Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #111: First, Film Business, Three Things Sir, etc.

1. Over the past 5 weeks or so, I have seen a huge uptick in the number of followers I have across social media. This began with a video of slushy ocean waves at a Cape Cod beach that went viral when shared by a much larger Instagram account. In the time since, I have had tons of shares, tons of follows, and tons of comments. It wasn’t until this week that I had a seminal moment that comes when one’s social media presence starts to grow. First! That was it. Does anyone remember when a larger account would post something, and the first few comments would be people racing to comment ‘First!’ It was like it was a badge of honor, or bragging rights for something that really didn’t matter. My social media presence is not that large. It’s more than doubled in a month, but still not on the level of most influencers or celebrities. That being said, having someone on TikTok comment ‘first’ on a video I shared of a sunset made me feel next-level. I can now put that on my creator resume: Had a guy comment ‘first’ on a video. I have finally made it. Now, where is my blue check mark without me having to pay for it?!


2. After a week off from work due to the blizzard, it was hard getting my head back in the game. It was like I needed to remember exactly what it was that I did for work. It took an extra energy drink just to get me through the day competently. Sadly, it wasn’t like returning to work from a fun vacation. It was returning after being wailed on by a once-in-a-decade snowstorm and then spending the rest of the time either without power or in a daze, trying to get my bearings back. It was as if I needed an extra day off to fully recover from my week off. With spring less than 3 weeks away, I can only hope that winter is starting to lose interest in beating the hell out of us in New England.


3. I immediately contradict that last entry with this one. The slush waves returned to Cape Cod for a short engagement. Temperatures in the teens at night allowed the phenomenon to happen at a few north-facing beaches in the town of Brewster. I was beside myself with excitement. They looked so cool in the bright sun. The slush piled up in a neat semi-circle on the beach, creating a makeshift barrier between the ocean and land. I would have stayed and watched them for as long as I could, but I had to get to work. That evening, I ventured back down to the same beach. By now, the tide had gone out. The slush waves had led to the return of the ice chunks, although in far smaller form than they were a few weeks ago. I had thought I had grown tired of walking through ice and snow and soaking my shoes, but lo and behold, there I was again up to my ankles in snow trying to get the best angles for photos. Hey, when it’s 90 and humid in August, I’ll be living in the photos and videos of those cold winter days.



4. Welcome to the film business. I learned that things aren’t always smooth sailing when it comes to movies. Longtime readers know that last summer and fall were highlighted by the work I did on the When Henry Met Henry short film. It is a fictional meeting between famed authors Henry Beston and Henry David Thoreau, co-produced by Frank Durant, who wrote the screenplay. We filmed in mid-October, and everything went well. Being that it is a short film, we expected that it would be totally wrapped and edited before the end of 2025. We routinely asked the editor how things were going and rarely got clear answers. My hope is to enter the finished product in at least one local film festival. Those things have deadlines. I needed to know when this film would be done so that I could plan accordingly. This past week, I heard from the editor. He asked if I could at least double what he was getting paid for editing. I was caught off guard but also pretty pissed off. Here he was more than four months after wrapping filming without a finished film, and to top it off, he was asking for more money. That being said, I was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. I want that film done, and if I balked at the editor’s demands, we might get a poorly done job, or we’d have to edit it ourselves. So I agreed to double his pay. It is technically within our budget of what we raised for the film, so it’s not back-breaking. Still, it was kind of a dick move. I have learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to the film industry. To wrap it up, I hope to have the finished film within a week or two, plenty of time to enter it in a festival I’m interested in. It’ll all work out in the end, hopefully. Except for the editor, I won’t ever do business with him again.


5. This week saw my youngest niece, Sylvie’s 7th birthday. She is, without a doubt, one of my favorite people to ever walk this earth. I am lucky that I have probably at least a couple of handfuls worth of people that I can give that distinction to. They are mainly family and a few close friends. I have always been seen as the ‘fun uncle.’ I never called myself that until my nieces and nephews and their parents gave me the distinction. With Sylvie being the youngest and almost guaranteed to be the last of this generation in my family, I take full advantage of the time I have where she still gets super excited and hyper when she sees me. My mom says she owns me, that I am wrapped around her finger. That’s 100% true. I pretty much do whatever she wants because I want to be associated with fun memories when she grows up. For this birthday, it didn’t disappoint. I had butterfly hair clips in my beard and was fully made up. Eye shadow, lip gloss, eyeliner, the works. I had needed to go to the store after the birthday party was over, and was joking that I just wouldn’t go all made up. The thing is, Sylvie did a good job with the makeup, meaning I didn’t look like a clown as I feared. So I still went to the store in all my made-up glory. It was another present for her birthday. Someday, Sylvie will grow up and not think I am cool anymore, so I cherish all of the moments I can make while she still does.


