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Monday 3.1 – Cotuit to Raleigh
Tuesday 3.2-Thursday 3.4 – Raleigh
Friday 3.5- Sunday 3.7 – Cotuit

Back to Raleigh to present budgets and proposals, back to Cotuit where spring is arriving and boat work beckons. A return to Raleigh the following week — very quick flipturn visit — then the balance in Cotuit.

No international stuff looming. Passport is getting a Brazilian visa, but nothing is on the books. I’ve confirmed vacation for the last two weeks of May to fetch daughter from her term in Italy.

Pretty pissed at Flickr (for a WHOLE lot of reasons I will not go into here) and their HP-enabled photo printing service Snapfish.

I ordered a poster-sized print of Paul Rifkin’s aerial shot of Cotuit Bay and the Kettleers playing at Lowell Park and got back a crap piece of work — colors off register (looked like it was whipped off on a crap ink jet printer) and most woefully, cropped with an axe losing the most interesting elements of the photo — the island at the top of the scene.

An utter waste of money. Serves me right for being lazy and not walking a local photoshop and getting it done right the first time. Avoid Snapfish.

update: Snapfish refunded me my cash via PayPal with no phone call required. Bravo to them for that.

Atlantic white cedar is the perfect wood for boat building and is difficult to find these days with the price to prove it. I have four enourmous planks in the old sail loft behind my bedroom, leftover from the days when my grandfather Chat built Cotuit Skiffs in the boat shop. The wood is all but rot-proof.

On Sunday I took my son and the dogs for a walk around one of the best examples of a cedar swamp on Cape Cod, the Almy Cedar Swamp in Cotuit off of Old Post Road. There aren’t many left and winter is the best time to explore. Here’s a link to a site with some good background information. Interestingly, they aren’t technically “cedar” but cypress swamps.

Cedar swamps are unique biotropes found along the east coast from Maine to Georgia. They are true swamps that support a species of tree that is more related to the cypress than the cedar.  Chamaecyparis thyoides is a pretty tree, a definite break for the eye after the typical scrub oak and pines that carpet Cape Cod. The habitat and growing conditions are so unique that I went most of my life without ever seeing a cedar swamp. A few years ago the Barnstable Land Trust and some local conservationists pulled out the stops to preserve a big tract of open space in Cotuit around Cordwood Landing. Included in the parcel was the Almy Cedar Swamp. This is what it looks like from the air — note the definite difference in the foliage.

The swamp isn’t easy to find. One walks north on a dirt road across from the Cordwood Landing way to water, across Old Post Road, and north towards Eagle Pond. A half mile in, on the right, is a hidden path down to the swamp. Winter is the best time to explore because the swamp is frozen and one can actually poke around among the trees. In the barreness of winter it is is strange to step into such a green and verdant space.  The silence is amazing and the woods are cathedral-like.

Flickr Video

The trees are very tall and seem, gauging from their girth, to be a few hundred years old. According to one scholarly paper, the Cape’s cedar swamps are less than 4,000 years old.

Walking around the swamp is very cool. The ice makes it easy to poke around the frozen peat and see the moss knobs around each trunk.

These were valuable trees back in the day, but some have survived because they are so difficult to extract from the swamps. It goes without saying the swamps are endangered, filled in, converted to cranberry bogs, or just dammed up and drowned. The largest is on the outer Cape near the Marconi station — it is 11.8 acres. I have no idea how big the Almy Cedar Swamp is — but know of at least two other smaller ones hidden around Cotuit.

While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone would care if I dragged a piece of deadfall out of the swamp to turn into a new skiff, I guess I should first check the condition of the planks in the sailloft. Cool to think the boat that defines Cotuit is made from wood logged from Cotuit’s swamps.

Over the Christmas holidays while visiting in-laws in San Francisco, I was invited to a party at a wine marker’s cave in the mountaintop town of Angwin, California. As we wound up the steep road my friend said, “This is a Seventh Day Adventist town and university.” We flashed past a big church, the campus of the Pacific Union College, and then on into the back roads to our destination.

Intrigued, I did some research on the religion. Here are the basics: an American denomination formed in the middle of the 19th century from the s0-called “Millerite” movement, and was formally organized in 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan (remember Battle Creek), largely around the writings and vision of its prophet, Ellen G. White, a native of Gorham, Maine who wrote prolifically of her visions which began after she was hit in the face by a thrown rock while fleeing a 13 year old girl in Portland, Maine.

