I finished reading The Size of the World last night. I was relieved to read that Greenwald finally discovered Pepto Bismol was causing his "mysterious" black tongue ailment. I kept wanting to shout into the book "Didn't you read the label on the pink stuff?!?" A pretty good read.
Went to the 1 hour photo to pick up the "hi bob" pics from Sunday. They look ok. We've done better ones. Now to choose which ones to mail to Bosnia. I'll do that tomorrow.
Rhode Island is often used as a unit of measure. For example, the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous left a crater "the size of Rhode Island". As I was driving down to South County I had the inspiration to collect a bunch of those references to the size of Rhode Island and compare them to the actual size of RI. What exactly is the size of Rhode Island? It's got over 400 miles of coastline. It's got way more people than Iceland. If you measure sqaure miles do you count Narragansett Bay or only the land area? So now I'm incubating this harebrained scheme to walk the length and breadth and coastline of Rhode Island and write about it. Better not let Jeff Greenwald beat me to it.
Nancy took the day off from work to wait for the electrician or someone like him and the plumber. Once they were done with fixing the doorbell and the kitchen sink We headed to our favorite birding spot at Watchemocket Cove. We saw a lot of cygnets. I'd been wondering how come we had never seen any since there are dozens of swans. They must hide them in the rushes until they're old enough to join the adults in begging for food from the humans. :-)
There are three greater scaup that seem to hang out on one side of the bridge. Nancy says their heads are too domed to be greater scaup so they must be lesser scaup. But I say their heads are moderately domed and have a greenish tinge instead of the purple characteristic of the lesser scaup. Anyway, I was finally in a position to get a really good look at them and a carful of kids arrived to feed the swans. The scaups immediately fled to the middle of the cove where even with binoculars all I could tell was they were roughly duck-shaped.
As we were first arriving a single file line of Altantic mute swans on parade plodded slowly up the embankment to join some ring-billed gulls and Canada geese eating popcorn. The swans were so dignified it looked like a religious procession.
We also saw 2 egrets, who I think nest on the inaccessible side of the cove. They were over among the swans so I got a chance to look at them close up for a change.
After Watchemocket we headed south and ended up at Third Beach in
Middletown. The beach was alive with: arctic terns
common terns
least terns
cormorant
crow
redwing blackbirds
semi-palmated plovers
sanderlings
horses
and one mermaid, Portuguese. Well the mermaid wasn't actually alive.
She was an extremely well done sand sculpture with seaweed and shells
for hair, quahog shells for a swim suit top, a necklace of various
shells, and a handfull of ripe rose hips. A family walking the beach
speaking Portugese stopped at the mermaid and the kids started added
scales to her tail.
Gray's in Tiverton is reputed to have the best ice cream in Rhode Island. Neither of us had ever been there so we capped off the day with a stop at Gray's. I can say for sure they make the best ginger ice cream I have ever tasted. And this was on a cold night. I bet coffee ice cream on a hot night there would transcend all.
When I got home, I had a message from the travel agent saying I'd have to stay 2 extra days on each end of the trip in order to get an Alaska Airlines flight to Vladivostok at all. There are no other flights. So I get to spend 4 extra days in the city that time forgot. If Iceland is "Wickford with volcanoes", Vlad is Wickford with rusting nuclear subs. The travel agent wanted to know if I thought it would be fun to fly into Khabarovsk and take the train to Vlad instead. I pulled out my guidebook and determined it is a 13 hour train ride from Khabarovsk. This is not calling out to me. I think I left my adventurous spirit on the road to Krisuvik.