Waste of time

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A friend of mine used to keep these regular lists. He listed all kinds of things about his life. It was a helpful reflection for him and, often, a source of interest or amusement for those of us who saw them. He gave it up a while ago, but yesterday sent one to a group of us and I have been thinking about for hours. I was doing some especially productive pondering while I was shaving in the shower this morning (side note: I flippin’ love shaving in the shower and I highly recommend that those of you who shave give it a go). This was the list he sent. I take no credit for it and I did edit it a bit for clarity.

List of Things I did to Waste Time While in College, listed In no particular order, and excluding drinking, etc..

  1. Wall Ball, I think was the name, soccer on a squash/racket ball court, with misses leading to being placed against the front wall and shot at from point blank range.
  2. How many plates can you eat, at dinner, times through the line in the dining hall.  Only do-able when you are 20, and playing a serious number of sports.
  3. Some incredibly stupid game when we threw a tennis ball at a semi-enclosed light on the ceiling in the dorm lounge.
  4. Flipping through college’s actual, print and paper, face book, making decisions about who was attractive, pre-Facebook.
  5. Watching Magnum PI reruns after dinner, think every night we did this. Note: there were all of 3 stations on our dorm TV.
  6. Saturday college football, Sunday NFL football.
  7. A handful of incredibly stupid video games, including an early version of Tetris.
  8. Hang out in the “spa,” with an order of nachos, and semi-pretending to study.
  9. Go downtown to either make a late-night run to Dunkin’ Donuts, or to buy CDs.
  10. This one was not my thing, but I had friends who tried to memorize MLB box scores, and then would quiz each other on them.
  11. Play name that tune, which involved going to someone’s room and having the DJ put in random CDs from their collection, play for like 3 seconds, see who could guess the band and the song.
  12. Stay up for days on end, then sleep for extended periods of time.

I admit I participated in some of these things, although not all of them. I did not play Wall Ball as I was not a soccer player and it would have meant simply getting pummeled by a high speed soccer ball. It feels a bit odd to reflect on judging people’s appearance in the paper face book but I did participate in that common practice. I would like to think we all have grown out of such behavior by this point but I can only speak for myself.

What struck me the most about this list, however, is the title. All of these are listed as a waste of time. But are they?

I recently listened to a Radiolab podcast called The Secret to a Long Life. It suggested that novelty can help us stretch time, that by doing new things, or by doing the same things in different ways, we can experience them with an extended sense of time. The extreme extent of this would mean that if you could do novel things constantly your life would seem to last forever. I felt pretty good after listening to this since I am regularly trying to do things differently. I try to take a different route home from the office. I put on my right sock first, instead of my left. I whisk the pudding with my left hand. These are all small things, but they demand that I pay attention more.

If you have ever experienced any kind of accident–car crash, falling off a ladder, getting hit hard in a sports game–you may have experienced time slowing down. Time does not actually slow down, but because we are experiencing something new/exciting/traumatic/dangerous our minds pay attention to more details than they do during other experiences. When you drive the same route every day you may find yourself miles down the road and realize that you hardly noticed the place you have been passing through. But when your car slides off the road or hits another car, your mind registers all the details of the event–you notice more and the time is more full.

The key here (and the lesson of the podcast) is that time will seem slower, our lives will seem longer really, when we experience things where we pay attention, whether that is by our own design or it is thrust upon us. The things that stand out for me in my long life are the things that were new, or different, or unexpected, good and bad. I remember the very first time I kissed my wife, but the hundredth time? I am afraid I do not. I can remember being transported in an ambulance, and standing on top of Black Mountain alone for the sunrise, but what I had for lunch on October 1st? Um, nope.

To me, the things that make life worth living, the things that make life full, the things that teach us the most powerful lessons, the things where we feel the most, the things that make this human life a thing at all, are all of those things we experience in detail, those experiences where we pay attention. We work to make a living so, I hope, we can have a life. Life lies in our attention.

