Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #72: (No)rthern Lights, Brown Water, Ab-solutely Crazy, etc.

 

1. Hopes were high on Cape Cod that we might get a glimpse of the Northern Lights this week. I even took a rare trip out after dark. My plan was to park at a beach and walk far enough down the sand to get away from as much light pollution as possible. That part was a success. I ended up staking out a spot on a staircase that led from the beach up the dunes and eventually to a summer home that was still empty. Then the waiting game began. During the hour I sat out there the low clouds rolled in along with some of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Eventually, around 10:15 I decided to call it. No Aurora Borealis. It wasn’t a waste though, as I did enjoy the sense of adventure I’ve been craving for a few months.

Me, waiting for the Northern Lights.

2. I’ve been stuck in a frustrating cycle over the last several months. I lose weight and feel better. Then I start to run more. Then I get some sort of injury. I get depressed and eat my feeling and gain the weight I lost. Then I get mad at myself and rebound. I lose weight and feel better again and the cycle repeats. I’m in the eating feelings stage as my body doesn’t want to cooperate with what my brain is asking so eventually my brain stops asking. Sure, I could chalk it up to a rough patch or just getting older, but my hope is that during one of these rollercoaster rides I find the eject button.

3. Whoa boy, nothing tops the mini heart attack you have when you flush your toilet and the water is brown. You think it's a septic issue. Luckily, in a roundabout way, the problem ended up being a water main break a mile away. Once many neighbors on my same street mentioned brown water the heart attack went away. I guessed it wasn’t septic because of course, I had to put my hand in the water in the back of the toilet once I noticed that the brown water didn’t smell. Sorry to anyone eating when they read this.

4. Basketball blues for me is a real thing. As you might recall last week I was doing my usual full-court playing at a local park and ended up needing both of my hips adjusted. This week I was able to top that. When chasing down a loose ball I lost track of where I was on the court. I ended up off the asphalt and onto the dirt. My left foot caught on the dirt, causing me to roll my ankle pretty good. I heard a nice crunch and everything. At first I worried it was broken or at least that something was torn. Luckily it is just a sprain that will be painful for a few days. You’d think I’ve learned my lesson but oh no. I’m sure in a week or so when it feels better I’ll be back on the court trying to find the next way to injure myself.

Before the injury

5. This week, we had the first super-hot day of the season. It got up to 87 on Thursday on Cape Cod. The only good thing is that it’s still spring so it’s not humid yet. I had to laugh because I was thinking about how the first few hot days of the season always feel good. In about 2 months though, those same types of days will have me begging for the fall. That being said the heat was short-lived and it’s expected to be in the upper 60s to low 70s for the foreseeable future, which is alright with me.

6. As a *sigh* middle-aged man one thing I try to do is be ahead of the game when it comes to simple products for the home. Things like hand soap, dish soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, etc. I don’t like running out. I think it’s gotten to be a problem though. Combine my need to be fully stocked with a tendency to forget what I’ve bought and you end up with a situation like I had this week. There was a deal on hand soap so I bought one. The only problem was when I got home and went to put the soap in the cabinet. It was then that I saw that I had 3 other soaps in there. Now, instead of being one ahead I am four. I have enough soap to last me until winter, which means I’ll likely buy a few more in the meantime by accident.

7. I had an interesting revelation as far as my own psyche goes. I can be a procrastinator at times. I also have severe bouts of Imposter Syndrome. Basically, it means you never think your victories in life are due to skill but more luck. That bleeds over into a lot of facets of life. I have been *debating* signing up for a year membership at Backstage.com, which is a big site for finding acting gigs. I want to try my hand at voice-over work. I was commissioned to edit a video for a friend, and the payment for it covers that one-year membership. Yet I still haven’t signed up. I figured out why. My imposter syndrome and procrastination are colliding. I can’t apply for any voice acting gigs until I am a member. I am terrified of failing at another creative venture so the longer I put off actually signing up the longer I can put off applying for jobs and the longer I can put off what I dread as far as failure goes. I will have to bite the bullet and apply since it is lining up well. Plus doing a podcast for over 4 years has given me some voice acting skill, so let’s just do it.

