Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog: #39 - Night Stalker, Greedy Supermarkets, Comet Fun, etc.

1. A bit of a follow-up to a post in the last blog. After the incredible Northern Lights experience my friend Steve and I took a chance that the next night might have some lingering Aurora Borealis effects. We drove along the Outer Cape(Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro) as we figured it’s further north and darker there giving us the best chance to see any colors. We ended up as far north as Highland Lighthouse in Truro. No luck with the lights but I decided to hike out to the lighthouse in the dark to get a few long exposure photos. Steve decided to stay in his truck. I’m walking out several hundred yards and I can hear a couple coyotes which immediately put me on edge. Nothing could prepare me for what came next. I got to the lighthouse and was sizing up a great photo of the lighthouse and the moon when I saw a shadowy man standing a few feet behind me. He says ‘Hey what’s up,’ in this hushed extra creepy voice. I immediately realized it wasn’t Steve and my blood ran cold. He asks about the Northern Lights and goes to look over the ocean. As I am taking long exposure photos I could hear him coming back and I was expecting to get jumped but he said ‘have a nice night,’ and I breathed a sigh of relief. That is until I heard too much rustling to my left and decided I had enough fun and hurried back to the truck.

"Do you think we'll see the Northern Lights?"

2. I think my brain is close to the point of being full. Like I need to upload some memories to the cloud. I went to Cape Cod Community College to do some writing in the library. It’s a great place to get my creative juices flowing. The thing is I was a student there 25 years ago and got an AA degree from there. I have very few vivid memories of my time there. It’s weird how you could spend so much time somewhere but only have a general overview in terms of memories of it. Maybe my brain is filled with so much random nostalgia for my podcast that it’s pushing out other memories.

3. As I get older there are things about becoming elderly that I think about. One is the large number of seniors that I see walking around with their mouths wide open like they’re in a constant state of surprise. Is this due to needing more oxygen? Or losing control of facial muscles? Because everyone gets old so if there’s something I can do to prevent this maybe I should get on it. I already hate flies I don’t want to give them a large opening to fly into.

4. I can see both sides of this argument. Supermarkets charging money for paper bags. On one hand, these multi-billion dollar grocery chains overcharge on the vast majority of their products as it is. Do they really need to gouge people more by charging them for paper bags? Then again on the other hand it’s 10 cents each. You can usually find it on the floor near the self-checkout registers. Also, I have seen people refusing to pay the dime and walking out of a grocery store with armloads of items, dropping something along the way, and getting more and more angry. Me? I have more than a dozen recyclable bags I’ve been using for close to 5 years so it’s not an issue for me either way.

5. Even as the fall weather begins to take hold I enjoy spending time at the beach. I will sit in the parking lot in my car listening to music or a podcast and watching the people and the ocean in general. This time of year it is much less crowded at Cape Cod beaches. Or so I thought. This weekend I was at the beach in the late afternoon awaiting the sunset. The parking lot was maybe ¼ full. Then it was ½. Then it was ¾. What was going on? It was like summer jumped out of the bushes like Jason Voorhees. The parking lot was overflowing full. Finally, I checked online to see if there was some sort of event at the beach. Yup. They were having a bonfire and hundreds of people were showing up for it. No worries though, I drove to another beach and it was all quiet on the Western Front again for me.

Summer in October be like...

6. Another thing that I find myself saying or thinking every year is this. It’s funny how different 50 degrees feels in October compared to February. 50 in October is like oh boy fall has taken hold, soon it will be winter. 50 in February is wow it’s so nice, early spring this year. Every single year.

7. With my last name being Setterlund which is Swedish I am used to people mispronouncing it and misspelling it. I guess I am a bit hyper-sensitive when it comes to places and names I know are being mispronounced. The latest example is an ad I get repeatedly on my Pandora app. On Cape Cod our one Whole Foods in Hyannis is moving down the street into a new shopping plaza called The Landing at Hyannis. On Pandora, they advertise this. However when the woman reading the copy says the name of the street, oh boy is she off. The street is Iyannough Road, named after a Wampanoag chief. It is pronounced Eye-yan-oh. She pronounces is Eee-yin-awe. It was so bad that I stopped what I was doing the first time I heard it in shock. Although she did pronounce Hyannis right which I have heard people call Hay-nis before so I guess there’s that.

8. Fitting that a week after photographing the Aurora Borealis at Bass Hole (Gray’s Beach) in Yarmouth Port I went back there to get photos of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime viewing event so I had to see it before it got too high in the sky and eventually fades away as it gets further from Earth. It is possible to see it once it gets fully dark. I stood on a dock with my phone on a tripod waiting. It got cold, down into the upper 40s while I stood there. There weren’t as many people as with the Northern Lights but still probably 50-60. What was the most fun, besides getting some cool photos of the comet of course, was people watching, or in this case people listening. Someone complained about it being too cold naturally. Several people complained that they couldn’t see the comet and had to be reminded it had to be fully dark. This meant a little over an hour after sunset. A man complained that the comet wouldn’t be where they thought it was to which their wife/girlfriend yelled at him to be quiet and just enjoy the moment. It was a fun time all around but I was glad to get back into my warm car.