So, the list. Most of the things on this are things that require paying attention. OK, maybe not watching football so much, or sleeping for extended periods, but most of these things are memorable because they were not mundane. They were novel. And having experiences like that is the point. To live a good life, to live a life worth living, requires that we do things like the things on this list.

I am not going to go out and try to get a Wall Ball league started, but I am going to get up early and go for a run in the dark with the wind blowing snow in my face while I sing a song from Lemonade Mouth. I am not going to memorize box scores but maybe I will go see an MLB game in a city I have never visited. And I should try black pepper on vanilla ice cream–I hear that is amazing.

Thank you, my friend, for posting this list. It helped me to remember some of the joys of my earlier days, and it got me mulling over about how to live a joyful life. Heck, all that thinking and even writing this are things I just may remember in future years. After I get some work done (that making a living thing actually matters, people), I need to find me some Tetris to play.

Winooski River Portrait January 2024

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Yesterday I volunteered to look for eagles for Vermont Audubon’s annual eagle survey. My route is the Winooski River, from Waterbury to Lake Champlain. I did see two Bald Eagles, one immature in Williston and one fully mature in Essex. There have been years when I have seen none, so this was a success. It was cold, in the twenties, with a light wind, and a recent coating of snow. I saw some remnants of flooding this fall–plastic jugs half full of oil, lots of branches and leaves, even a complete futon frame. There were a couple of locations I could not go to, closed due to flooding damage, but mostly I had a full survey. Along the way I took a portrait of the river.

River’s edge in Duxbury
Bridge 31 from Waterbury
Railroad bridge Bolton/North Duxbury
Snagged flood debris, Richmond
Next to Jonesville bridge
Tree uprooted into the river from recent flooding, Richmond
Volunteers Green, Richmond
Looking east from North Williston Road bridge
Below dam on Route 2A, Williston
Woodside Park, Essex
Winooski Falls
Winooksi River mouth at Lake Champlain

Finding some snow for the holiday season

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We have gotten some snow down in the valley, but it certainly has not stuck around. One day last week, the world had a thin layer of white and the road right here was slick. Just walking early was a treacherous journey. But it had mostly melted by sunset. Later in the week, the snow all but gone, I drove north to Enosburg for the day. As I drove the temperature dropped, and the snow piled up. I don’t mean it literally piled up as I drove, I just noticed it was deeper the farther I went. It was 14 degrees by the time I got where I was going, but it was beautiful.

We have no snow now. The ground is wet, not even frozen. This morning the wind picked up and the temperature was close to 50 degrees. My spouse and I went for an early run and when we got back she said “Well that was a lovely September jog.” This is Vermont in mid-December, but the weather isn’t exactly festive to match the time of year. As Andy Williams sang, “It’s the holiday season.” So come on.

Yesterday, rather than wait for snow to come to us, we decided to go find it. We drove to Huntington, up the long twisty road to the Burrows Trail, and hiked up Camel’s Hump. Even in winter the trail is popular. My guess is that it is the most popular hiking trail in the state, so it gets use even with snow and ice. We found both snow and ice right at the start of the trail. The trail was packed down from previous hikers, and we wore micro-spikes, so it was easy going. Just like in warmer days we were hopping over water running down and crossing the trail, but mostly we walked on snow.

As we climbed we found more and more snow. The trunks of trees were covered, plastered along their lengths by what must have been a stiff wind, then branches. Eventually we got high enough that the spruce and fir were coated in heavy snow. Success. It definitely made the season feel more festive. We did not head all the way to the summit. We had found our snow. We relished it for a bit before hiking back down. It was a jolt of true winter to boost the drear of our valley home.

This afternoon we will get rain, but then overnight, oh happy night, it will turn to snow. It will be wet snow, heavy, and will make things a bit of a mess in the morning, but we will wake to a snowy day. That’s more like it. We may lose power, which is a hassle for sure, but I am pretty sure it will be worth it. If it is going to be winter, then we may as well have lots of snow. Bring it. It’s the holiday season.

