South Shore Leaf Peeping

As fall foliage season peaks, we hit the South Shore again to see what was what....

There are disadvantages to working this turf. In a county where the tallest place is Manomet, we're not going to get those panoramic mountain valley shots where you can see 10,000 trees. Sorry 'bout that. I tend to aim at one tree, often- as you can see above- one that is in someone's yard. If you're upset about the lack of sweeping ROY G BIV vistas, take some comfort at the fact that A) many of these pictures are taken while the person inside the house is loading a shotgun nd saying, perhaps to no one but themselves, "I'll find out why thaat stony looking dude is parked in front of my house," and B) my number is going to come up at the deli some day, perhaps even some day soon. I worry not about stuff like that... "The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast."

Whoever owns this house can do a fall foliage drive just by idling their car in the driveway. Added bonus: basketball hoop. Nothing says "suburban white kid" like one of those not-planted-in-concrete basketball hoops. Ally McBeal could tear down that backboard if she dunked on it. Imagine if Shaq threw down on that? He might snatch it up by the pole after and beat you with it, just for not having the planted-in-concrete type of basketball hoop. Your author here is a tall man, and he sometimes wastes a tangent on stuff that only 6'5"+ people care about.

Orange is the essential fall foliage color. Red and yellow can be found in spring or summer, in the form of roses, glads, marigolds, what have you... but you're not getting orange until Autumn. With the prominent place in Autumn/Halloween ascribed to the pumpkin, orange sort of wins in a rout.  

Since you asked, our road trip this time went 1) Bourne, 2) Plymouth, 3) Kingston, 4) Duxbury, 5) Marshfield, 6) Pembroke, 7) Norwell, 8) Hanover, 9) Rockland, 10) Hingham, back to 11) Bourne.

The good Lord works in many a strange and wondrous way, and even a non-drinker knows better than to cross the Great Spirit when He pretty much smacks you in the face with a suggestion. A pre-noon Mudslide or two never hurt anyone.

Not a lot of people know this.... but when you're drinking and driving, the way to keep safe is to introduce a second negative integer into the equation. Shooting a camera while driving counts as a negative. Two negatives will, uhm, negate the negative charge of each other into a positive. The mathematics work

You know that the green trees are all jealous...

"Foliage and fenced-in meadows" go together like "F5 Tornado and trailer park."

This tree, normally yellow, wore pink in October to raise awareness for breast cancer.

This tree cares not for the affairs of wood-burning humans.

I got the house level in this shot, but the street was, like, on  hill or something.

Lake shots are as close as n EMass shutterbug can get to Vermont-style views. My camera and skills hold me back personally, but I didn't see any overly colorful horizon foliage.

Ignore the times and dates on the shots, my camera changes the time/date every time I turn it on and off. I took these last Friday or so. I did the South Coast on Saturday. The Cape is coming soon.

Not many places have less foliage than sand/scrub/pine-dominated  Duxbury Beach. I had to jump a fence and stomp on some beach grass to get this color.

The one below came easier:

Check back for South Coast and Cape Cod!

King Tide At Duxbury Beach

We headed out to Duxbury Beach to check out the King Tide. A king tide is when the moon, sun and Earth align. It increases gravitational pull on the ocean, and produces some of the higher tides of the year. We hit town as the king tide was receding... it was only 11.8 feet today, down from 12.8 Wednesday. It'll be down to 10.1 soon.

A tide two feet above normal would be trouble if it went down as a storm hit, which is why October is the start of Nor'easter season. However, Duxbury was No Problemo today. They probably had some spray come over the wall and they did have a Coastal Flood Advisory, but no damage was done today.

Wave good-bye to the King Tide.

Early Season Leaf Peeping In Plymouth County

It's about two weeks too early, but we took to the streets to see what sort of early fall foliage we could find in Plymouth County.

Southeastern Massachusetts may be the weakest spot in New England for leaf peeping, but New England has the bar set pretty high.