8. I wish that you knew when you were living in a period of time that was going to have a major impact on your life. Sure sometimes you get a feeling but typically you don’t recognize those times, specifically positive ones, until long after the fact. Every year for the last 20, including this year, during this week I remember a person who impacted my life more than just about anybody I’ve ever known. I could write a million words about her and still only scratch the surface. She came into my life when I was a major low point, battling depression. She pulled me out of it and taught me that I was okay being an authentic version of myself. At times it feels like her part in my life was a dream. I find myself chasing the way she made me feel and never finding anyone who matches it. All these years later I am also chasing the answer to the question ‘Why?’ Why was she sent into my life? What was the lesson she taught me? My best answer is she taught me that I could find real love as my authentic self, and that if I could once, I can again.

9. You ever do 20,000 ab crunches in a single session? At my work we got a machine that gives you that many muscle contractions in 30 minutes. It’s not just for abs though. There are 2 different pairs of paddles. The larger pair is for abs and probably lats, maybe glutes. The smaller, slightly contoured paddles are for smaller muscles. I chose to work my abs. The intensity was an 8 out of 10. I tried different positions for comfort. I laid down. I stood up. In the end I definitely felt the contractions but I wasn’t sore, at least not immediately. By the end of the next day it hurt to take a deep breath due to the, you know, 20,000 ab contractions. I had to tell my mother that if she saw me clutching my stomach that I wasn’t sick, just sore from the machine. Can’t wait to try it again.

10. When I write I sit at my desk with a window a few feet away to my right. This time of year it is wide open to let in the fresh air. There was a long round of silence in between passing cars and I could hear the birds chirping near and far. It was late in the evening and the music's seeping through. Wait, sorry that’s a Paul Simon song. It was evening, and through the silence I heard the sound of what I know to be a squirrel eating an acorn. The grinding of its teeth as it chewed was so loud it felt like the squirrel was on my windowsill. After getting up to check a few times I finally spotted it sitting about 40 feet away in a tree with its tail flipping around while it chewed. That was some crazy echo, plus at least it wasn’t one of the many squirrels that destroy the bird feeders in the yard.

Very loud eaters

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog: #38 - Vanilla Ice, Cricket Whisperer, Northern Lights, etc.

1. It’s the time of year when people start pulling their boats out of the water. This past week one guy was pulling his 30-foot boat out at a ramp at a local beach. It was a weird dichotomy as it was definitely a cool boat, but he decided to blast Ice Ice Baby while hooking it up. I think within a few months of that song coming out in August 1990 I was embarrassed to play it and I was 13. Granted I didn’t see the guy super up close so maybe he was Vanilla Ice. That would be the only person on Earth I could see proudly blasting that song in 2024.

2. This week marked 15 years since my infamous Caught In A Rising Tide video. It was one of my first YouTube videos and was a funny experience of me walking out to Wing Island in Brewster to get some photos only to return an hour later with the tide coming in. I ended up walking through nearly 2’ of water, soaking my shoes and pants. People asked why I didn’t take my shoes/socks off and I figured I’d end up with splinters from the boards I was walking on which would lead to infections and then maybe losing a foot. Soaked shoes made more sense. I went back to Wing Island and shot a sequel video. No, I wasn’t stuck in a rising tide but it was a fun and fitting follow-up video.

3. I decided to treat myself to a pizza from Domino’s. Now I know that some people don’t like Domino’s but they do have over 20,000 locations worldwide so they’re doing something right. Anyway, I ordered a 3 topping medium pizza from them and went to pick it up. They were super busy inside so what happened next was understandable. They handed me my pizza and I immediately noticed it was a large. I checked the receipt and it said medium so I got an upgrade for free. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. In addition to the pizza being a large, it had additional toppings including mushrooms which I am not a fan of. I will say that picking mushrooms off a pizza was a fair trade for getting a free upgrade to a large.