Contrails on Thanksgiving morning

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The busiest time of day at the Burlington International Airport (excuse me, the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport as it has recently been monikered) is early morning. There are always flights at 5:30, 6:00, 6:30 or thereabouts. On a morning run, as the sun lightened the sky today, we noticed the contrails of several of those flights. They were lit pink with the rising sun. They were beautiful.

They are not natural, of course, and it hard not to wonder how they affect the weather–so many flights every day. They are literally making clouds. There were a couple of jets flying over us as we trotted along, drawing pink lines across the blue. And there were several old contrails–broken and spread wide across the sky. There were few natural clouds. The world is so beautiful that is feels odd to marvel at this manufactured beauty, but there is was, a marvel above us.

We realized that not all of these planes came from Burlington. Some were too high, too far away, traveling too fast. While we could of course find out in real time what flights were passing overhead, we did not. Instead we speculated about their departure points. Boston? Portland? Montreal? Manchester even? No idea. But it felt good to have a little mystery this morning.

It is Thanksgiving Day. I feel grateful for that morning moment–physically capable, outside in a beautiful place on a beautiful day, with an amazing woman, looking forward to a day with my awesome children. My daughter and I plan to cook up a big old meal together. We have been looking forward to it for a few days now. She knows her way around a knife and a pot. I am grateful for that too.

We also got a glimpse of a bright shooting star, even as the light grew. We wondered how bright that might have been had it been fully dark. It faded in a second. Those contrails will fade as the day progresses and air traffic slows. We will peel potatoes and pre-heat the oven and prep a pie and eventually eat it all up together. This day too will fade into the evening and tomorrow and the days to come. There are many things for which I am grateful. Right now, I am just happy to be here, trying to enjoy the moments as they come.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Enjoy the day.

Winter on the way, apparently

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It makes sense to get up early. It helps to get a start on the day, to have some time before dashing off to the rat race or the daily grind or a fun adventure. The past couple of weeks I have been sick–nasty cold that won’t quit–so I have not been getting up early every day, but today I was in charge of the dogs, so I got up early to get them off to their daily routine.

The routine is to give them some hearty attention, pour out some kibble for their breakfast, and while they suck that down gear up for whatever the weather might be. In the summer it is light and it is warm, but these days it is neither. The temperature was 26 degrees this morning and, along with my insulated and hooded jacket, I pulled on a reflector vest and a headlamp. Plus a warm hat and gloves. No shorts and T-shirt and Crocs today.

It was dark, but there were some stars out. Venus and Jupiter hung out up there, glowing their glow. Skunks are around, although I admit I have never seen one here. I can smell them sometimes, however, so that headlamp comes in handy to sweep the roadside for those cute but worrisome mammals. There were none again today. Animals come through at night. The dogs can smell whatever they are. Maybe they are other dogs. Maybe they are coyotes, or bobcat. There have been bear around. These domestic creatures spend a lot of time sniffing. They say it tires them out to read through scent.

It feels like November–cold, bare trees, frost. It isn’t winter yet, but soon enough those gloves and that jacket will be habit. And the early morning light will be a distant idea. We still have another month of days getting shorter. The light will come later and later until the solstice. Later today there were snow flurries. Fall might still be here but it seems to have taken a nap. Winter has its elbows out.

I will rise early tomorrow to do it again. It will be our bi-weekly trash and recycling pickup day. While the pups chow down I will wheel out the bins to end of the driveway, then collect the breakfast eaters and out we will go. I do like seeing the stars and the red of the morning horizon, and hearing distant coyotes. The dogs will take their time, and at the end of all the sniffing we will head back inside, to brew some coffee and get ready for the day ahead.