6. I passed 2,000 days alcohol free this week. It’s amazing how, when you get so far out from a big change in your life, you can almost forget the journey that it took to get to where you are. September marks 6 years since I kicked alcohol the F out of my life. It was a big problem for a while, so I want to make sure that I take every opportunity to celebrate the accomplishment. For too long, I felt I needed alcohol to cope with life and to make me feel better about who I was and where I was at the time. The last thing I wanted to be for younger members of my family was a cautionary tale of things not to do. I have found now 2,000+ days away from my last drink that I am a little of both. The cautionary tale is not to let alcohol become your master. Also, the redemption, if you are down and feel like you might never get up, just keep moving forward and never stop trying. I had days where it was like my brain was on autopilot. My car would seemingly drive itself to the liquor store every day. It was a battle to get out of that habit, but once I was clear of the addiction, I could look back and realize how lucky I was to get away from it. My father is the biggest alcoholic I’ve known in my life, and my greatest fear was ending up like him. The one and pretty much only thing he taught me was that a weak man lets his demons run his life. I chose to be stronger and better. 2,000 days and counting.



7. I got a bit of confirmation this week on something I thought was true. Back late in the summer, I got my car’s oil changed at a Jiffy Lube I had gone to many times. They informed me that, for some reason, they could not get my oil filter off to be replaced. This was even though they were the ones who put the filter on in the first place. I left there thinking they were just incompetent and/or lazy. I would get my answer the next time I needed an oil change. That came this week. I chose to go to the nearest Valvoline spot, which was about 40 minutes from me. The entire process was great. Tire pressure checked, fluids topped off, oil changed, oh yeah, and the filter removed without issue. So, needless to say, it was incompetence and laziness at Jiffy Lube. I don’t think I’ll ever go back there. I’d rather drive 40 minutes each way for a guaranteed positive experience. Thank you, Valvoline. You will see me again.


8. My newest show I’m obsessed with binging is Yellowjackets. The show is about a high school girls' soccer team whose plane crashes deep in the Canadian wilderness and their attempts at survival. It’s a little like Lord of the Flies, but with mostly teenage girls. The show takes place in two timelines. The past is 1996 when the crash happened. I love that because it means the girls would have all been my age, so I immediately relate to them more. Plus, they play a lot of great music from then. But then there’s the other timeline, which is present-day, where the survivors of the crash are trying to cope with the trauma of the events. I won’t spoil anything, but just know it’s far more gory than you might expect. I just finished the first season. There are three out so far, with a fourth that’s supposed to debut soon. It’s also got Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis as the older versions of two of the characters, which makes the show even better. It comes highly recommended.

9. Going to Walmart is always double the fun. You get to shop for some cheap stuff, and you also get the extra bonus of people watching. Several times in previous blogs, I’ve mentioned the wacky people I’ve come across when visiting Walmart. This time was a slight disappointment. There were no weirdos inside, well, maybe besides me. When pulling into the parking lot, though, I was cut off by some idiot in her SUV. Like she couldn’t wait one extra second for me to pass? She just had to whip out in front of me. I handled it coolly. I followed her around the parking lot until she eventually kept driving. I can’t say if she left and didn’t come back because I found a spot and went in. If you’re gonna be a jerk and nearly cause an accident because you’re jonesing for some Walmart goodies, I’m going to be just as petty and tail you around the lot. So I guess in a way, I was the person today that I would have been looking for to write about when visiting Walmart. Who would have seen that twist coming?


