2019 Life Logs, Day 95: From Bow to Rye, New Hampshire
Date: Friday, April 5, 2019
Weather: Mostly Cloudy; High 39, Low 33 degrees F
Location: At Home with Rich and Leslie Kole, Rye, NH

Visiting with good friends in New Hampshire is always a happy time. This morning I woke up in Bow at the Kanegsberg’s and tonight I am tucked in bed in Rye, New Hampshire, in Rich and Leslie Kole’s beautiful home. Leslie and I taught together in Concord, New Hampshire, for many years, and when she retired, she and Rich moved to Rye on the seacoast. Rich is a phenomenal chef, so dinners here are always a delight. Tonight we had a wonderful salad and a delicious shrimp and sausage paella. Good food and good company always makes for a great evening. Earlier in the day, I worked with Helaine to pack up some of the things from her kitchen cabinets that she knows she won’t need in the next month before their move. When we finished our packing job, we went to a restaurant called The Common Man for lunch. Everything about the day was delightful from beginning to end.

2019 Life Logs, Day 94: Trip to New Hampshire Plus Anniversary Wishes to J&J
Date: Thursday, April 4, 2019
Weather: Sunny; High 46, Low 23 degrees F
Location: At Home with Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg, Bow, NH

Justin and Jo were married 12 years ago today and each year they seem more madly in love. So here’s to 12 beautiful years together with wishes for many, many more.

I drove to New Hampshire this afternoon, met with my friend Detta Porat at the end of her school day to catch up on happenings, and then headed to the Concord Yacht Club meeting at Gretchen and Mike Coughlin’s in beautiful Canterbury, New Hampshire where there was still snow on the ground! As this group grows older, there are fewer and fewer members who still have boats, but there is no lack of sailing stories. No one can spin a yarn better than a seasoned sailor, so we ate and sat around and listened to a few of those yarns. A couple of members that I haven’t seen for years were there tonight which made it a special evening for me. Alan Kanegsberg has been our Commodore for years and even though he and Helaine are moving to Massachusetts, he will continue to keep us organized. Thank you, Alan, for your dedication to this group. After the meeting, I drove back to Alan and Helaine’s to spend the night at the Hotel Kanegsberg where we stayed up late to continue talking. Wonderful evening.

2019 Life Logs, Day 93: Taxes Filed
Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Weather: Sunny and Windy; High 50, Low 35 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

For the first time in 45 years, I filed my own taxes today! I used a free online filing service on the IRS site which was easy. On Monday I tried using the free Turbo Tax service, but being my first attempt, I kept making errors. So, I started fresh today with a different service and things went much more smoothly. I know I filed taxes myself before I met Mark, but somehow, once we were together, that job became his and I let that be. It feels good now to have done it for myself. And I’ll get the $150 that H&R Block would have charged. Nice compensation for a couple of hours of work.

Otherwise, I got ready for a trip to New Hampshire. I leave tomorrow just after noon and head to Bedford to meet with my friend Detta after her school day. Then I travel on to Canterbury for the Concord Yacht Club meeting tomorrow evening. I end my day at the Kanegsberg’s in Bow where I will spend the night. They have sold their home to move into a beautiful state-of-the-art retirement community in Massachusetts. After many years as a regular ‘customer’, I’ll be spending my last night in the Hotel Kanegsberg. It makes me a little sad, but I am so excited for Alan and Helaine. On Friday I will travel on to the New Hampshire coast to the town of Rye to visit with my friends Leslie and Rich Kole. Then on Saturday I’ll head home. It is the first soccer Saturday of the season and I am going to miss Sam’s first game on Saturday morning. But I will go to Jonah’s Sunday game which is off-Cape.