First Snow and a Few Lights Up

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It was wet but it was cold and white and covered the ground. It didn’t last but it was beautiful while it did. With snow in the forecast, we decked the big fir out front with lights. When we rose, darkness just slipping away, we had lights in the snow.

That spruce has grown since we moved to this house a few years ago. The first year we stood on a step ladder and wrapped a string of lights up to the top. We do not have a ladder tall enough to reach the top of the tree now. So we had to improvise. We wrapped lights around until we could no longer reach, then pulled out the pool skimmer pole, topped it with its scrub brush and used that to persuade the lights all the way around to the top. Warm weather tool for a cold weather job.

The roads were slick in the morning. This early snow always sends a bunch of drivers off the road. That happened. But by afternoon that white blanket had settled into the grass and trees and had melted off the roads. The next morning there were a few random piles here and there but little other trace.

It is early in the season. Thanksgiving is still a couple of weeks away. But it is dark early and the lights help. We will put up more, but today that tree is doing the trick. We will only turn it on when it gets cold enough, or it snows, at least for now. Thanksgiving will be here suddenly, and then the holidays are in full swing. We should make the most of it all.

It is an El Nino year, and that may mean we get less snow. But we also have climate change happening, so maybe not. I am going to hope for snow, as always. I hope for lots of snow, but I will take what we get. This snow was a good start. Cheers to that.

Last of the Garden

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I wasn’t planning to plant beets, but I had some extra space. Our vegetable garden consists of a whole bunch of raised bed boxes. Every year I know I am going to plant some things, but inevitably I do not have a plan for some of the boxes. Extra basil? More carrots? Something totally new? This time one of those beds got beets.

Someone I work with had a lot of seeds. They were seeds to be given out to participants of a program that got canceled last spring. Covid canceled it, probably, but anyway she had a hug bin of envelopes of donated seeds from High Mowing Seeds, a Vermont seed company. She was giving them out, so I rifled through them and figured I would try a few. I took some carrots, some spinach, swiss chard, and these funky beets.

I mean, they looked cool on the envelope–bright pink stripes. Even if we just got a few they would be nice to look at. I popped the seeds in the ground and let them do their thing. And they grew well. Leaves came out and I just let them go. I wasn’t exactly excited to have beets. We grew them when I was growing up–bright red jobbers that we ate boiled for dinner. They were OK. I didn’t hate them or anything, but there were not really my favorite.

But hey, I am a grownup now. I am allowed to change what I like. I am allowed to at least pretend I am sophisticated enough to like stripey beets. When they finally started to get big enough to eat, I pulled up a few. And they did look cool, just as advertised. I didn’t boil them but I added them to smoothies. Because of the stripes they added less color than I had imagined they would, but they added a healthy earthiness to my smoothies, which was a nice change.

Eventually, it got cold enough that the garden was pretty much done. I pulled the tomato and pepper plants and stored their cages. I cut the last lettuce. The potatoes were safely in a bin, ready to be washed and eaten over the fall. And I pulled the rest of the beets. There were quite a few, and some of them had gotten pretty big–softball sized. I washed them, peeled them, cubed them and blanched them. Then I stored them in freezer bags and off they went to the chest freezer.

Now I can add a few to my smoothies as I like. They should last quite a while. I don’t put that many in a smoothie, I’m not a weirdo, so what I have will go a long way. I have several bags and I grew them myself, and I am allowed to add them as I please thank you very much. Blanched, they add a little more color then raw, so there is that too.

The other day I planted garlic. Generally that is the last act of the fall for the garden. We have gotten a few hard frosts. We are likely to get snow tomorrow. The beets are in the freezer and the garden is put to bed. Except for those last carrots. I need to harvest those soon, crap. But it is mostly put to bed. I am already planning for next year. I am not sure about planting beets again. It depends on whether I go through what I have in the freezer, or if I get more free seeds. When I have some beds without a plan, I guess I will figure it out then.

