memento vivere

My new cube has a window . . .

2008-09-04T09:38:00.001-07:00

in the ceiling.

Pond by Sal's Pizza

2008-06-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

Top of the water is green with pollen.

It's a sign

2008-05-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

I am standing next to a granite pillar that says 'One Brattle Square.' Off in the distance is a sign that says 'Two Brattle Square.'

Spring contd. . .

2008-04-14T10:59:00.001-07:00

a little more green

Spring day #?

2008-04-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

First skuk cabbage sprouts barely visible

Spring - day 3

2008-03-28T10:47:00.001-07:00

A minor setback, I'm sure.

Spring - Day 1

2008-03-27T10:43:00.001-07:00

Met with mild but firm skepticism

An anniversary of sorts

2008-03-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

The yard has been covered in snow for three months now.

Start of the lunar eclipse

2008-02-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

cell phone camera through binoculars

Andrew Jackson for Whom The City is Named

2008-02-07T09:36:00.001-08:00

He is taking his hat off as he jumps that palm tree, 'cause it's kinda warm.

Jacksonville FLA

2008-02-06T17:32:00.001-08:00

Development Research Conference

Horrendous Accident Outside My Window

2008-01-31T08:07:00.001-08:00

Should not be a two-lane road here.

Radio Tower in Newton

2008-01-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Russian School of Mathematics

2008-01-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

No snow days here

Western Canal Frozen

2007-12-10T15:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes this phone takes excellent pictures. That's my building in the distance.

Picking Son up after cello lesson

2007-11-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

Statue of Debussey

First Snow of the Season

2007-11-21T08:24:00.000-08:00

I love the snow!

NaNoWriMo 2007

2007-11-19T15:58:00.001-08:00

Noel in Lowell

2007-11-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

Hurricane

Beaver Den

2007-10-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

At the far Eastern edge of Spruce Swamp.

LTD State Forest Swamp

2007-09-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Midway through our mountain-biking excursion.

Spruce Swamp

2007-09-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

Out for a bike ride

Rainy Tuesday in Lowell MA

2007-09-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

The view from my new office.

Last ice cream of the summer

2007-09-03T17:39:00.001-07:00

Hanging out by the river.

Had a nice day exploring locally.

2007-08-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

Boston as seen from the top of Spectacle Island

South Park

2007-08-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Didn't have time to "have ourselves a time," though.

Buena Vista CO

2007-08-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

Liar's Lodge, right on the Arkansas River.

Needles CA

2007-08-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

The desert information center was closed, so we cross in ignorance.

Mr. Toad's pit crew

2007-08-02T17:49:00.001-07:00

Technical difficulties in Fantasyland

Mickey's Toon Town

2007-08-02T10:47:00.001-07:00

The happiest place on Earth

I-5

2007-08-01T14:14:00.001-07:00

Move along, now. Nothing to see here.

Leaving Folsom

2007-08-01T09:12:00.001-07:00

Maybe you can't go home again, but you can leave home any number of times.

Reveah

2007-07-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Waiting for a plane and eating breakfast

Flight delay

2007-07-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

Here at lovely Logan Airport, 5 am. The plane won't be here until 10, though.

Walking Maggie

2007-07-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Along Varnum Avenue

Play play play!

2007-07-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

That's not her tounge. It's the beak of the rubber chicken.

Pull tab

2007-06-27T18:29:00.001-07:00

To activate battery

Maggie

2007-06-25T17:42:00.001-07:00

Tired from chasing the ball

At the river again

2007-06-24T13:08:00.001-07:00

Having a little more ice cream

Conservation area

2007-06-23T14:37:00.001-07:00

Mowing the lawn

Pepe LePeau

2007-06-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

Skunk in the side yard

At the river

2007-06-15T15:56:00.001-07:00

Eating ice cream

Squirrel lasted Maggie 20 minutes

2007-05-06T17:15:00.001-07:00

That's its squeaker, below.

Go Fish

2007-04-30T11:07:00.001-07:00

Go I'm hanging around at the fish store waiting for the tests on the water in our aquarium to conclude. This guy's watching me, sort of.

How to walk a terrier

2007-04-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

Just tie a stuffed animal to a cord and growl at her. She gets much more exercise this isometric way.

Warm next to the heater vent

2007-04-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Her hair was getting matted, so we had her groomed.