The Millerites were a group formed around 1850 in upstate New York who, based on a close reading of the Bible, predicted the Second Coming would occur in 1844. It didn’t. Again, I will spare you my borrowed pedantic knowledge and point you at the Wikipedia entry, which, as I assume with all Wiki entries, shares the input of the church, its members and officials and is as balanced a definition and history as you can find anywhere. The church is unique in several respects, notably the observance of a Saturday sabbath, a high proportion of vegetarians and abstemious practices, and a strong tradition of extroverted charity and public works from hospitals to higher education. Tithing is encouraged — more on that later — and church members do not join unions or other organizations aside from the church.

I believe there is only one Seventh Day Adventist congregation on Cape Cod. I live about five miles from the church on Route 28 in Osterville. It is a modest, contemporary structure set slightly back from the road in a stand of pine trees.

The Service

The parking lot was full — most churches seem to be enjoying strong attendance these days — and I entered the narthex along with a herd of young people dressed in their Sunday best. I was warmly greeted at the door, handed a program, and made my way into the main church hall where I took the customary back-pew-right-hand-side seat. As I settled in I put on my glasses to read the program but the temple piece fell off, victim of a lost screw. As I flustered around trying to fix the specs, a jovial man introduced himself, a local attorney who it turned out was also the church pianist. We talked for a few minutes, me explaining the purpose of my visit, he telling me about his beginnings as a Catholic. Before I could ask him about his conversion the pastor, Rev. Mark Gagnon introduced himself. The welcome was warm and effusive and I was made to feel right at home.

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Another Cotuit-based week, the second in a row. Still heads down on budget and strategy for the fiscal year starting April 1, and preparing for another round of presentation next week in Raleigh.

Boston Tuesday night for a dinner with Digg
Wednesday – dinner in Rhode Island with a customer
Rest of the week focused on powerpoint — then down to Raleigh the following week to guest lecture at UNC’s Keenan-Flagler business school, executive presentations, etc.

Hey, American Airlines just made me Platinum, so now I have that going for me. …..

Saturday and the sun was beaming down and melting the grey snowdrifts. The boat looked lonely. I put the battery on a charger, emptied last season’s remaining gasoline into a jerry can, and refilled the tank with three gallons of new gas and a shot of ethanol treatment.

Backed up to the trailer, connected the hitch, and 500 yards later was backing down a snow covered ramp into Cotuit Bay. I pushed off with an oar, anchored in deeper water, and for three minutes coaxed the dormant Honda back to life with the choke and throttle. When I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t fart out when I was in the middle of the harbor I came back into the beach, loaded the two terriers aboard, and took off for Dead Neck, the barrier island at the head of the bay.

As my son said when he declined my offer to accompany me, “You are only doing this so you can say you are the first to do it.”

That was not the motivation. Anyway, there is a simple thrill to doing this in February:

I anchored near Cupid’s Cove, the ancient inlet (now clamming cove) out to Nantucket Sound, careful to keep the boat off the beach so I wouldn’t have to push it off if the tide went out. I offloaded the dogs (who went into immediate mania and starting biting my boots) and satisfied the boat would be there when returned, headed off for a complete circumperambulation of the Island.

I brought a garbage bag and scavenged all the plastic I could find from the wrack line where the moon tides had deposited it.   There was more man-made trash on the inside, bayside of the island, reflective of where the people are in the winter and where the prevailing northerly winds blow from

Around the Point of the island (which received a bit of a trim from the dredge this winter to widen the channel) and down the outside of the beach, flawless and without footprints, just the overwash signs of high tides and winter storms. After a half mile of walking with the wind in the sun I took off my coat. The trash bag was getting full. Halfway down the beach and I popped up on a dune to see if the boat was still where it was supposed to be. It was.

And onwards down to Osterville and the Wianno Cut, where the dredged spoils from the Cotuit end of the island were pumped to shore up the dwindling beach in front of Bunny Mellon’s house.

Without some beachgrass that too will wash away, thanks to the jetties built 100 years ago that now block the natural ebb and flow of the coastal sands.  I sat down for a second, patted the dogs on the head, and then headed back towards the boat.