4. I am approaching 47 years old and yet every year I am still amazed at how quickly the sunset times roll back in the fall. It’s like one minute you blink and the sunset is 8pm and then you blink again and you’re walking out of work at 6pm at dusk with an owl in the trees near you scaring all of the little creatures below. The way I found out it was an owl was not that I saw it, I didn’t stick around. No, my co-worker saw it do some swooping over the parking lot in search of dinner.

5. I was pretty zoned out at work trying to get caught up on some paperwork. I was so focused on my computer screen that I didn’t notice the encroaching intruder. A small spider was slowly descending from the ceiling on its web. I was so into my work that I didn’t see it until it was quite literally an inch from my face right between my eyes. Only then did I let out a yell in surprise. Don’t worry though the spider was not smashed. I grabbed its web up above and coasted it to the floor behind my desk.

6. In other insect news we have had a stowaway cricket inside my work for weeks. Sometimes it’s quiet, other times it chirps so loudly that it seems to echo off of the walls. Today its chirping was loud enough that I actually tracked it down. I grabbed a paper cup and a tissue and went to work trying to coax it into the cup. To my surprise, after I asked it nicely to get in, and promised I wasn’t going to just crush it, the cricket crawled into the cup. Then he got smashed. Just kidding, I brought it outside and let it go in the grass.

Am I the cricket whisperer? 

7. There are 2 days each week when I have to be at work early, typically around 6:40am. My body is now used to waking up around 4:45am. However, getting to bed the night before is still a harrowing task. The routine I have now that is working relatively well consists of popping 2 melatonin at 7:30pm followed by a 3^rd at 8:30. This usually results in me being knocked out by 9pm. It was easier in the summer to wake up so early. Now with sunrise being close to 7am when my eyes open at 4:45, it’s easy for my brain to try to trick me into thinking it can’t be time to wake up yet. Each time I get up on time is still a minor miracle.

8. Nothing better than being awakened from a deep sleep at 3:30am by thunder so loud that I could feel it shaking the house. I spent a half hour trying to go back to sleep for a little longer but the thunder and lightning were so severe I just gave up and got out of bed at 4:30. Despite being tired I would much rather deal with a few severe thunderstorms than the once a century Hurricane Milton that is wrecking Central Florida.

9. A fun memory that popped up on Facebook this week dates back to 2016. My sister Ashley and I were at Longnook Beach in Truro, MA which is very remote with little to no cell service. We spotted a middle-aged man with a bicycle walking up the 50-60’ sand pathway to the parking lot. Out of nowhere one of his bike tires popped. The weather was a bit misty and feeling bad we offered to pack him and the bike in my car and drive him home. Luckily he wasn’t far but it was another remote section of little Truro. Then things got weirder. We helped him get his bike inside his house and he offered us tea. We politely declined as it was a little odd. He was insistent on giving us something as a thank you. This ended up being in the form of a random CD. It looked like a mix of tracks by some unknown artist. Maybe it was him, but who knows since once we got back in the car I was already looking for a trash can to throw it in.

Longnook Beach in Truro, MA

10. A first for me happened this week as I got to see and photograph the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. They are rarely visible this far south, typically being seen in Canada or maybe at best Northern New England. I took the long way home from my mother’s house and stopped at Gray’s Beach, aka Bass Hole, in Yarmouth Port. It was not even 7:30pm and I could see the pinks and greens in the sky. It was beyond words. I was mad that I didn’t have my regular camera, or my tripod for my phone, but still what I got ended up being some of my best photos ever. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. A chilly Thursday night at the beach on Cape Cod and there must have been 200 people there. The parking lot was overflowing. It was an experience I won’t soon forget.

Aurora Borealis at Bass Hole in Yarmouth Port, MA