Four inches last night

2007-04-05T13:20:00.001-07:00

I could have sworn we were done with this stuff

Let that be a warning to you both

2007-03-30T06:06:00.001-07:00

With so few signs in Lowell, some serve more than one purpose

Shuwatch!

2007-03-27T06:24:00.001-07:00

Watching the last episode of an Ultraman DVD.

The Cast Room at Saints Memorial

2007-03-22T03:09:00.001-07:00

Bonus, I got to ride the cool chair

What a mess

2007-03-17T06:32:00.001-07:00

Winter's funeral precession

The Ides

2007-03-16T14:56:00.001-07:00

Probably the last snow of the season, being sifted by the redwood deck in back of our house.

Meet the new boss

2007-03-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

My boss's boss, actually. Everyone seemed pretty excited and optimistic at the press conference/announcement.

Morning Watch

2007-03-09T04:23:00.001-08:00

AKC-approved toy fox at her side, Maggie makes sure every morning that the neighbors drive their cars to work. Fridays are especially important, because she has to make sure all of the garbage and recycling are picked up.

Maggie with a led ball

2007-03-06T17:30:00.001-08:00

We spent several hours Christmas Eve trying to get her to hold one of these flashing balls up so we could take her picture with it in her mouth. We weren't able to do it then. For some reason I got a couple easily last night.

My Sacramento Accent

2007-02-21T17:53:00.001-08:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
North Central
The West
Philadelphia
Boston
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Start your day with an ash-can fire

2007-02-21T06:54:00.000-08:00

What a smell, burning cigarette filters and dog-ends. It's bad enough people have to smoke in this spot, which has an overhang, keeping the smoke close to the entrance to the library, so that it gets on your clothes.

Anyway, it looks like the mobile posting is messed up again on Blogger. So I will post these some other way for a while, until I get really tired of it an give up entirely, or the fix the problem.

Beaver den

2007-02-17T15:09:00.000-08:00

In the middle of Spruce Swamp

Getting kid after checking out a school

2007-02-15T08:56:00.001-08:00

Not this one, but it is just down the street.

Sledding in the State forest

2007-02-14T09:42:00.001-08:00

Carefully groomed run

Night tennis at Trull Brook

2007-02-13T17:18:00.001-08:00

I'll feel it in the morning

Back to Working Assets

2007-02-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

We had canceled our Working Assets long distance service because we decided to go with a cable TV/internet/phone bundle to save money. So they called us with what sounded like a good deal on wireless. They'd buy out our current contract, give us two of these Katana phones, which the guy said were the latest thing and would take better pictures than my Motorola, and all for about what we are paying now.

Wrong. He didn't know what he was talking about. It would have cost considerably more to get it to send pictures as text message attachments, $15 per month (currently I pay about $5) per phone. Worst thing, though, was that I got this box of phones and stuff via UPS with little instruction as to how to make them work. The packing list said the phones were ready to go, which was completely wrong, they didn't even have phone numbers. And when I tried to use them they connected me to Sprint. They wasted about three hours of my life without any kind of idea of how they might make recompense, so I bundled everything back up and shipped it back to WALD.

Dropped son at prospective school

2007-02-07T11:50:00.001-08:00

He did not like it at all.

The dentist's bathroom

2007-02-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

Just got out of x-ray and cleaning and am spitting blood and chunks of mouth-beef into the sink.

Finally some snow

2007-02-03T04:55:00.000-08:00

About two inches last night

Break-fast fundraiser

2007-02-02T07:22:00.001-08:00

The electric pancake griddles keep blowing the 10-amp fuses. So we stood by the breaker board in shifts to keep resetting them. Then on the way to work the radiator on the Subaru finally fell apart.

Lesson number one

2007-01-29T16:43:00.001-08:00

Let there be rock

International incident

2007-01-26T16:50:00.001-08:00

Caught in the Canuck flag

Maggie's 1st fur-cut

2007-01-24T15:35:00.001-08:00

Has to go to the groomer every 3 months, though

I had an idea

2007-01-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

Quartered breathing

Fixed it w/a roto-zip and chisel

2007-01-21T15:21:00.001-08:00

See the camera in the reflection? Don't know what's so hard about putting these things in the right place and hanging the doors so that they actually close and latch. New house, less than 2000 square feet. But three doors were screwed up the day we moved in. It's hard to sculpt with a roto-zip, but it it even harder to use the roto-zip bit in a regular drill because you can't find the stupit chuck device for the roto-zip machine.