The dogs and I crossed the island at Cupid’s Cove, where some ice still lingered, and with our bag of trash made it back to the boat. Which was now riding at anchor in much deeper water than I left it. The solutions were:

a. undress , wade out, start boat, return to beach and get dressed again

b. take off boots and socks and attempt to roll jeans up above knees

c. just wade out, flood the boots, and climb aboard and then cruise back home at warp speed before hypothermia set in

I opted for plan C and soaked my self right up to the belt line. flopped into the boat, emptying the seawater out of the boots and onto my face. I was very happy to be the only person on the water at this point as an audience would not have been appreciated.

I phoned home, told my son to meet me at the ramp with the trailer, and fifteen minutes was back home in the shower.

So ended a good beach walk and motorboat ride in February.

By Paul Rifkin

I have a serious jones for a baseball game. How lucky am I to have this in my neighborhood? I knock off work early around 4 pm, walk barefoot or ride my bike to the ball park, buy a Moxie and a bag of peanuts, and for three hours get treated to the best amateur baseball in the world.

My neighbor Paul Rifkin shot this. Click on the picture for a larger version. He is a man of many talents and this is the best shot of the ball park, perhaps the entire town, I’ve seen in a long time.

Shopping smarter with Google Shopper on your Android Phone

via Google Shopper for Android.

Okay, I’ve had it. Four years of Blackberry and I really want a true smartphone. iPhone, Droid, Nexus — anything but this godawful enter-your-password Lotus Notes belching, horrible web browser, crippled App Store functionality Blackberry.

I need Global GSM. So that means T-Mobile or AT&T. I may downgrade the Blackberry to an email only device and move my cell number to an Android……

But which? I hate touch screens as I have sausage fingers. Droid is a Verizon product. …..

The plan last Sunday morning was to hit a “regular” church but on the way I saw a few people enter the Assembly Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in North Falmouth on Route 151 near the Massachusetts Military Reservation. I turned around and casually slipped in for what may be one of the more novel religious experiences since I started lurking in strange churches last autumn.

I try to find a new denomination everyweek so I don’t fall into the lazy trap of repeating the tried and true. With three Episcopalian visits on the board and two more scheduled I could easily be accused of sticking to what I know when the point of this exercise is to check out the mystery religions I may never have cause to visit again.  With this entry I officially cross the one-third mark in my 52 churches and need to start seeking out the significant Protestant holes in my experience as well as the religions that are going to be tough to track down (Buddhism, Hindu, and Sikhism are the big ones on the list now).

My prior experience with the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been a few random door-bell-ringing-points-of-contact where well-dressed young men, travelling in pairs, come bearing pamphlets and prayers. The second was when I worked as an orderly in suburban Boston hospital and witnessed a drastic surgical procedure on a child who’s spleen had ruptured in a school bus accident and had to have surgery without the benefit of a blood transfusion which Witnesses prohibit due to a specific Biblical admonition against third-party blood. I believe, but can’t confirm, that one of my great-great-grandfather’s four daughters was a Witness, but that is based on faint hearsay and some found copies of the faith’s signature publication, The Watchtower.

Of course the Witnesses’  headquarters in Brooklyn is a familiar sight across New York City’s East River, and according to my brother-in-law Jim,  the Witnesses dominate the dry wall trade in NYC in the 1980s.  I have no reason to doubt his word on this, but at the same time I have no evidence that this is still the case today.

The Assembly Hall is a neat, trim single story building with no rooftop steeple or other overt religious contrivance. I parked and walked back around to the front of the building, up a few steps and into one of two doors. Two gentlemen dressed in suits immediately made me feel under dressed in my Merrill snow clogs, green corduroys, and blue blazer sans necktie. I scanned the tables for some sign of collateral (pamphlets, programs, etc.), saw none, but heard a man’s voice amplified through the sound system.  I said hello to the two deacons and entered the main room in the Hall.

It had three banks of chairs, about ten rows of 15 each, and was more than 75% filled when I entered. A man in a suit stood on the dais behind a lectern and was preaching on the topic of the Sabbath. As I walked to my seat in the last row of the farthest bank of chairs he told the congregation to turn to a specific place in their Bibles. Immediately I was at a disadvantage as I don’t own a Bible and none were furnished. I took off my coat, sat down, and started to take notes, not sure what I had missed as I obviously was entering late.

