Blog de Puree

As usual, Randye dazzled our friends with her hostessing with the mostessing. From 11 to 3, we had friends from various parts of our lives all mingling pleasantly.
The highlight of the day was the food, of course. We served two baked omelets, upside down apple banana French toast, baked ziti, salad, our friend Melissa’s [...]

I came across a fascinating column today in the print version of The Newburyport Daily News (part of the Eagle Tribune Company) about the descriptions that can be used for groups of various birds.
The column, Words on Birds by Steve Grinley, was entitled “Names for birds add to description.” I tried to access it on [...]

Some dark-eyed junkos appeared at our house for the first time since our moving in a few years ago. They’re cute, chubby little suckers. One of them seems to be excited by the sunflower seeds on the ground and on the tree stump in the back yard, while the other is fixated on the thistle [...]

With the foresight of a reknowned fortune-teller, Randye told the contractors to save the kitchen cabinets when they were pulling them out while gutting our old kitchen this past summer.
“There has to be some use we can find for them, rather than filling up some landfill,” she told me after I rolled my eyes and [...]

This afternoon, we were alerted to some feathered visitors to the yard by the staccato meow of our cat. This is his way of communicating when he goes into “hunt mode.”
Looking out the back door from our kitchen, a flock of European Starlings, with their telltale white spots, swarmed around various piles of sunflower seeds [...]

Earlier this summer, I blogged about a simple life-hacking technique involving my backpack and traveling by car. I must say, the technique, used by a colleague of mine, went quite well and I was a new convert to life-hacking techniques. In today’s crazy hustle and bustle, any technique I can use to save time and [...]

Brownies. They may be the world’s perfect food. Well, maybe not. But I love, love, love them. (Oh, but don’t dare taint them with nuts of any kind. Just pure, pure chocolate-y goodnes.) And while any morsel is good, the edges, with their chewy, dense lusciousness are the holy grail of bakery heaven.
So imagine [...]

Or is it  octopi?
According to wikipedia, either spelling, or pronunciation, is correct. There’s even a third spelling, also accepted but rarer, octopodes.
According to one of my favorite blogs, Pharyngula, the octopus is a cephalopod, an amazing class of sea creatures. Pharyngula, the blog of PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of [...]

I’ve been following the events within the last few months surrounding the sale of the Community Newspaper Company and its online properties within Townonline.com to Gatehouse Media.
I’m doubly interested because my career currently revolves around online media and content delivery, and because I used to work with Herald Media years ago, when it owned and [...]

One of the pros of moving out into the suburbs, is the many ecosystems at our disposal, all within a scant 20 miles in any direction–the ocean, the Merrimack River, mountains, marsh lands, and dense forests.
Naturally, I’ve become more sensitive to what’s happening in nature around me. When I lived in Boston, it was [...]