Here’s a list of all the games I’ve attended at Fenway Park to date:

Good waves pretty much all of the time. I was up before the surfers. Cool to see dolphins in the water fairly frequently.

Here’s a shot of the beach looking back towards town:

This rock had all kinds of things living on it, including a pair of colorful starfish. No starfish pics, though…out of batteries!

Really large barnacles:

A 3-inch crab:

These anemone things were everywhere:

Finally, one last look at the big rock by the 8th street public access:

Here are the details for my CA gigs this weekend with Steve Mazzetta:

Yellow Crab Spider Eating Fly

This spider was on the same lily the next day even though all but one of the petals had fallen off overnight:

Yellow Crab Spider Waiting For Next Meal

Tiny Spider On Daylily

Tiny Bee On Day Flower

Bumble Bee On Lysimachia clethroides

This dragonfly was hard to get close to, but kept on returning to its favorite spot on the deck:

Dragonfly On Deck

Usually, dragonflies are difficult to approach.  I think this one was sleeping. I spent a good fifteen minutes photographing it within three inches before it started to buzz its wings. Then it wiped its face and took off before I could get another shot:

Dragonfly On Yew

Look at the water droplet on its fly in the previous picture. This detail shows the droplet magnifying the eye lenses:

By the way, this was a very large dragonfly. Perhaps the largest I’ve seen around here. Very dragonly.

Dragonfly Wing

http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/

Right now, I’m doing a project with axonometric perspective paper. But I frequently need various forms of graph paper, and of course, music paper. You can customize your paper settings before generating the PDF. I love it. I wish I had the source code!

Please check out his music at:
http://www.myspace.com/krisjenseneklektik

Actually, the situation was totally different with my friend Ed and me.  We were on a high school trip and the first day they let us loose for the afternoon with very little in the way of instruction or supervision.  Ed and I decided to go to Piccadilly Circus and the Hard Rock Cafe.  (It would be a few years before I developed a sense of shame for doing anything so typically touristy…)  We headed directly for the Underground (aka. The Tube) never having taken urban mass transit before.  It’s hard for me to grasp now, being a 12-year veteran of New York City with the subway map virtually ingrained in my mind, but that Underground map made no sense to us whatsoever!

The shocker, though, was the fact that neither of us knew you had to pay to ride the Tube!  We just walked in and out of station after station without any idea we were breaking any rules!  That would never work in NYC, where the turnstiles don’t cooperate if you don’t pay your fare.  At one point, someone in a uniform ran after us, but his accent was so heavy and British that we truly had no idea what he was saying.  We just looked at him like he was crazy, and I suppose he found it easier to grant us our assessment and wander off.

We never did find our way to Piccadilly Circus.  We just got plenty lost.  The next day on the bus, everybody had these little Underground ticket stubs.  They were cool.  We asked where they got them.  "Umm…from the Underground?"  And that’s when it started to put two and two together.

That day, we couldn’t figure out how we managed to get into the stations without paying.  There were barriers, guards, ticket booths, all of that.  There was no way we could have got on without a ticket!

In hindsight, it was nice of that guard to let us ride without tickets.  I suppose in London, you don’t have to be Tony Blair to be treated like the former prime minister!

I read the feeds every day and am always amazed and heartened by the innovation happening out there these days to protect our planet for future generations.  Yet, when you look around, environmental sensibility still seems to be a fringe element.  I hope that sites like Inhabitat.com help spread the beauty and common sense of sustainable design.

Some recent favorites: 

• Electric cars can be fast
• A bizarre concept for a 2-MILE-HIGH  vertical eco city
• Beautiful prefab homes like this one
• Wind-powered swirly lights for your back yard
• The rise of solar power

Unfortunately, a lot of the innovations featured are rather expensive or targeted as high-end luxuries.  A lot of the technology is emerging and will become more affordable as it becomes more mainstream.  However, I’d like to see more cool designs and sustainable products available at prices that everybody can afford.  After all, protecting the environment only works if we can all participate, not just the few top percentiles of consumers.

To that end, I believe Inhabitat.com helps by generating interest in sustainable design.  The more people who catch on, the more demand and innovation.  Hopefully, this technology becomes ubiquitous.  It has to.

I remember this very clearly.  I was somewhere around one year old.  It was before I started walking.  Visually, I remember this from a crawling perspective of about nine inches off the floor.  I was in the living room of my first house.  The couch was behind me and perpendicular to the wall I was exploring.  That’s where I discovered an electrical outlet.  I knew that electrical outlets were for wires, presumably because I’d seen people plugging wires into them.  I observed the faceplate and screw and ran my fingers across the holes.  (You know, they do look sort of like happy faces…)  That wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiosity.  I was sure the magic happened when you stick a wire into the holes.

That’s when I remembered where the wires were.  Those old U-shaped wires that connected television antennas and stereo speakers.  They’re called spade lugs, and I’ve sketched one below.  I knew they were the right shape to fit into the outlet slots, and I knew where to find them.  They were in the bedroom closet in a large white chest of drawers, conveniently low enough for me to retrieve them.  So I turned to my left, crawled down the hall, turned to the right into the bedroom, and along the wall to the left into the closet by the bed.  They were in the second drawer from the bottom along with other electronic stuff.

I grabbed a set of wires.  This was the kind that had two wires joined together on a flat strip of plastic with two spade lug connectors on the end.  I crawled back out to the wall outlet in the living room, sat up straight, and promptly inserted the metal ends into the slots.  ZAP!!!

Yeah, that hurt!  I suppose I could have died or something.  I don’t remember sparks, but I remember it hurt.  I’m sure I bawled up a storm.  Next thing I know, I’m on the couch in my grandmother’s lap with my hand in ice water in one of those tall brown plastic thermal cups with the white rim.  And that was the last time I played with electrical outlets!

The interesting twist in my first memory is that I remember myself remembering where the wires were.  I pictured the U-shaped connectors in their place in the drawer.  So my first memory is really of a memory.  I suppose it’s not my first memory then, but it’s my first memory with a storyline.