9. A bonus story from the night of the comet was the story of a dog. It was low tide at Bass Hole and near the boardwalk is the dock I stood on. The dock stretches out into the water 100 feet or so and has a few small boats tied to it. On this day I noticed something in the shallow water next to the dock. It was an older golden retriever with a white face. It was in the water standing there and every now and then splashing like it was trying to catch something. Everyone out there thought the dog belonged to someone else. We all agreed we’d like to call the dog but didn’t want to get wet and/or muddy. Eventually, we did see the dog’s owner as he toweled the dog off thoroughly before it could get into his car.

10. This week I got my annual pumpkin. What I get is a smaller pie pumpkin a little bigger than a softball. I scribble some kind of spooky face on it and drag it around with me for photo shoots. The biggest surprise to me is how long these pumpkins last. The one I bought in 2023 lasted from mid-October all the way through early June. By then it still wasn’t rotting I just figured it was about time it went to pumpkin heaven.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog: #30 - Deja Raccoon, Pet Pigs, Rib Guilt, etc.

1. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I was going to empty the trash in the dumpster behind my work. I opened the right flap and lo and behold there’s a sleeping raccoon in the back left corner. It was like deja vu from a few weeks ago. I don’t speak raccoon so me explaining to this animal why it couldn’t live in the dumpster didn’t work. So I emptied the trash in the corner furthest away from it and also left the flap open in case it decided to leave. I likely ended up creating an easier entrance for the other raccoons to dumpster dive.

2. 8 years ago this week I ran 2 races on the same day. I ran a less serious inflatable obstacle course race in the morning at the Cape Cod Fairgrounds and actually won it. I went home and colored my dark Mohawk hair blond thanks to hydrogen peroxide. Then I tried to stay loose before going to partake in the Brewster Brew Run in the afternoon. I didn’t win that one but did manage to chug a beer afterward as a reward. Remembering that day it’s amazing where I was in my physical conditioning. It’s also a stark reminder of how far from that I am today. Maybe I’ll get back there, but if not it’s all good because at least I was there once.

Race 2 on the left, Race 1 on the right

3. In what was just another ordinary day in my life a patient where I work brought their pet pig into the office. His name is Wookie and he’s still a baby but oh man how cute. He oinks with excitement if you feed him Cheerios. I wanted my own pet pig until the patient said Wookie would end up weighing at least 150 lbs, then I thought of food bills and said I’ll take a goldfish instead.

4. I went for a run one day this week. I parked at the far end of a strip mall parking lot since it was very close to the neighboring bike trail. This meant I could walk to the trail, do my run, and then after walk to the grocery store without starting my car. I ended up doing over 5 miles, plus my shopping, for a total of about an hour and a half. All the while sitting a few spots down from my car was some woman in her running SUV. For 90 minutes. At least that was how long she was there by the time I’d left. Who knows, maybe she is still there at this very moment?

5. My Gold Star of the Week goes to Whole Foods in Hyannis for solving my ordeal with returning the camcorder I ordered from Amazon. During this week I learned that for some reason the UPS Store isn’t associated with UPS. How is that a thing? That’s what they claimed to me when I tried to return the camcorder there after UPS had missed me 3 times at home. UPS Store was useless, but thankfully it was relatively quick and painless to return the camcorder through a kiosk in the Whole Foods in Hyannis. I didn’t buy any groceries though, that place is still way too expensive.

6. This week in the Northeast we had a trifecta of amazing photography opportunities. I wish I had paid attention more as I only found this out the day after with a barrage of once-in-a-lifetime photos on social media. These photos featured the Milky Way, the Perseid meteor shower, and the Aurora Borealis. I’d kill for photos of any of those three but all of them? I was disappointed for a few minutes until I remembered that to have gotten those photos I’d have needed to be out at 2am. It made it a little easier to handle, but not much.

Look outside? Now why would I want to do that?

7. There is a house along one of my favorite running routes that always makes me smile. They are on the river which is nice. They have a big flag outside their front door and it is a photo of their Corgi dog. They also have a large garden running along the fence in their front yard. Every time I go by during the summer they have a table next to that fence with a pile of veggies fresh from their garden. Anyone can take them for free as there is a sign that says ‘happy to share the bounty.’ Just such a cool vibe.

8. The best purchase I have made this year is my Canva Pro subscription. It’s a design site for everything from editing photos to creating documents, videos, etc. The pro version gets you access to thousands of photos, videos, fonts, and more. Every time I make a video on Canva I save lots of money snagging the videos and photos I need. Definitely worth every cent of the $14.99/mo. I pay.

9. Maybe someone can help me. Why is it called the Registry of Motor Vehicles(RMV) in Massachusetts, but the Department of Motor Vehicles(DMV) in almost all other states? Did this state feel like a department wasn’t official enough so it needed a registry? I am also researching and just finding out there is a BMV? Bureau of Motor Vehicles, in Ohio and Indiana? And an MVD? Motor Vehicle Division, in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, and Arizona? Now I need to lie down this is all too much.

10. One of my favorite foods is a good rack of ribs. I could eat them pretty much every day. There are a few problems with that though. One, they are not cheap, and two, they are not too healthy. So as much as I’d love to make ribs as common in my life as water they’re best left to every once in a while. That way I save money and don’t pack on pounds.