Blog de Puree

Last night was a great night for doing a little stargazing. It wasn’t too cold and it was relatively clear. Despite the street lights and the lights from a few nearby houses, the visibility was pretty darn good. So, I pulled out the old Dobsonian telescope, set her up and had a look at what’s [...]

Rowing champ Xeno Muller posted an exciting seven minute video of his 2000 Olympic single scull race on his blog yesterday.
Regardless of his finish (2nd place), the video highlights the great technique used by world class rowers. Pay particular attention to how the body, arms and legs all finish together at the end of the [...]

The final painting stage of the kitchen/dining/living room color palette strategy is finished. This weekend I painted the living room a light, robin’s egg blue color and we have finally freed ourselves of the builders’ beige tones in the main living areas of our home.

I started on Friday evening with prepping the living room by [...]

In another effort to join the Internet fray and experience more of the crowd sourcing side of things, I’ve joined Wikipedia and started editing articles.
For anyone not familiar with the site, here’s a brief description from Wikipedia’s “About” page:
“Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all [...]

We’ve canceled our print subscription to the Newburyport Daily News, and we did it for a couple of reasons.

The price, hovering over $200, was not worth the amount of news and information that we actually read and felt was worthwhile.
It was also a waste of paper. Better to read online than destroy the environment.
I can [...]

The lower Merrimack River Valley is a unique ecosystem in many aspects. One of the most interesting is that it is identical to Canadian summer habitats of the American Bald Eagle. And that, of course, means that these wonderful raptors visit the area every winter to breed.
If anyone has been following local news reports and [...]

There are differing reports of snow for today, into tonight and tomorrow. Some sources are telling us it’ll be a few inches and others expect us to get buried again, as we did a few weeks back.
Regardless, we’re preparing for the worst—as good New Englanders do. It’s either take-out or some pre-made items from the [...]

I’ve rested on my laurels this winter and it shows. I’ve got a slight pooch in my belly and there’s this new double chin on my face. My family says the belly-fat is my layer of love—from being happily married, which I certainly can’t deny, especially with Randye’s cooking. And the double chin is apparently [...]

It was late this Sunday afternoon, the sun was starting its descent in the west, behind the trees across the street in our neighbor’s yard. Directly behind our backyard, looking south into the trees within other neighbors’ yards, a huge number of black dots sitting in the branches made a rising crescendo of assorted bird [...]

We had a new winged visitor at the backyard feeders the other day, which was very exciting. I looked out the back door and immediately noticed a new plumage pattern.
“Randye, Randye,” I called, a little too excited. “Get the binoculars and the bird book! Stat!”
I grabbed the binoculars from her and she started thumbing through [...]