Some herps

    I had Tuesday off and Laurie and I couldn't think of anything to do. I had been to Rhode Island a bunch of times birding and fishng with nothing to show for it. Despite there being great fishing "out front" I've either missed it or been in the wrong place. I couldn't bring myself to head down again. 

   The only times I haven't been miserable lately (seasonal depression?) is when I am being productive. So LAurie and I set out to drop off my mother's knick knack shelf to my brother and drop off photos of my son to his mother. This is all part of my organization from moving.

   It was about noon after we did these chores. After a frosty morning it warmed up to the low 60's and was quite nice out. Laurie and I had thought about going to a small museum but realized they had a "highlight's tour" at noon and out ETA was 12:40 so we decided to skip the museum until next time we could actually be there in time to take the tour. 

   So we decided to go for a walk at the Boyden Wildlife Refuge in Taunton, MA. I had been there a couple times. I went on a salamander walk once so I knew where to look for salamanders. I flipped a bunch of logs and found four.

On our way back from the river LAurie spotted a Garter Snake crossing the trail. It took me a few seconds to see it also but did manage to catch it. I picked it up and held it for a couple of minutes. Gosh, I've seen so few snakes this year it did not want to put it down. Laurie took a few photos for me and we let it go. I'm sure it will be hibrinating before long. Godspeed little buddy
  

Great Swamp Battle Monument

 

Just off of Route 2 in West Kingston, RI is a monument that is dedicated to the bloodiest battle of the King Philip's War. I have driven down Route 2 hundreds of times to go birding but had never went to the monument. The side road leads about a quarter mile into the woods and then there is a walk of roughly half a mile to see this monument. Would this monument be worth the drive on its own? No. But if you are already in the area it is worth the walk to see it.

   King Philip's War was the bloodiest war per capita in American history. Both the English and the natives were very cruel in their tactics often targetting civilians, towns, and livestock. This battle was no different.

    In December 1675 about a thousand colonists descended on the native fort/village in the swamp. The natives built a European style fort that included longhouses. There were women and children in the village along with several hundred warriors. 

   The English won the battle probably because the nartives ran low on gunpowder. Once the English got the upperhand they slaughtered women, children, and the elderly. They burned the village to the ground and destroyed the winter supply of corn. It was a massacre and sometimes the battle is called "The Great Swamp Massacre". It was winter so along with the dead from the battle many natives also died of cold and starvation after the battle. 

 

   The monument is dedicated to the white men that fought in the battle (not the natives). There are stones along the edges that have Mass Bay, Plymouth Colony, Rhode Island, and Connecticut engraved on them since all four colonies sent men. There isn't much to say about the natives that also fought to defend themselves. The monument was put up in 1906 and I suppose history was still looked at through rose colored glasses at the time.

   I honestly knew nothing of this battle. So going out to the monument lead me to learning about it. I researched and watched a documentary about it. So because of this monument a half mile in the woods I am slightly smarter because of it.

More free time than I thought

    I had to be out of my house by October 1 for the developer to take over. It was a stressful and time consuming month from the beginning of September intil October. It turned out to be a pointless timeline. My house is not sold yet because it is still in probate.

   During those three weeks as I said before, I'd go home on days that I closed at work. I'd box stuff up. Then on the following day when I opened at work Laurie would meet me at my house and we would fill our cars with boxes and bring them to her house. I obviously had a lot of stuff to go through. Besides my stuff which includes many hobbies, I had to go through the stuff of my mom and dad  that we never threw away when they passed. This included two closets that had been not touched for thirty years.

   Also, my son's room was still there so I had to give his mother whatever was worth saving. If you've moved before you know that it isn't just stuff you think you need to take but also stuff that you know you can't part with. I am the opposite of a hoarder but I knew anything I left was going to get bulldozed so I had to be mindful that this was my only chance to save anything worth keeping.

   Once at Laurie's, I organized to the point of OCD. I had shoe boxes full of photos, postcards I collected as a kid, camera equipment, and a lot more in boxes. I did not want to waste space with stuff I didn't want. I also didn't want to move anything a second time that I'd never use or look at. Last Friday during a rainy day off while Laurie was away  I spent eleven hours just organizing. This included everything from photos, loose fishing gear, music on the computer, postcards, and finding the deed to my car. It was a long day and at 7:30 pm I stopped for the night and ate supper.

Those paragraphs are a long introduction into something I learned...when I am not moving from selling my house, I have more free time than I had realized. We all get in the habit of getting out of work, watching some tv, and going to bed. I was in a rut like that.