10. My oddest interaction this week was not at Walmart but at the grocery store. At one particular store, there is a 60-something-year-old man who fetches carts. I can tell he doesn’t like his job based on what he mutters to himself as he walks around. This visit to the store ended with me walking outside. There was some idiot who had parked their car in the fire lane and left it running unattended. I walked in front of it and stopped to make sure there weren’t any cars coming. The cart guy, out of the blue, says ‘okay sir there are three things.’ I turned around with a confused look. I said ‘excuse me?’ Then this guy finally did what a normal person would have done and asked if it was my car. When I said no, he apologized. I said, ‘okay well that’s one thing.’ I then walked away, not giving him the chance to say or do anything else weird. I have no clue what his three things were or whether he waited outside for the jerk that owned that car to come back.


11. I walked the nearby stretch of the Cape Cod Rail Trail for the first time in nearly two months. That part was great. Getting to walk five miles outside, even if it was drizzly and 45 degrees. However, I wasn’t ready for the sheer number of downed trees scattered across the bike trail. I spotted at least six good-sized trees along the trail in about ½ mile. I can only assume it’s the same or worse throughout the rest of the bike trail. Even as much of the snow from the recent blizzard has melted away, it will take a lot of work to remove what must be many dozens of trees from the trail. Spring is next week, and yes, you’ll be able to ride or walk the bike trail, but it will be a while before you can do so without having to stop and navigate around fallen trees.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #110: Blizzard of 2026, Power Outages, Odd Captions, etc.

1. The Blizzard of 2026 came roaring in late Sunday night. By sunrise on Monday morning, we had power flash off several times, but luckily, it always came right back on. The funny thing was that I sleep with a white noise machine on, as I am a very light sleeper. Each time the power went off, the machine stopped, and I immediately woke up. The machine has several different sounds to sleep to. The default is running water. So when the power came back on, I was greeted with running water sounds. I would switch it back to the white noise only for the power to go back out a few minutes later. After doing this two or three times, I gave up and left the running water noise on. The white noise machine became my canary in the coal mine during the day. Since I didn’t need any lights on, I knew if that machine stopped, we had lost power.


2. Fittingly, during the day of the blizzard, I got nostalgic and watched a video I had shot with my camcorder of a blizzard we had on Cape Cod in 1996. That one was in the first week of January during my senior year of high school. We had 21” of snow from that. It was wild to see my siblings and me out shoveling during the peak of the storm near 11pm. We also scaled our roof with a ladder. Mind you, I was the oldest at 18, the rest were younger. It was a different time 30 years ago. While watching my brother and me driving around town during the storm in my mother’s blue station wagon, I noticed a few things. First, I was way more reckless with driving, doing fish tails, donuts, and getting stuck in snow banks. Second and perhaps more shocking was how much of an accent I had back then. Not sure if it was a conscious effort to speak without the Cape Cod accent once I started doing author events, or if it’s just something you can lose over time. It’s amazing how fast 30 years can go and not really feel like all that long.


3. One of the silver linings about the blizzard was that I could use shoveling the snow as a workout. I set my Fitbit up and got to shoveling during the height of the storm, around 12:30pm on Monday. It was hard-packed, cement snow, probably over a foot by that time. Despite it being heavy, it was not terrible to shovel since each scoop stayed on the shovel. I shoveled for about 70 minutes and clocked in roughly 715 calories burned. I felt really good about that and was looking forward to a hot shower and a bit of rest while the storm raged on. That was not to be though, as once finished shoveling, I found out that the power had gone out while I was outside. No shower, no hot food, just sitting in silence, slowly draining my phone’s battery. I guess I was foolish to think that power would stay on during one of the biggest storms in recent memory.



4. In total, it was close to 75% of Cape Cod that lost power during the blizzard. I believe at one point, the entire Outer Cape (Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown) was without power. I always say that at my age, I am old enough to remember growing up without the technology of the internet and smartphones. It was not some sort of a challenge, but we ended up there anyway. Unsure of how long power would be out, I tried to prolong the life of my devices as long as possible. I had a portable battery called PoweRocks that my mother had given me years ago. Smartly, I charged it before the storm. I used that to prop up my phone’s battery. Once it died, I plugged it into my laptop and drained that battery to slowly recharge the PoweRocks and my phone. When all else failed, I’d go sit in my running car with my phone plugged in. Surprisingly, that didn’t give me as much of a charge as I’d hoped. It was a game of musical chairs with my car, phone, laptop, and portable charger as I tried to keep some sort of connection to the outside world while the blizzard raged and then crews worked to restore power.