One of the benefits of having a blurry camera is that, if you don't enjoy fall foliage, you can just squint at this picture and pretend that the article is about forest fires.

As you can see, we'll be working in the ROY part of the ROY G BIV color spectrum. I looked pretty hard for a purple tree without success. I may have seen a Magenta tree, I'm not sure.... never had that crayon.

Our basic route for this trip was Bourne to Wareham to Plymouth to Kingston to Plympton to Halifax to Bridgewater to Hanson to Pembroke to Duxbury back to Bourne.

I went down Route 106 after a huge yellow tree in Plympton, but it hadn't peaked yet. This tree in Halifax was up earlier.

I needed orange in my life badly enough to shoot the tree with wires in front of it.

Otherwise, a shutterbug develops  tendency to invite themselves into people's yards without permission to seek better shots. I haven't been beaten up or shot at yet, but it's only a matter of time. I have already forgiven my future assailant.

Fortunately, one of the benefits of  working with a crappy camera is that shooting out the window of a car going 50 MPH doesn't really lower the quality that much when compared to my stand-still work.

Neither of my MVP trees (the giant yellow one in Plympton and a deep red one next to the Middleboro 4H building) were at peak when I drove by.

I should really learn which types of tree are birch, cedar, maple, forsythia etc.... I only know maple leafs because they have a hockey team.

I shoot 100 pics or so, then go through them at the end of the trip. Memory issues come up, and you get captions like "I think this is Kingston."

No foliage here, but I love reflective work.

Don't let the week-old dates deter you on the pictures from Leaf Peeping. My camera calendar is  week slow.

Pine dominates our tree shots, preventing us (along with my camera) from getting those panoramic Vermont calendar shots.

Be sure to tune back in....

Because we'll be doing more of the South Shore....

And we'll also do the South Coast...

As well as Cape Cod!

I'll even drag Jessica along, as she takes better pictures than I do.

See you on the road!

Cruise Ship Hits Railroad Bridge On Cape Cod Canal

Oops!

The Viking Star, a 900 passenger cruise ship, struck the railroad bridge on the Cape Cod Canal yesterday.

No one was injured, and the bridge seems to have just lost some paint. US Army Corps Of Engineers workers heard scraping sounds as the tall cruise ship worked through the Cape's favorite man-made river.

The railroad bridge is 135 feet over the water. I have no idea how tall the Viking Star is, and I looked, too. I'm guessing 135 feet and 6 inches. it either has 9 decks or 14 decks, depending on if you believe the Cape Cod Times or Wikipedia.

I actually watched the Viking Star as she approached the Bourne Bridge, but I was too far away and behind too many trees to see much of it. There were reports on Facebook that she also hit the Bourne Bridge, but nothing is turning up on those there Internets.

We'll keep you updated. You never know if the diagnosis will be worse once they look at it with the daylight.

It was just like that, just with a larger boat and contact.

Cape Cod Canal-Only Fog

This was Saturday's fog, but there was a slight release delay as I pondered the "terrible pics of a cool phenomena" question.

I lacked the testicular fortitude to dash across the four lanes and shoot through the bars. This is what I would imagine that prison looks like in Heaven. 

The fog was the result of some temperature contrast between "cold morning" and "warm water." I was shooting from the side where the sun had been shining on the Canal longer.... or the people on the Cape side be smokin' up a few bales of that sticky-icky-icky. 

I kind of one-two'd these shots quickly, mostly to show how the fog was creeping over Buzzards Bay.

I'll get a better camera some day, honest.

South Coast Shellfishing Ban

You might want to skip the clams tonight, player,

The state’s Division of Marine Fisheries has banned the harvesting of shellfish in the west side of Buzzards Bay and in Mount Hope Bay until further notice.

The ban is due to an outbreak of toxic algae. The algae is a form of phytoplankton known as Pseudo Nitzschia. If Pseudo Nitzschia doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger.... and a nihilist.

