too.

Wake up! Wake up!

... at 5 a.m. Dog was barking. She was barking at the thunder. The thunder was following the lightning, as thunder does. We had to check the whole house to find out where the thunder was.

It was a fierce storm: lots of electricity, much rain, high winds. The rocking chair, as usual, rocked itself over. The window screens that were neatly stacked on the deck (why hadn't I put them downstairs?) are scattered. There is a huge puddle or ten in the street. The water is high, the ocean sounds like an express train.... and the sun is shining.

Amazing.

Now I have to go out and collect all the debris that blew off the dumpster/skip. Soggy.

It really feels like spring

The sun is shining. The sky is a pale, translucent blue. High clouds hazing the sun. Water a deeper reflection, small wavelets on the bay. Redwinged blackbirds singing and rattling, a mockingbird going through his phonecall repertoire, bluejays scolding the cat. There are daffodils coming up: both the ones I planted (which were impatient and now are scorched by frost), and the ones that have been here for a while. I wonder if they are yellow daffodils, or white narcissi? I wonder if the bluebells will come up safely? (Thinks... Swithland Woods when we were kids, miles and miles of blue carpet that wilted if you tried to pick them for mother or aunt, so we left them where they were... thinks... miles of wild garlic in Sassenage, all along the below-mountain stream, pleasantly stinking in the warm air... thinks... spring is a good season and Easter will be early this year...)

Guest/game room?

I don't know what to call it! It's the room-between-the-hallway-and-the-"summer"-kitchen... or maybe the "guest suite living room". Now has a distinctly Mid-East flavour. Just need to bring in a few plants and a camel and we'll be fine.

The curtains... put up the curtain pole over the window after carefully measuring the length of one of the curtains. Hung the first curtain and went to unpackage the rest (each one in its individual plastic zippered-up bag, and the window needed four. Was feeling pleased with self since, armed with the laser level, hadn't made dumb mistakes like the first ten times hanging curtain poles. Second curtain looked a little different. Was different. It was a different colour and it was fake suede. Realised that the curtain used for measuring was in fact the odd one that was going to be converted into cushion covers. Ok... still have four, all the same... only... half the length. Oh, heck. These were the ones that came from the shop in the outlets that was closing down (and were subsequently a terrific bargain), but ooooops. They wouldn't work. Not at all.

Had to make a detour to Medford... Target saved the day :-)