5. While out getting the lay of the land the morning after the blizzard, I had a fun adventure with my youngest niece, Sylvie, who lives nearby. I was out filming a video where I stood in a fresh snow drift to show people how deep the snow was when she spotted me. She was able to convince me to go for a walk with her mother and their dog through their neighborhood. It doesn’t take much convincing, though. My mother typically says Sylvie is my boss and can get me to do pretty much anything. The neighborhood we walked in wasn’t plowed at all, which made walking a chore. It was a fun time though, as Sylvie enjoyed diving into the snow and asking me to come and rescue her from it. Eventually, I offered to give her a piggyback ride back to her house. By this point, I had helped do a 2nd shoveling of the driveway on an empty stomach, plus done the walk, so I was tired. If I could have gone back to bed at 8:30am, I would have. Sylvie wanted me to hang out at her house, but I wanted to go home and collapse into a chair. She’s very convincing, but I had to say no. It’s hard because she’s smart and remembers everything. If I said I’d be back later, she’d hold me to it. I had to actually go home and relax, otherwise she’d call me out on it.



6. In total, we got somewhere in the neighborhood of 18-20” of snow on the Mid-Cape. The jackpot was a stretch from Plymouth, MA, down into southwestern Rhode Island. There, they got something like 3 feet of snow. The Blizzard of 2026 was breaking records set by the legendary Blizzard of ‘78. We had wind gusts of 80mph on Nantucket. I think Cape Cod got spared in terms of major beach erosion since the storm’s peak was during low tides. That being said, the videos of the Scituate shore were awful as they typically are during big storms. I have seen countless such videos of huge waves crashing into the sea walls and spraying into the air as high as the roofs of 3-story houses. I love Scituate, but it has to be a blessing and a curse for those who live there. You get beautiful scenery and shorelines, but also the threat of major beach erosion and storm surge damage. As of writing this entry, I believe that more than half of Cape Cod is still without power. It came back on where I live in the middle of the night after about 40 hours of darkness and cold. As I mentioned above, my white noise machine was my canary in the coal mine. I heard it turn on and checked the time. I hope that everyone else gets their power back soon. It’s no fun sleeping in a 55-degree room.


7. Once fully shoveled out, and once I felt the roads were passable enough, I took a little ride. I needed to try to charge my phone, so I figured rather than sitting in the driveway in my car, I’d go see how the area looked. It was an adventure for sure. The roads ranged from passable to totally unplowed. I drive a sedan, so my adventurous side is determined by whether my car can make it. I was more than willing to walk through deep snow to get cool photos and videos. The problem was finding a place where I could park. There was also the issue of downed trees and power lines. There were a few detours caused by trees across the road. I didn’t dare try to get any footage while driving, otherwise I’d end up in one of those ‘idiot driver’ fail videos. In the end, I went and grabbed some food at a supermarket that was open and called it a day. With no power for several days at my work, it left a lot of room for further adventures later in the week.


8. The difference in when certain areas of Cape Cod got their power back meant that, despite getting power back at 4am Wednesday morning, a lot of other places did not have it back. One such place was my work. I ended up with an entire week off from work. It wasn’t planned, and I couldn’t really enjoy it since half of it was under storm conditions. With half of the Cape not having power, all I could really do was sit around and relax, which is not my favorite activity. It’s amazing the luck of the draw where a select few never lost power during the blizzard, others (like me) got it back in a day and a half, while more had to wait 4 or 5 days. There was really no rhyme or reason, but it made me feel like I needed to apologize to those who had longer durations without power, like I had somehow paid off the power gods to give ours back sooner. You’d see a handful of people on social media saying it ‘must be nice’ to have power when, in reality, it was totally random.


9. After a long and cold winter, it’s amazing how good 45 degrees feels. I immediately grabbed my fall jacket to head out into the sun. As bad as the blizzard was early in the week, having several days of temperatures in the 40s did wonders for melting the snow. It also did wonders for the psyche of a lot of us in New England. It honestly has felt at times like winter was never going to end, but now hopefully (knocks wood) the worst is behind us. Those who live in warmer climates wouldn’t understand when we get a 40+ degree day and drive with our windows down and start drinking iced coffee. Yes, we’re kind of crazy, but in a charming way.