Maggie took this from the upstairs bath

2007-01-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

Toilet paper. She tore it apart, leaving a trail all the way from the stairs on the other side of the house, while we watched The Chronicle of Narnia up there. Something about the cardboard in the middle is tasty, I guess. But you have to take all the white stuff off to get there.

Tracks in the snow this morning

2007-01-19T03:53:00.001-08:00

The picture doesn't really do justice to how small these things are. They are about as long as an aglet and almost as thin. I should have put something in for scale. It doesn't seem to hop like a squirrel, and they seem smaller than squirrel tracks anyway. They came from the farmers porch in the front of the house and ended at a hole next to the birch tree that we had to cut down two years ago. I didn't see where they went after that, so the hole may have something in it.

9-year-old son made dinner for us

2007-01-18T15:02:00.001-08:00

Beautiful, Isn't it? Pasta with red sauce and some sort of meat in it (onions, too). The salad is green leaf lettuce with dried cranberries and cherries, mandarin oranges, balsamic vinagrette. Then there is bread with garlic and olive oil dipping bowls. The drink there is some sort of sparkling water with blackberries in it. That is his hand, on the left hand side, gratin fresh parmesan cheese onto the pasta. He made it all himself, even boiling the pasta and draining it, etc. My wife helped with advice and instructions on certain fine points, but he conceived the whole thing and carried it out himself.

Finally started my pirate story

2007-01-17T18:35:00.001-08:00

Only a couple of weeks left to put something together for Glimmer Magazine's pirate story contest. I've been toying with an idea for weeks now and finally found a free hour to get going on it. The pencil, perched lovingly on Edward Rowe Snow's Pirates and Bucaneers of the Atlantic Coast has been carefully (but not quite silently) chewed by Maggie. I thought it might be something in the cedar, but the Wife says that Maggie likes the carbon, for some reason.

Didn't want to go out; doesn't want to go in.

2007-01-17T08:02:00.000-08:00

The temperature dropped like twenty degrees last night. When Maggie sniffs the ground, which I guess you have to do when you are a dog, her little blocak nose gets really cold. And she walks funny, too. The ground is so cold that she keeps thinking she has stepped on something weird.

Dog with 12-string

2007-01-15T11:30:00.001-08:00

First time in ages I played this one. Mostly old tunes by Mojo Nixon, the Beat Farmers.

Still life with fiber

2007-01-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

Fruit, walnuts, omega-3s

The stamp game

2007-01-12T16:41:00.001-08:00

Dad's night at the montessori

Poor Po

2007-01-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

Took this on a rainy Connecticut Thanksgiving Day, 2006, but neglected to post it then. Since I left my phone at home today, I thought I'd post this instead.

Po was always my favorite Teletubbie. O.K., Po was the only one I liked.

This stuffed version was owned by Strawberry, a golden retriever. She is a small doll, not the actual Po that is seen on TV. Still, it was disheartening to see her out in the yard like that, face down in the rain.

That's Maggie, sniffing at Po with her "I'm really concerned about this beloved TV icon" posture.

Hanging's not too good for them

2007-01-10T11:59:00.001-08:00

Back working for the Development office, I hanged my degrees on the wall, 'cause how else would anyone know?

Anarchy in Belmont

2007-01-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

I've always wondered if the graffitist intended this ironically.

Cycad

2007-01-03T17:42:00.001-08:00

New Year's Day Burlington Vermont

2007-01-01T07:50:00.001-08:00

Day 1

Burlington first night

2006-12-31T13:33:00.001-08:00

A giant keg?

She really wanted a badger

2006-12-28T13:41:00.000-08:00

Maggie's new toy gets a workout.

Dog tired

2006-12-25T13:01:00.001-08:00

Getting a lot of walking in today.

The tree on the right is more than 100'

2006-12-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

I am thinking about climbing this tree sometime next year. I should get a great view of the city from up there.

Oh Christmas tree

2006-12-16T16:47:00.001-08:00

The finished prouduct

Hunting Christmas trees

2006-12-16T13:57:00.001-08:00

57 degrees. People playing golf today at Trull Brook.

Coureur des bois

2006-12-15T13:45:00.001-08:00

My Son running through the woods next to our house, with the ubiquitous stick. I'm still thinking about beginning this experiment again. The phone interface seems to work fine, now. In fact, it works better than it did before, because I used to have to go to my blogger account and delete a bunch of extraneous text that Verizon sent along with the pictures and text. So, any day now, probably.