   However, if I had all of that time to pack boxes, drive to my house three or four days a week, or spend hours sorting through photos, then finding time to write an email or blog post really isn't that hard.

   This realization has had some great benefits.While I've been fairly consistant working out the last nine months, over the last three weeks I have been even better. I find it easy to squeeze in a twenty minute workout now. I have the time. Sometimes, Laurie and I will eat supper and watch a show. After the show, I'll head downstairs and lift weights for twenty minutes to a half hour. This is absolutely perfect for a diabetic. These workouts burn off some of the sugar or carbs I ate. As my doctor said, let your muscles do the work for you. Other nights after supper, we have been walking the neighborhood. It is a large neighborhood and we walk by the Halloween (and soon Christmas decorations). The walk is 1.8 miles. And again, it just feels like I have more free time than I thoguth.

   The day I worked eleven hours on projects was brutal. I was mentally burned. I had a huge list and I wanted to get it over with. However, that too taught me to be efficent. That day I had no choice. I had stuff in boxes that I wanted to clean up. However, now that  is done, instead of letting chores or emails build up, I'm finding the spare ten minutes to get things done. 

   While this doesn't have a lot lot to do with southern New England Outdoors, it does mean (now that packing is over) I have time to write. I have time to walk (even after dark). I have time to be productive. These are all good things.

World War 2 Museum a Second Time

    Laurie and I went back to the WWII Museum in Wakefield, RI. We went over the summer on a rainy day. The museum was incredible and we knew we would go back. When we went, we took a tour lead by a docent. He showed us a ton of cool stuff and spent an unexpected two and a half hours with us. 

   This time we wanted to go at our own pace. We also figured two and a half hours was enough time for someone to spend with us. There is so much memorbilia that it was impossible for the docent to show it all to us. Our goal was to find some interesting to mind blowing stuff we hadn't preiously seen.

   We did find a lot of amazing things we did not see the first time. As I said in the my first post, Nazi's are bad. They are the most evil regime in history. Seeing Nazi historical pieces brings strange emotions. Being that close to evil is something you do not do everyday.

   Photos of some of the stuff we saw below.

A photo of the Sullivan brothers.
All five were lost at sea.

A plate owned by Reinhard Heydrich head of the 
Gustapo

The collar of Hitler's dog Blondi

A photo signed by three of the men that 
raised the flag on Iwo Jima

Ira Hayes
Johnny Cash wrote a song 
about him

Letter written by Bernard Montgomery
General of the British Army.
Patton was not a fan

Letter by Charles de Gaulle
Leader of the free French Army

The guy that wore this hung high
level Nazis!

Read this-
It is about the guy that hung the 
Nazis after the Nurembberg Trails

Dwight D. Eisenhower signiture

   The museum is open Tuesday-through Saturday.The hours are 10-5 pm. The musueum admission is ten dollars and well worth it.

Too busy to write

    For the last six weeks, I have gone dormant on this blog. There is a very good reason...I sold my house. I've been hemming and hawing for years about selling my house and I finally did it.

   I had been taking my time with plans. I was pretty sure my realtor would be Eric Meyer. I've known Eric since high school since he sat behind me in home room all four years. Eric has been a realtor for a long time and is very good at his job.

   I contacted both Eric and a lawyer in June. We needed to get some legal work done first. By early September I was finally ready to take the plunge. I had warned Eric that he would need to be patient. I took a long time between steps. For example, I wanted to cut my grass before he took outdoor photos. So because of rain on my day off he had to wait an extra week before I gave him the go ahead.

  When he finally put it on the market on a Monday, I told myself that it was okay because it would take a while before it would be sold. I'd still have time to pack at my leisure and remember the good times from my childhood home.

   Things did not work out that way. By Tuesday afternoon we had an offer for more than the asking price. We had until Wednesday to accept it. The even more pressure was we had to be out the door by October 1st 

  And that my friends is why I haven't written anything. Between that Wednesday that we accepted the offer and the first week of October (they extended the deadline by moving the closing) I have been packing and organizing.

  I had thought I had gotten all of the crap out of my house two years ago. After my back healed I spent a lot of time at my house getting rid of a lot of junk. I am not a hoarder so the junk was just stuff that was useless. I made a point to throw out a bag of trash a week and sometimes bring another bag to Laurie's. By the time I was done the house looked pretty empty.

  But it was still my storage unit while staying at Laurie's. I kept my baseball cards, extra fishing poles, books, my three bookshelves, and a lot of spare fishing gear. I still had plates bowls, and a shed full of stuff too big to put into a trash bag.