Mile a Minute Weed in Vermont

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It was a wet summer. It rained and rained and rained. Too much rain. The field behind our house flourished. Bobolinks nested, and Meadowlarks. Grass grew tall. But we hardly went out there to explore–too soggy. But a couple weeks ago we figured we should head to the back to see if there might be any pumpkins.

When we moved here we discovered a compost pile at the edge of the meadow, next to the woods. It was filled with yard waste and garden trimmings–the stuff you cut back in the spring and fall. We added our own contributions to it. We compost kitchen scraps and some other yard bits in a bin close to the house, but the big stuff we haul across the field to this pile. It is where we toss our Christmas tree when we take it down. The first fall we also discovered pumpkins out there.

The previous owners had left pumpkins in the pile, clearly. They dropped seeds and grew, so our first fall we had a bounty of huge pumpkins, the vines stretching into the tall grass. We found a couple dozen of them, some hidden pretty well. It was like finding orange treasure. We tried to replicate this, adding our own pumpkins, plus squash and other gourds, and overgrown cucumbers and zucchini. We have never had success, but we look each year. On our first visit out there this fall after a wet summer, we found no pumpkins, but we did find something else.

I am always curious about the life that I encounter–plants, animals, insects, fungus. Several years ago a friend turned me on to iNaturalist. When I encounter something in nature I do not recognize, I take out my phone, open the iNaturalist app and snap a photo. Based on the characteristics of your photo, plus your location and time of year, the app makes suggestions for what you have seen, with photos and description. If one of the suggestions you see looks like what you have found, you select it. Then it uploads to a database where others can see it. Others can then look at what you found and agree with your identification or make another suggestion. It has been great to see when I had it right, and helpful to see suggestions that help me get it right.

On this day, across the field filled with ponded water, my spouse and I found a vine growing in the compost pile. I did not recognize the blue berries and the triangle leaves. And the stems had barbs. When we lived in Bolton we would find tearthumb growing in open areas. This low vine with barbs would do some damage to your ankles if you walked through it. This vine seemed similar but was not the same. Was there more than one species of tearthumb? INaturalist told us that it might be one of two species. Neither one looked quite right, but I selected the one that seemed closest and entered it. I figured I would look it up later to learn more.

The next day I got a notification for iNaturalist. A retired botanist in Pennsylvania had suggested it was not Halberd-leaved Tearthumb as I had suggested, but Mile-a-Minute Weed. This was not one of the suggestions that came up when I used the app, so now I was really curious. Another Tearthumb? I used the map feature of iNaturalist to find other sightings of this plant in Vermont, but there were none. So I tried Google. Nothing. The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources site let me know that this is a plant of concern but had not yet been found in the state. So I let them know I had found it.

We realized that Mile-a-Minute Weed is invasive and that we needed to pull it, but figured someone might want to see it. The next day I got two calls from people working for the state who did indeed want to see it. That afternoon the two of them, along with my spouse and I, splashed across the field and checked it out. They confirmed it was what it was and we looked around for more. The vine had spread over the compost pile but that was it. Because it grows so densely, we managed to roll it all up, pull the roots out of the ground, and stuff it into a construction-grade trash bag. We scoured for dropped blue seeds, added them to the bag, double-bagged it, and hauled it back. They took it away to destroy safely and that was that.

It was sort of exciting to find the first of a species in Vermont, I admit, but I can’t say it made me happy. Mile-a-Minute weed can really take over and smother everything around it. It has caused problems where it has invaded other places. I took a look a couple days ago to see it there was anything we missed. There wasn’t, that I could see. I will be sure to look again in spring, when seeds might sprout. We could have buried one of those inadvertently. We have had a couple of heavy frosts now, so it is done for the year, but we will monitor the site.

Shout out to iNaturalist for doing the job. Without that tool we would not have identified this invasive plant and it might have spread too much to deal with easily. I am glad we found it, and I am glad it is gone.