2019 Life Logs, Day 92: Busy Day
Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Weather: Sunny, Still Cool; High 48, Low 38 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

This second day of April was a busy one. I started my morning with a visit with my snowbird friends Bruce and Jane Woodin who just returned from Florida. They had a wonderful, warm couple of months, but it is great to have them back home. Bruce showed off his Christmas cactus which thrived while they were away. We had tea and then Jane and I went for a walk on the bike path. We did the mile+ walk that Lynne and I did last Friday. I came home, had lunch, worked on my puzzle, elevated and iced my knee, and then went to pick up Ollie after school. An hour later I went back to pick-up Jonah from his after-school program and in-between I did a load of laundry. Once Jed got home, I hurried home to have a quick dinner and then head to the Waquoit Bay Reserve Visitor Center, about a five-minutes’ drive, to attend a Tuesday night science talk. During April, they are hosting these Tuesday night talks to highlight research happening on the Reserve. Tonight’s talk was about carbon fixation in salt marshes. Karen and Peter Baranowski told me about the talks and it was great to see them there tonight. I came home and finished working that 1,000 piece puzzle that Lynne and I started (hurray, hurray), but I didn’t get to the taxes today. I’m giving myself one more day. So that will be tomorrow’s BIG job.

2019 Life Logs, Day 91:  The First of April
Date:  Monday, April 1, 2019
Weather:  Sunny but Cool; High 47, Low 27 degrees F
Location:  At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

I spent this first day of April wishing it were a little warmer, but thankful for the sunshine.  I had early morning PT, which ended up to be a longer session than normal, and then I spent my afternoon gardening.  I worked outside to get the raised beds ready for planting and worked indoors planting some flats for starting more seedlings indoors.  I’m hoping the seedlings we planted in Heather’s garden on Sunday survive tonight’s freezing temperatures.  When I checked the weather on Saturday, it showed ten days of low temps above freezing.  April Fool’s.  That has changed and now the low for tonight is forecast to be 27 degrees F—well below freezing.  I’ll head over there in the morning to spray them water which should help a bit and hope that most of them survive.  The only thing I planted outside here today was hardy sugar pod peas.  Tomorrow I’ll start my day with a walk and then a visit with Bruce and Jane Woodin.  They have been traveling, so it will be good to catch up.  Then I need to come home and get serious about filing my taxes.  Wednesday is my deadline.  If they are not done by then, I’ll have to pay H&R Block to do them again.  Then I pick up Ollie and Jonah after school.  It will be a busy day.

2019 Life Logs, Day 90:  Gardening Day at the Goldstones
Date:  Sunday, March 31, 2019
Weather:  Sunshine Early, Then Overcast with Light Rain; High 57, Low 34 degrees F
Location:  At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

Today was gardening day at the Goldstones and everyone pitched in.  We cleaned out the last of debris that built up over the winter, cleaned out growing boxes full of good compost and put that on the garden, disassembled those growing boxes as they never really worked, and then started planting.  I had grown red kale, curly kale, and collard green seedlings to plant early and we planted peas, spinach, and arugula seeds.  We worked for four hours and we were all pleased with the results.  It was like an instant garden and a breath of spring.  This week I’ll work on my deep beds here and plant the remainder of the seedlings I have grown in my front window ‘greenhouse’.  And I’ll plant new seeds indoors for planting in late May.  I came home mid-afternoon to rest my knee and then returned to Heather and Jed’s for dinner.  Heather leaves for a conference in California on Tuesday and I head to New Hampshire for a couple of days on Thursday.  As always, busy, busy here.

2019 Life Logs, Day 89:  Lynne Heads Back to Nyack
Date:  Saturday, March 30, 2019
Weather:  Sunny; High 62, Low 46 degrees F
Location:  At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

Visits with good friends and family that live afar are so special.  But they always feel too short.  It was wonderful to have Lynne here, but she needed to get back to Nyack to continue the transformation of her life without Ed.  She just returned from five weeks in New Zealand with her friends there.  Lynne lived in New Zealand from the mid-1970’s to 1990, so many of her friends from her adult life are there.  In addition to living there, she and Ed spent a great deal of time in New Zealand during the 17 years that they spent sailing around the world.  So it is very much home to Lynne and she hopes to return there for a few months each year during North American winters and New Zealand summers.  She will become a New Zealand snowbird.  But now she needs to figure out the rest of her year.  Her family lives in Michigan, so she is going to start there.  It is time to pack up her belongings in New York and head to Michigan.  So off she went and I got a text saying she got home just fine.  Tomorrow she will begin the readying for the move to Michigan.  It will be harder for us to see each other as Michigan is not just a four-hour drive, but we talked about doing some travel together.  That will be exciting to plan and to do.

