Category: photography

Weather is a Jerk

It is April so if there is one thing we can count on it is rain in New England. Today is at least the forth consecutive day with rain in my town. Forth or fifth? Something like that. It’s raining again.

Or is it? Is it more than that?

Yeah… I was driving in to the office and sure enough there was snow falling. Not a lot. Just the occasional snow flake mixed in with the drizzle. Today is April 7th and there is snow falling. Well honk my hooter, April snow. Ugh.

I tried to take a picture of Robin the Cat before I left the house. I needed to do the photo a day thing. I pointed my phone at her as she was exploring the laundry basket that I failed to put away yesterday. Just as I was about to click the shutter button she saw me and ran away and this is the photo I got…

219/365

Happy Monday, folks. It’s going to be a tough one, I think. All the signs are pointing that way.

Long Drive Recap

The drive from Methuen, MA to New Bedford, MA:

103.1 miles in one hour and 48 minutes. The GPS app (Waze) took me through a couple of weird routes, but there wasn’t any traffic at all.

The drive from New Bedford, MA to Methuen, MA:

93.8 miles in one hour and 28 minutes. The GPS took me on exactly the route I would have expected.

The total drive:

196.9 miles in three hours and 17 minutes.

In closing, here are a few toy camera app (Hipstamatic) pics from the gas station near our house that I stopped at as I was leaving on today’s drive.

218/365

Rain

The kids are at a concert with their father and their step mother. Jen is working. I’m sitting in the living room typing this and looking at a sleeping cat or two.

I want to shoot film at sunrise but I can’t because New England in April means rain on the weekends. Not just the weekends, of course, it just seems that way. Every Thursday or Friday I start looking forward to the weekend and I check the weather forecast and it’s always the same. It is always rain. Rain and gloom. Even the Red Sox have been in a rain delay for the last hour and a half or so.

I wish I could have made it into the city to join in on the Hands Off demonstrations today, but the kids were here and I would rather be with the kids than almost anything so I happily stayed home. One of these days there will be a certain ridiculously tall old person with red hair in one of those Boston throngs, I promise.

Until then, here’s a photo of Lily that I took a few minutes before she jumped up onto the ottoman and curled herself into a ball and fell asleep.

217/365

I think Jen and I are going to do dinner via DoorDash tonight. It’s a special day for us so we need to do something nice to celebrate. 18 years ago today, on April 5, 2007, we went on our first date. As special days go, today is a big one. I love her so much, and it all kicked off 18 years ago today. Our relationship is old enough to vote, assuming the u.s. will still have elections… you know… nazis in charge and all. Oh shit, I just brought politics into my happy first-date-aversary message. Fuck me. Sorry about that.

Mild

The weather was kinda nice today. It was warm enough for me to open the windows in my home office. The cats approved.

Change of subject. Here is my unsolicited political thought of the day.

I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. I am very familiar with existential dread. What I did not expect is that the source of the worst existential dread would be some fucking moron who can't do math…… ……but here we are.

— Rob (@robj1971.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T16:06:08.166Z

Okay Then, I Guess

Yeah… well… Okay. 7:20something on a Friday morning. This feels like a sign that today is going to be a weird one.

I guess we should all just duck and cover and roll with whatever the universe spews at us. Good luck, folks.

Commute

In the office today. In the office tomorrow. After three straight business days working at home, this is suddenly painful again. Weird.

Traffic was bad today, but the normal level of bad. One exception was my own street. 3-4 houses down from us there was a school bus partially pulled into a driveway, facing perpendicular to the street, completely blocking the road. Why? How? I don’t know. I had to sit and wait for them to maneuver out of the way. I don’t get it.

Robin Sparkles the Cat doesn’t get it either.

214/365

Baffle

I saw how the squirrels are getting around the anti-squirrel baffle I have on my bird feeder rig. I looked out the window just in time to see one of those little rodent pricks simply jump over it. I had been trying to imagine some complicated method they were using to thwart my defenses and it was just an athletic little sucker jumping really high. Asshole.

I went outside and raised it up quite a bit. Hopefully that will be enough. We’ll see.