Mourning Doves, or something like that

2006-12-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

I was about to get into my car this morning and found that even though it had been warming up for about five minutes it still had frost all over the windows. Luckily I saw that I had some water left over in a big bottle from Saturday's tennis clinic. So I poured it all over the windshield, not thinking about the fact that, having been sitting in the car, it was very close to freezing. So, essentially, I replaced the frost on the windshield with a thin, but strong, sheet of ice, which I could not even scrape off (at least I couldn't scrape it off with the scraper I keep in my car--the crystal case from a Stray Cats CD.)

Anyway, while I was waiting for it to thaw naturally I heard some birds, little birds, on a tree across the street. They were really chirpy and loud. Apparently I was not the only one listening, though. Some sort of bird of prey swooped down and nabbed one of them. The others screamed, but in vain. Here's a picture of said raptor standing on this little bird, choking it with one claw and pulling feathers out with the other.

Maggie at 6 months

2006-11-28T15:58:00.001-08:00

Haven't posted a picture of Maggie in a while, so here you go.

Black Friday in Lowell

2006-11-24T14:46:00.001-08:00

Christmas lights downtown

On tha Mass Pike

2006-11-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

Here we ah.

Considerations in Continuing this Experiment

2006-11-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

I started this blog because I had a cool idea, that I could post pictures about the things I am seeing at randomly selected times of the day with data about what I am thinking about, how I'm feeling and that sort of thing. And then later on I could run it through some statistical analysis and find out some interesting things about how I can be a happier and more productive person.

But I'm thinking that this will be the last post here for a while. Three main reasons:

There are some technical problems that are making this difficult. Apparently Verizon fixed some sort of problem at vzwpix.com and my posts are able to get through now. I say apparently because the post below took two days to get from my cell phone to this blog. The process used to work dependably and I don't have time to figure out how to fix it right now.
I have entered National Novel Writing Month and committed to producing a novel and have only 20 days left to do so. I'm making excellent progress, but this takes a lot of time.
Maybe most important, writing this novel is clearly the most engaged I can possibly be while I have my clothes on and am not on a tennis court. I hope that this novel doesn't completely suck, because I know I'm a good editor and I can make it a lot better. And I may seriously think about attempting to do this full time after I am done writing it.

So I'm going to take a break from this site for a while and may return to it if things change (if I find myself bogging down in the novel, or I become suddenly unemployed, or depressed, or whatever. And maybe I'll just return to it anyway and finish the experiment. Best way to get notification is to subscribe to the feed.

Crunching numbers

2006-11-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

101010101722

I am preparing some spreadsheets to format election exit-poll data as it comes in. Pretty energetic, mostly out of fear that when it finally comes in I won't be able to do it before the deadline. And feeling pretty good about being able to help.

Writing again

2006-11-05T16:27:00.001-08:00

111001001925

Work on the NaNoWriMo novel never ceases. Well, I guess it will cease on November 30.

Making good progress after an extremely busy weekend with two birthday parties for my son, who will be nine years old tomorrow morning at 8:27 am.

Feeling good but tired.

Zamboni

2006-11-04T17:28:00.001-08:00

101010102028

At a hockey game/birthday party with my son and his soccer friends. There are like 14 of us. I think if you include the pep band that's like almost half the crowd at the lightly-attended game. Lowell Riverhawks won 5-0 against Merrimack. I'm tired but having a pleasant enough time.

Mobile blog up and running again

2006-11-04T05:28:00.001-08:00

I have no idea how this worked out, but the gears and fan belts are all going in the right directions now and I can post with my mobile phone once again.

I called Verizon yesterday, thinking that the communications problem might be at vzwpix.com, since I wasn't getting responses from them that they had received my posts. But I still don't understand why they would get the messages in the first place. I am sending them directly to go@blogger.com.

Anyway, the time-intensive and somewhat unsatisfying experiment that is real-life postcards will resume today, thanks, I'm guessing, to the patient and kind Crystal at Verizon.

I'll probably have to spend some time getting the formatting on this site worked out, though. Perhaps I should learn some more html, or CSS. I changed the format of the site when I was having technical problems, because I switched over to beta.blogger. I don't know if I still have the option to play around with the formatting directly.