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I walked most of the eastern shoreline of Cotuit yesterday, breaking the hike into three sections. One at 7 am. One at lunch, and the last in the late afternoon around sunset. All told I covered six and half miles of mostly sand, with some Main Street pavement mixed in. The dogs accompanied me for half of the distance, their favorite thing in the world is a beach walk. Indeed, all I have to say to them is “Do you want to …..?” and they start bouncing off the furniture and assault each other in anticipation.

The new camera is a nice thing to bring along, especially its high definition video capabilities. I find myself very fond these days of Flickr’s video hosting for two reasons: the Flickr uploader application bundles the videos on the camera up with the still pictures so I don’t need to upload stills to one place and videos to YouTube; and second, Flickr is not normally blocked in China or Turkey — two places where YouTube is dead.

First, a video of some Canada Geese exploding off of the marsh when I surprised them at Handy’s Point. Good thing Captain Sullenberger was not on the ascent in the neighborhood.

I started at the town dock right at sunset — which at the start of this week at this latitude is 5:15 pm. By Sunday it will be 5:31 — so we’re gaining two minutes of daylight every day now. There’s still ice in the harbor — it comes and goes depending on the wind and temperature. This sheet stuck against the town dock makes an interesting ringing sound as the waves wrinkle underneath it.

Then along the beach to Lowell’s Point. Above is the abandoned home of the former president of Harvard, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, also known as the arbitrator in the Sacco-Vanzetti case early in the last century.  The cement sea wall and old wooden groins are disintegrating.

Then along the shore to the boat ramp at the foot of Old Shore Road, where this old sign warns people not to anchor on the submarine cable that runs across the bottom of the bay to Grand Island.

My father always advised setting the mooring of the family boats to the south of the cable, in the belief that in a blow they would drag through the black mud and fetch up and hook onto the cable. So much for warning signs. I think the old man was right though. Stay to the south of the cable.

Then around the fresh water springs at Hooper’s Landing where Conrad Geyser proves the best use for an O’Day Daysailor is to be reborn as a clamming catamaran named the Thermoplayae.

The rest of the walk is smooth sailing down the broad sands of the yacht club beach to Handy’s Point. Ducks cruise along, the winter sticks on the moorings look like crosses in a military cemetery, and critters rustle in the underbrush under the bluff. The dogs get freaked out by something at the same place along the beach. I think a coyote must have killed something there  because they sniff at the spot and then cling to me like something bad is going to happen.

Handy’s Point is where my great-great-grandmother used to live, before she sold the place to be closer to the village in the winter. Can’t blame her, husband at sea, infants, big drafty house on the beach. Her descendants may wish for the view, but the salty old timers wanted nothing to do with the beach. That’s where bad things happened during storms and where the lower class clammers and watermen made their livings.

I find myself needing beach time more this time of year than the middle of summer. It’s just me and the dogs and no pissed off waterfront property owners, few ticks, and a vacant harbor to gaze out on.

Home is the sailor home from the sea as the hunter is home from the hill ….

No travel this week. Full work from home coinciding with Junior’s February vacation but alas, I am not taking any time off but need to sit still in one place and focus on some big strategy stuff for the upcoming fiscal year (which commences 4/1). Will be good to be home and not on the road for the first time in three weeks. Next trip is back to North Carolina the first week of March to guest lecture at UNC Keenan-Flagler business school, push on my Digital Marketing agenda, and push onwards with the big project du jour.

NYC perhaps the week after that.

I would make a terrible Jew.

On Saturday I visited my first synagogue and attended my first Jewish services since Hiram Samel’s bar mitzvah in 1972, thus this is the first Jewish visit of the series.  It was a reform congregation in Hyannis, one founded in 1933, located on Winter Street in a contemporary building that is at most thirty or forty years old. I give my participation a C minus at best, but throughly enjoyed the service, particularly the warmth of the congregation and the high degree of communal participation by all in attendance.

This was the most confusing service for me to participate in, with some serious revelations into the depths of my complete ignorance of the Jewish tradition. Example: I did not know the Jewish name for God (Adonai) I certainly do not know how to read Hebrew, let alone pronounce it. I am not used to reading from right to left. I could go on, but let me forge on first. I approach this entry gingerly as good mensch friends like Uncle Fester are sure to howl at my Judaic Ineptitude.

