Late summer in Rhode Island…
And it's been awhile since I could hold my head up high. — “Its Been Awile” by Staind (2001)
Okay. Wow. It's been a minute, huh, mav? — Topgun: Maverick (2022)
It has been a while. I know, I just cannot establish a routine of posting regularly, and I cannot seem to stop beating myself up about it — my apologies. Some people find speaking in front of a crowd, no matter how big or small, truly terrifying. I am not one of those people. During my career in the bicycle industry, I was always selected to make presentations for the company. I have stood in front of groups of fellow employees, customers, technical standards groups, and government regulators, often speaking extemporaneously, but with the confidence that I knew what I wanted to get across to the audience and how to do it. It is a constant struggle for me to do that in writing.
I have tried all sorts of things to overcome the barriers that prevent me from just writing what I am thinking. Composing with the formatting, punctuation and grammar required for effective written communication is a challenge I struggle with and always have. I keep putting off writing a journal post until I finally tell myself that if I don’t put something up on the website, I should delete the Journal page and make the site a pure portfolio site. This post is an attempt to fulfill the obligation I have to myself and my few, but much appreciated, readers.
This morning was beautiful along Narragansett Bay. Over the past few weeks, I have been taking photographs of the sunrise regularly as part of an experiment to prepare for a 365 project for 2027. So far, I have made an image for 32 consecutive days. I did not make an image of the sunrise this morning. It is a running joke in our household that our beloved dog Conner understands me when I speak to him, and that despite hearing what I say, he does the exact opposite. Last night I told Conner it would be great if we could sleep in a little, say to maybe 5:30 am. Now, I need to say here that I am the one who gets up every morning at pretty much exactly 5 am, but Conner is ready and waiting when I get out of bed. This morning I slept in, and we didn’t get up until 5:30 am, and Conner didn’t make a fuss. The sun actually rose at 5:53 am, so I could have taken a photo, but somehow I got distracted. Maybe I was making lattes, getting dressed or putting an ice pack on my back; I'm not sure, but I missed the sunrise.
We have a routine for our mornings that involves alternating between taking a long walk and taking a shorter walk and going to the gym. This morning it was supposed to be a gym morning, but Therese suggested that we take a rest day and walk on the beach. Back when we first arrived here, we walked the beach almost every morning. Over time, our lives evolved, our priorities changed, and we have walked on the beach only occasionally. It was a beautiful morning and a little cooler than it has been lately. We walked north towards Providence to the estuary. The walk was grounding, a reminder of why we chose to live here. We spotted, actually Therese spotted, a Flicker and a group of Cedar Waxwings, and later there were Mallards, Egrets (both Snowy and Great), Great Blue Herons, and various seagulls. The tide was moving in. I made a video of the tide rolling in over the sandbar we were walking on. (I may post it down below, or I may not, so don’t be disappointed if it is not there!) Later in the morning we took a swim in the bay and then took a shower in our outdoor shower - a perfect summer morning.
Autumn is coming. The window over our kitchen table looks directly east over Narragansett Bay, and I sit with my morning latte and watch the sunrise almost every morning. This time of year, the dawn breaks a little later, and the sun moves south just a little more each day. The light changes as well. People often use the term “longer light” to describe the phenomenon. That term is not too far off. As the sun's angle drops, the light's path through the atmosphere lengthens. That longer path is the actual physical manifestation of that sense that the light "gets longer,” and that longer path shifts the color and lowers the contrast. The blue and violet wavelengths scatter away over the longer path, leaving the warmer reds, oranges, and yellows to reach your eye. The warmer tint, lower contrast and more pronounced shadows, compared with the flat, neutral light of high summer sun, are what we sense as the changing light of late summer.
I did some research on Claude to produce that description of the “longer light.” Despite my own sense of dread about where the LLM (Large Language Model) AI’s are headed, they can be, if used intelligently, a great tool for doing that type of research. My hope is that we can somehow avoid the apocalyptic dystopias of AI takeovers depicted in the Terminator and Matrix movies. We live in interesting times!
Autumn is my favorite time of year, and soon we will see the leaves on the trees start to turn and the fall colors this region is so famous for will slowly reveal themselves. I hope the timing works out so peak color arrives just before or soon after a trip I am planning to the West Coast the last week of September and the first week of October. It would be early for the peak colors in late September, but the current forecasts are for a “late great season”, with the peak here in the lower New England area happening in late October — perfect timing, fingers crossed.
There are other things I want to write about: the lack of fish and birds (just a yearly variation or a symptom of a problem - like the Chesapeake Bay? see below), my photographic practice (or lack of), and my attempts at handmaking books using the Japanese Stab Binding method. Those topics will have to wait, but hopefully not for long.
Okay, the link about the Chesapeake Bay and the Ospreys is directly below, followed by some of the images from the last month or so,and lastly the very boring vid of the incoming tide. I found it interesting to imagine that in just a couple of hours that spot would be 3 to 4 feet underwater!