Before her departure, we had a great morning together.  We went to visit with Heather, Jed, and boys as she hadn’t seen them since Mark’s memorial.  Then we came home to have breakfast with Karen Baranowski as I wanted two of my good friends to meet each other.  After Karen left, we walked my daily mile together, and then off Lynne went.  It felt very lonely here, but I did my exercises, iced my knee, worked on that puzzle, and did some indoor gardening.  I put the little plants I have been growing outside to harden them up a bit before transplanting and planned what I will plant next.  Tomorrow Heather is planning to plant some things in her garden, so I will head over to see if I can be helpful.  I also need to prune the raspberry plants.  I should have done this during the winter, but somehow never got around to it.  Tomorrow is the day.  Rain is expected in the afternoon, so hopefully we’ll get an early morning start.

2019 Life Logs, Day 88:  A Day with Lynne
Date:  Friday, March 29, 2019
Weather:  Overcast and Windy; High 59, Low 41 degrees F
Location:  At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

Lynne and I had a great day together.  I started my day with another PT visit while Lynne stayed at home.  We (well, really mostly Lynne) worked on the 1,000 piece puzzle any time we were not engaged in some other activity.  After getting our day started, it was time for a walk.  We wanted to walk along the ocean, but it was overcast and windy, with winds from the SW, so I drove to the bike path in West Falmouth for our walk as the bike path is somewhat protected.  We had a mile and half walk with views of the marsh–not green and beautiful like it is in the summer, but still a lovely view.  Then we drove to Falmouth Heights Beach to see just how windy it was there and walked a little more.  It was windier, but okay for a short distance.  It is always great to walk along the ocean, no matter what the weather.  We came home, had lunch, worked on the puzzle, and I elevated by leg and had a little nap.  We had an early dinner of wild caught Alaskan salmon with a salad and then headed to Woods Hole for an evening Falmouth Forum talk.  We picked up Olivia on the way and found that Terry is doing great after his back surgery yesterday.  Good news.  The Forum speaker was John Holdren, a well-known scientist here on the Cape as he was once the Director of the Woods Hole Research Center and calls Falmouth home.  His expertise is climate-change and he was President Obama’s Science Advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.  Currently he is a professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.  His talk pointed out “the options available to society for reducing the pace and ultimate magnitude of future changes in climate (mitigation) and for reducing the damages to human well-being resulting from the changes that nonetheless occur (adaptation).”  In his opinion, we need the full backing of the national government behind the effort to make substantial changes in policy as soon as possible.  Yes, climate change is real.  It is here.  And each of us has to do what we can, most importantly pushing for our elected officials to make major policy changes.  After the talk, we came home and watched a town hall meeting in the Bronx with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing the Green New Deal that was introduced by her and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey.  This has spawned all sorts of controversy, but after last night’s Falmouth Forum, I have decided my first action is to actually read the document to see what it says.  If you are interested, here’s the link to the resolution.https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

Lynne arrived from Nyack at 1:00 this afternoon. Yea, yea, yea! It is wonderful to have her here for a couple of days. I put her right to work on my latest puzzle and I’ll bet she finishes it before she leaves on Saturday. We spent the entire afternoon and evening just catching up and will probably continue to do the same tomorrow.

2019 Life Logs, Day 86: C & C
Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Weather: Sunny; High 43, Low 27 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA

All I got done today was C & C–cooking and cleaning. I wanted to make a casserole to take to my friends Olivia and Terry White as Terry is having a surgical procedure done on his back tomorrow. And as long as I was in the kitchen doing that, I decided to make soup as well. Nothing exciting, but between that, walking and exercising, and doing a bit of house cleaning, the day was over. I did have a nice visit with Olivia and Terry when I delivered the casserole and then I spent my whole evening trying to get the border of a new 1,000 piece puzzle done. I’m almost there, but I’ve decided to stop and let my friend Lynne complete the job when she gets here tomorrow. Looking forward to her visit!