Pseudo Nitzschia leads to the development of Domoic Acid. Domoic Acid can cause Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning, which gives the person who suffers from it vomiting, cramps, diarrhea and incapacitating headaches followed by confusion, disorientation, permanent loss of short-term memory, and in severe cases, seizures and coma. Other than that.... no probba!

Harvesting or collecting shellfish from the affected areas is now prohibited. Towns with the ban include Bourne, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Falmouth, Gosnold, Marion, Mattapoisett, New Bedford, Swansea, Wareham and Westport.

I had Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning once, but I forget what happened.

Plymouth Yeti Gets Political

A lot of people know who they are going to vote for to be President right when that person declares, others know at some point in the primaries, others decide during the debates and some even make up their mind while staring at the ballot.

Not me.

I make up my mother-loving mind only when I know how the Lawn Yeti is voting.

Granted, you should cast your vote for who you like best. However, if the Yeti doesn't like the R or the D... it's time to go Third Party, folks. Yeti (I'm assuming that the singular is the plural here, I've never seen two together in any Bigfoot stories) have been around for an eternity, and may have been America's first residents. They have a sort of Fey wisdom that regular, non-hairy primates lose once we start building cities and losing touch with Mother Nature.

That's not a problem the Lawn Yeti has. He's as American as a bald eagle landing on Mount Rushmore. When I saw that he had gone political, I immediately pulled the Cranberry County Magazine Mobile News Car over to see WTF was up with all this.

I don't speak Yeti and he is a reticent Sasquatch, but he was able to communicate his basic platform to me.

He's very pro-Bigfoot, as you can imagine. Much of his platform included Yeti-related planks, especially relating to fur, deer poaching, urban sprawl and privacy issues (his life was Hell after the Patterson tape went public). As you can see, Fur figures heavily into his advertising.

For someone with fur, he sure spent a lot of money on that suit. I checked... Armani. He's still waiting for his hairpiece to come in. He's not wearing pants, but he's shaggy enough that your kids won't be ruined for life if he visits their school for a photo op.

His suit is in no way an endorsement of Trump, and it is no dig at Bill Clinton's wife. "They don't make pantsuits in my size, he intimated.

Yeti are frightening creatures just by their stature and appearance, and sometimes Yeti Method involves scaring off someone who wanders into his stalking-about territory. Other than that, he's not bothering you unless you bother him.

Humans have a low bone-to-meat ratio, and are too large and unwieldy for even a Sasquatch to eat in a manner that a human might eat chicken wings or baby back ribs. We also tend to be high-sodium. It's the same reason that most shark attacks are mistakes on the part of the shark.

Either way, he's happy to see you. He prefers that you just drive by and wave, as things like honking or stopping the vehicle in his yard are frowned upon... unless you're a heavy hitter media type like a Cranberry County Magazine sandwich artist.

Otherwise, it sort of screws up the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. That makes the Lawn Yeti angry, and you don't want him angry with you. He can tear off your arm and beat your momma with it. Remember that people and Bigfoots (feet?) move into deep southern Plymouth for the peace and quiet, and resent intrusive outsiders.

His extreme pro-Yeti stance means that only he can represent himself. He runs his campaign with some human help from his Long Pond Road complex. He has no First Yeti as of yet(i), but he's single and ready to mingle.

In the small print of those Wikileak articles, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was very intent on there being no Lawn Yeti presence in the debates."He'd rip off Trump's head in the first round of questioning. After that... well, he's been in the forest a while, and Hillary would be the first female he could reach..... He may be where discarded Feel The Bern people go..... He'd make a great Mr. Palin upgrade."

I'm pretty much All In as far as it goes with Team Yeti. Sure, there are flaws with electing a Missing Link to lead the Free World. However, there are advantages as well. A leader with an exclusive fur and primate platform is never going to launch an oil war, pick a fight with Indochine, insure 15 million slackers, dump a Pontiac into the Chappaquiddick River... You can do worse than electing a Lawn Yeti.