   So for the last month, on days that I closed at work I'd go home for a couple hours in the morning and pack. The days I opened and got out at 4 pm, Laurie would meet me at my house and he would load our cars.  I had my friend Susan, who owns a Honey Dew, save me boxes. So once a week for a month I was also making a trip to Woonsocket to pick up boxes. It was worth it. Having all the boxes the same size made packing and stacking so much easier.

  I didn't want to just throw shit into boxes. So what took me the most time was organization. I wrote on each box it's contents. I organized my books in boxes labeled guide books and literature. I put my photo albums and framed photos in neat organized boxes. You get the idea.

  But even at Laurie's house I was giving myself tons of projects. For example I found two shoeboxes full of photos that never made it into albums. Many of these were before digital. It took me a couple hours to got through the boxes. Some of the photos were duplicates. Others were just blurry or I had too many from one memory. I did the same with postcards I collected as a kid and I organized them by the state we went to on vacation. When I move again, not only do I want everything organized but I don't want to take anything with me that is either useless, dirty, or a waste of space.

   On top of all of the moving, I gave my bird club notice that this will be my last year as president. I want to go out on a high note. So I have been spending a lot of time contacting potential speakers, organizing events, and writing for our newsletter and our Facebook.

  I did go trout fishing in Plymouth one day last week catching one nice Rainbow. I don't think that one fish without a photo was worth interrupting my writing hiatus.

  The closing is any day now and I have gotten most of my organizing done. My next board meeting is Wednesday for the club so I should have an uptick in free time. So hopefully, I'll get out fishing and birding and having something worthy to write about. 

 

 

Sandwich, MA

 

Words to live by

  The last couple of weeks I have had Tuesday off from work and on Monday I have a day shift. So, when I got out of work on Monday at 4 pm we have been heading straight for the Cape. The routine is to go straight to a campground, pitch the tent, make dinner ( hot dogs one week and burgers the next) on the grill. After dinner we have gone to the beach shark fishing. All of this is in the hours from 5-11 pm.

   The next morning we have explored. The first week we went to Crane WMA in Mashpee. We go there a lot looking for butterflies. This day, we saw four new species which was great. We were in a slump for lifers. After Crane we went to Market and got a sub and ate at the Railroad Bridge. We went home kind of early that day.

   This Monday we were better prepared and got to the campground early. We made supper and went sharking. No sharks were to be had. The highlight was watching a lightning storm over Martha's Vinyard  the entire time. For three hours we watched six or seven strikes a minute. The storm was moving east over the ocean and still going strong when we left the beach.

   Tuesday, we explored a little bit. We stopped in the center of Sandwich. There is a nice little veteran's park with monuments to many wars from the Civil Wat to Vietnam. There is also an old grist mill. It made for great photos but I'm thinking the mill would make calendar quality photos during peak foliage season. It may be worth a trip down just for photos.

   Also in downtown Sandwich was an old church. The church is very picturesque. So much so that it was used as an album cover for Elvis Presley (holy crap!). the album was called " How Great thou Art". That was pretty cool. 

  Our best find however, was a natural spring right next to the town hall. The spring is popular with locals who filled up gallon jugs and large Poland Spring jugs while we were there. I took a drink and the water was ice cold and delicious.

 

 the spring next to Sandwich Town Hall

    After our stint in the quaint ( I despise that word) town of Sandwich we headed to Onset. Laurie swam for an hour and I looked for shells and stripers ( I walked to a bridge). After my walk I was low on energy ( diabetic bullshit) so treated myself to a Pepsi with sugar (instead of diet. I never drink regular soda but needed sugar this day) and a small bag of popcorn. I sat at the bandshell until Laurie was done swimming. 

   After Onset we went back to the Canal and ate a steak and cheese sub by the water. We sat at a bench eating fruit as a desert after enjoying the ocean breeze until it was time to come home.

Post script- The campground we found  cost less than twenty dollars a night. It is almost empty on weekdays. We had a side road to ourselves. The road had seven other sites and we were wonderfully alone. Laurie liked the trip so much that she went back on Thursday last week. She went to Onset and swam first. Then went to the campground. Friday she took a walk on the canal and had lunch at the Sandwich Marina. Today she left to do the same thing. It works out because I have to close on Thursday nights and open on Friday. She has the two days to herself and we reconvene Friday afternoon.

The light was not good on the church
no matter where I stood

   

Imagine this photo with fall colors

There is a cemetery near the center.We found gravestones of both Revolutionary War and Civil War vets. 

Th

Leopard Frogs

 

Laurie and I took our annual trip to Great Meadows in Concord, MA to see Leopard Frogs. This is about the only place I know where I can see them regularly. Not much of a story, there were a lot there. I caught a couple and we took some photos.