There are not a lot of synagogue options on the Cape.  The other synagogues I’m aware of are in Falmouth, a “Chabad” in Hyannis, and of course the oldest in the country, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. When my eldest son was in third grade he  participated in a “Local Heroes” project which paired him and his classmates with local leaders — his “hero” was the former Rabbi of the Cape Cod Synagogue — and so he shadowed the man for a term, visiting the synagogue on several occasions.   Of the religions I hope to learn the most about in this project, Judaism leads the list due to its venerable age and traditions, and  its commonalities and differences with Christianity (shared geographical locus, Old Testament history, etc.).

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Farch: the mythical month invented by Tony Perkins long ago when Red Herring missed a month and he decided to combine February and March — which in New England is the nadir, the pits, the lowest point of the annual cycle when the blizzards roll through, then the  winds follow, the landscape turns grey, and slowly, as St. Pat’s draws nearer, the dog shit starts to surface through the grey snow  banks.

• Red Sox Equipment truck left for Fort Myers — this is good. There are two halves to the year: the baseball half and the non-baseball half.  Truck Day is my personal Groundhog Day and now, with some luck, I’ll be blogging about the blooming of the crocuses, the planting of the sugar peas, and even — dare I tempt the gods — the launching of the boat for some clamming.
• Reading. I’ve been busy on the Kindle and in print.
  • The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain: worth a read, definitely worth a read. How these escaped me is a mystery, but it takes a strong sense of humor to make a reader laugh out loud more than 100 years later.  I’m reading the Modern Library edition edited by Lawrence Berkove.
  • Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk won Turkey’s only Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.  This memoir of growing up in Istanbul introduced me to him. I will definitely visit his novels next. It has been the perfect coda to the recent Turkey expedition.
  • Europe Central, William Vollman. Lyrical history of the Eastern Front in WW II as seen through the eyes of various luminaries from the artist Kathe Kollwitz,  the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to the Wehrmacht General Freidrich Paulus.
  • The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons. I couldn’t finish it, but the beginning is great as he relives the glory dynasties of the Boston Celtics as only a true Masshole of my generation could. The rest of it — especially his “what-if” scenarios are confusing and indulgent.
  • Baseball America: monthly rag out of Durham, NC devoted to inside-baseball and minor league prospects. Feeding the inner baseball geek.
• Watching. Lots of art film. In the past couple weeks ….

• Tropical Malady: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, aka “Joe.”  Beautiful, strange, mystical Thai film.
• Pickpocket: Jia Zhang-Ke. mid-90s film about a doomed pickpocket. Amazing flick. Sino-philes need to see this.
• Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi. Iranian flick, written by the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

That’s it. Lots of things happening at work, still engaged with the church thing, thinking about social devices, emerging market internet usage behavior, censorship issues in Iran and China …. the usual and not enough time to blog about it all cogently.

As I am back on Cape Cod sand after a weekend of exotic services in Istanbul, today I went to Christ the King, a large Catholic church in the neighboring town of Mashpee.  This is the second Catholic church visited in this project, the first being a Latin mass in San Francisco over the holidays, but one I had highlighted as a key visit in my local peregrinations. I have visited the large, white and relatively new parish twice before: once for my eldest son’s soccer banquet and the second for the funeral of a friend’s father. It is the largest Catholic congregation in the immediate area, perhaps on the entire Cape, and the church itself is the largest local church visited so far on the Cape.

Massachusetts is a very Catholic state due to the high influx of Irish and Italian immigrants in the 19th century.  I estimate half of my childhood friends were Catholic, and over time I felt I was in the minority as a non-church going, non-affiliated quasi-Christian. Those friends would talk about going to  ”CCD” (catechism class) and when visiting me on overnight stays, would need to make arrangements to attend Mass at a local church. Catholicism is an integral part of eastern Massachusetts culture, and I’ve always felt excluded when in the company of friends for whom the church was a fact of life.  As a WASP I was part of a different tradition that was more English and austere than Latin and emotional. As the local political columnist Howie Carr once observed, Bay State WASPs worship in wooden churches, Catholics in brick. WASPs tend to have roman numerals after their names, Catholics’ end with a vowel.

