Journal of a Sabbatical

March 2, 2000

has-been

Today's Bird Sightings:
Riverside Park, Haverhill
6 common goldeneye
2 red breasted mergansers
Chain Bridge
3 great cormorants
3 common mergansers
6 herring gulls
1 great black backed gull
6 common goldeneye
100 black ducks (fly over)
Salisbury Beach
5 red breasted mergansers
24 black ducks
5 common goldeneye
2 common eiders
too many gulls to count
Today's Mammal Sightings:
47 seals

Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake, Tigers in the Snow by Peter Matthiessen

Like I don't have enough to do already, I started fooling around in Photoshop with a really bad photo of Shanti that I took yesterday. It was one of those things where I pushed the button at the same time as I was zooming in and so got a very blurred photo. The thing was that the lines struck me as interesting and there was enough contrast to make it into a drawing. Somehow making it look like my vision of it took longer than I expected, but I'm happy with the results.

Now that the ice is mostly gone, I thought I'd see hordes of goldeneyes and buffleheads and mergansers if I did my tour de Merrimack. I didn't. I drove along the river stopping at all the usual spots but found few ducks at any of them. The Chain Bridge, which normally yields bald eagles along with more common mergansers than you can imagine, was practically deserted except for three great cormorants, a handful of common mergansers and goldeneyes and an impressive fly over by a flock of black ducks. No bald eagles.

Salisbury Beach wasn't much better. The most numerous life form was the harbor seal, of which I counted 47 most of whom were hauled out on the rocks. A few were swimming in the channel and I suppose there were tons more that I just didn't see. The seals had company in the form of lots of gulls and two (only two?) common eiders.

I ended up at The Tannery for a quick lunch at The Tannery Cafe and book browsing at Jabberwocky. Without intending to buy books, but just to soothe that Augustinian cut bleeding soul within me, I bought the long awaited Peter Matthiessen book about the Siberian tiger and the latest Cat Who mystery. I think I missed the previous one in the Cat Who series so I'll have to borrow it from Priscilla so I can be sure to read them in order.

Back at home I finally finished moving my web site and Zsolt & István's Excellent Web Site from my former virtual hosting provider's sever to the megacorp that bought them out's server. This was way more of an ordeal than it should have been. With a 56K modem it is a royal pain to ftp the whole site back to my Mac's hard drive and then ftp it to the new host. I can't believe that the folks who bought out the company didn't make any provision for moving their customers. It would have taken them -- what?-- maybe 15 minutes to add a "control panel" or whatever they call them to move a whole site. I sent idiotic emails to their customer service people, who acted like the previous hosting company was no concern of theirs and in the process made myself look both stupid and annoying. Boy, I'm just not getting along with anybody anymore.

Both my irritation over moving the web sites and my strange bizarre silly fruitless argument about the Mac at the shelter yesterday (oh, I didn't put that in yesterday's entry but it doesn't matter), have got me into one of my fear of obsolescence panics. Big time. That and listening to something on the radio about the new MP3 "radios". Do I really want an Internet connection in my car? What other new technologies am I missing out on? There's just too much to keep up with and not enough time to do it. I already spend way too much time online just reading journals, buying used books, and obsessively checking rare bird alerts. I try to read up on new technical stuff but I finally became a semiofficial drop out from the computer culture when I canceled my subscription to Wired because I was having trouble reading it - I mean physical trouble with the fonts and ink colors, not having trouble understanding the content. My PowerMac 7600 still works, as does the Microtek E6 scanner and the LaCie 4.1 gig drive. I'll grant that the 56k modem is too slow, but even if I had a faster connection the network seems to get swamped and unresponsive after I've been online for 45 minutes or so lately so the modem wouldn't help. Part of me thinks it's ridiculous to feel like I have to run out and buy the newest, biggest, fastest everything in order to hang on to my self esteem. Another part of me thinks I'd darn well better catch up with the times before I find myself an ancient has-been before the age of 50. Step right up folks. Watch me become a has-been right before your very eyes.

Am I in a bad mood or what?