Better with Snow

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Walking out in the field recently has meant crushing the ice-covered grass stalks. I kept feeling like I was killing it, the fragile stems breaking under my boots. But now we have snow! It feels like we have had a hundred days of gray skies and damp air and chilliness. Dreary. Usually I take whatever weather comes. Complaining about the weather is a bit annoying, I have to admit. Why grumble about something that can’t be changed? I have been a bit more sympathetic lately, however. All that gloominess.

However, this past week has brought snow. It snowed heavily for a while–that beautiful white stuff falling to cover the brown and gray. It makes everything lighter. Even at night the world is brighter. Our boots don’t smash the grass but plow through the snow instead. It feels gentler, softer, quieter. The world around us is covered in beauty. The bareness of winter has its own beauty, for sure, but this is magical.

I have been thinking lately of what to plant in our garden. Now it is covered in snow so it will be a while before I can turn the dirt and sink in some seeds. But January is the time to dream of spring. Rosemary and thyme still grow in that cold soil. Last night I had to dig through snow to cut some thyme springs. Hard to believe it is still green. It made a difference to dinner. I managed to plant garlic in the fall and that sleeps, waiting for warmth. And there are all those empty beds to imagine full of plants–tomatoes and carrots and pumpkins and potatoes. What new varieties can I try? It is about time to order some seeds.

The trees are covered in snow. It falls now with more on the way tonight. It does not have to be much. A dusting is enough. Maybe fairy dust is really just snow. The Snow Buntings came back last week. They have been flying around the fields, although they have yet to discover the seed I keep leaving on the ground for them outside our windows. They are like fairies they way they float and appear from nowhere. Snow I tell you–magical stuff.

Squirrely Weather

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It was way too mild for a while. Warm, no snow. Even rainy for several days. That is pretty lame when it comes to winter. Last week I drove to Rhode Island for a couple days. Of course it snowed then. It was not a full-on storm but it made for some slow going. Then it cleared and snowed for me again on the way home. When I got to Bolton on I-89, close enough to home to think I would be there soon, traffic slowed, then stopped. Car off the road? Some slipping and sliding? Hard to tell as it was too far beyond the long line of cars ahead. And so I waited. And kept waiting. We all inched forward a few times but mostly just sat there. A few people got out and walked around. One guy stood on his roof to try to see what was ahead. Another guy walked down the hill to take a leak.

A flatbed came up from behind and so everyone pulled to the side to let it pass. Then another came, led by a state trooper. And we waited. I have no idea how long I was there. I did get out to stretch once. Luckily I had gotten gas and some coffee back in Barre, so I was pretty set. Eventually we did get moving and I finally passed a pickup getting pulled onto one of those flatbeds. The thing was completely burnt–fire ate it right up. Another car was on the other flatbed, front end all smooshified. I found out later that no one was hurt. That could have been bad.

The weather has been seasonal since then. Yesterday and today were cold and windy, like way windy. I went to the lake both days to look for wintering ducks. There was surf at the Charlotte Beach and again today at Chimney Point, waves crashing on the shore and throwing spray. It was hard to stay out long. I was bundled but that wind sucks the heat away right quick. Taking a walk close to home was bitter too. It felt good to get out there and move but good lord that wind tugged at the cheeks. We had snow flurries most of today. More are on the way.

We may get a storm later in the week. I’ll take it. While we have a couple inches of snow on the ground, drifted in spots and bare in others, I would love to see the ground covered. Can’t beat some quality snow in January. The Snow Buntings might appreciate it. They came back today. This is about when they arrived the past two years. We watched them swirl in a flock over the field and loop around to the neighbor’s fields, little white fluffs of fluttering. I spread some seed on the ground to let them know they are welcome. I am sure they will find it, hopefully in time for the storm.

I don’t plan to travel too far this week, so my chances of getting stopped on the interstate are slim. If we get a big old dump of snow, I won’t mind working from home. I need to stay safe, and it is easier to watch the snow fall from my home office, not to mention the Snow Buntings.