In the 1960s and 70s the Catholic parish that went on to become Christ the King was in temporary quarters on Route 28 in the Portugese section of Cotuit near the intersection of Newtown Road. I remember attending Mass there with a visiting friend one summer, the services were held in a tent evidently because the congregation swelled in the summer months and needed additional seating. My memories of that first Mass were of being confused by the Sign of the Cross, the genuflection before entering the pew, and the large amount of memorized rote evidently taught in the catechism classes. I was lost and felt very left out of the internal workings of the church.

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And now for something completely different, a post on interactive marketing!

Hat tip to Avinash Kaushik for tweeting this:

The International Olympic Committee has issued explicit blogging guidelines to “accredited” participants in the Vancouver Winter Games that take place this month. As a marketing representative of the Olympics who promoted a large athlete blogger program — Voice of the Summer Games — in Beijing in 2008, I had some intimate insights into the IOC’s attitude towards blogging and freedom of expression by athletes which I stifled at the time in light of the corporate relationship. My true feelings towards the IOC and its bureaucrats may never be expressed in public, but suffice it to say that initial concerns about censorship going into Beijing which were directed at the wrong authorities. The guidelines just released confirm in my mind that the IOC is hyper-sensitive and misinformed about new media and self-published content, are trying to preserve their lucrative broadcast revenues by prohibiting athletes from posting videos of themselves or other athletes, and are primarily concerned about athletes using their blogs to promote non-Olympic sponsors. Bottom line. The IOC is protecting its bank.  The guidelines continue to be restrictive, negative, and defensive in nature, and shows the wide  distance the IOC needs to cover before it catches up with the reality of athlete, coach, sponsor, and fan generated content and coverage. The IOC should establish a program to promote blogging, tweeting, first-person streaming, and do its utmost to use its best assets — the elite athletes — to promote the Olympic ideal. Instead it will likely continue to issue DCMA take-down notices against non-sanctioned video and do its utmost to say “no” when it should be saying “yes.” I understand from a colleague who worked with me in Beijing that there is some hope for London, but someone needs to throw an intervention in Lausanne and tell the IOC the time has come to promote, not negate, athlete blogging. Sorry for the rant, but as one who was deep in the weeds with the IOC over this issue, it is depressing to see little if any change in their attitude in the past eighteen months. They are on Twitter: @olympics.

Thanks to Kaitlyn Wilkins for alerting me to the new guidelines via twitter.

Update: Newsy has produced a piece quoting from this post. I am not alone in finding the IOC wrong on this issue it would appear.

While in Beijing I stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel on the Olympic plaza, scene of the 2008 Summer Olympics which remain one of the more fun things I’ve ever experienced. Being a tad plump from the holidays I have entered the New Year a devoted walker — taking inspiration in the poet William Wordsworth who logged an obsessive 15 miles a day in his beloved Lake District of England.

While at the Intercontinental I have taken the habit of a morning and evening constitutional down the broad promenade of the Olympic plaza. With the blue Water Cube and the magnificent Bird’s Nest stadium, the astonishing Blade Runner Media Center tower, it is a very cool place to take the air and stretch the legs.

In the mornings, while it is still dark, at the northern end of the plaza, there is a subway station and beyond it a man-made hill and park. There I stop, kick the wooden fence to mark my arrival, and turn for the walk back to the hotel.

The first morning I was very concerned by the distant sound of a man in distress. A terrifically loud “Ho-Ho-Ho!!!” noise that I can only describe as a human rooster. The single loud voice in the darkness was off-putting. Was the man deranged? Was he being beaten? Would he find and beat me?

I walked faster, bound for my destination but not wanting to cross paths with the Hooting Man.

Then a man behind me hooted. This was bad.  I was surrounded. The asylum had been breached and the psychotics were loose. Then a lady cruised by in the darkness walking backwards and vigorously clapping her hands. Another man along windmilling his arms. He tilted back his head and let fly a lusty “HEY-HA-HEY-HA-HEY!”

I turned on my camera to record the sounds. Listen to the first few seconds. There is no picture as it was dark.  This is a morning ritual on the Olympic Plaza — lung exercises. The ladies-who-walk in Cotuit should do this.  It would endear them to the late sleepers on Main Street.

Flickr Video

Cotuit – Feb. 6-9
Raleigh, NC – Feb. 10-12
Cotuit thereafter

More time on the road next week. Then I hope to decompress in Cotuit for a week or so. Passing on Brazil due to visa issuance problems.