10. With my content being more visible on Instagram and TikTok in the last month or so, I am starting to try to put a little more effort into my videos. This means taking a few b-roll shots, doing camera cuts, and trying to turn a 90-second to 2-minute video into a short film. Sure, it might not make much of a difference in the long run, but it actually is fun and gets me some practice in a director’s sense and a layout sense. This video of the damage at Town Neck Beach in Sandwich is an example of what I’m talking about.



11. As I have said many times, when it comes to photography, I practice something called dedication to the craft. That is the idea of getting the photo you want, even if it means disregarding your own safety. Obviously, my risks are calculated, but they are still risks for a good shot. The older I get, the more my practical side starts to take over. I have always seen a few moves ahead in life, and now I have found that seeing those moves can stop me from doing something stupid. For example, and obviously you knew there was an example, this week I went shooting down in Chatham. While at one location, I noticed in the distance on a deserted stretch of beach, there was a grounded boat. I immediately knew I needed to get closer to it. I went to a place called the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge. It’s way out in the boonies of Chatham. From there, I could see the boat and knew a route I could take to get pretty close to it. Sadly, the last few years have seen this location decimated by erosion to the point where there is no beach access from it anymore. Well, technically. Here is the seeing moves ahead part. There is an overlook where you can see the ocean, but the stairs that used to lead you to the beach have been removed. If you walk to the edge of the bluffs, it’s probably a 10-15-foot drop down to the beach below. A few years ago, I’d have jumped off the bluffs, walked the beach, and gotten some sick photos and videos of the boat. Today though, the idea of jumping in the snow and sand and then trying to figure out my way back to the parking lot, all while hoping nobody who lived on the bluffs saw me and decided to make a scene, was all too much. If it hadn’t been winter, I’d have walked to an access trail a half-mile away, but the temperature and time of day wouldn’t allow it. I had to settle for a video from a distance, lame.


12. I like putting captions with all of my videos on social media. It helps people who might not be in a place where they can play a video with sound. As you’d expect with AI deciphering my words, there are lots of inaccuracies, specifically with proper names and locations. This week, I shot a video at the Cape Cod Canal. While I was there, a helicopter flew overhead, and I got a fun shot of it. When I went to add captions to the video, I noticed odd words appearing. While uploading it to TikTok, I noticed a few Arabic words in my captions. Then, when I put the same video up on Instagram, I noticed the phrase ‘oh my god’ was randomly thrown in. It took me a moment to realize that the AI was trying to make words out of the helicopter sounds. So apparently TikTok thinks helicopter noises sound like Arabic, and IG thinks they sound like someone crying out, ‘oh my god.’ Both random and funny at the same time. I did momentarily debate leaving those captions in, but ultimately took them out.


13. I got lucky and experienced a classic Cape Cod sunset on the tidal flats this weekend. All of the ice had melted away, and it looked like it does in the summer. I had a great idea. I would shoot a killer time-lapse video of both the tide rolling in and the sun setting. I used my selfie stick, which is also a tripod, and set my phone up probably 6-7 feet away from the water’s edge and let it roll. I had hoped that the water wouldn’t come in too far before the sun had dipped below the horizon. I watched the video recording, and the water rolled in. It started lapping at the tripod, but I held firm. It began trickling past the tripod, but I wouldn’t relent. I held out as long as I could, but once the water was 5 feet past the tripod holding my phone, I had to rescue it. If I had waited a few moments later, I don’t know if the water eventually would have knocked my phone over. The video was amazing, though. Probably 5 minutes of filming for less than 30 seconds of time-lapse.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #109: Brainless, Scratch Tickets, Blizzard Time, etc.

1. I never realized how many people either don’t pay attention or don’t know how to read. I have been posting tons of the Cape Cod ice floes videos for nearly a month on social media. Each one is from a different north-facing beach. Each one is time-stamped, and its location is shared so that viewers get an idea of when and where I shot it. I even make sure to give a good description of each one so that there is literally no possible way someone with an IQ above 10 can be confused. Yet with every post I share, I inevitably get handfuls of people either asking where it was filmed or telling me to stay off the ice since it’s not safe. These low-intelligence people seem to think that if they watch a video of mine at midnight on a Tuesday, that somehow I am magically out there on a sunny beach at that very moment. I gave up trying to explain to these fools that the videos are not happening in real-time and that I actually am not living out on the ice waiting for people to comment. It’s like, use some common sense before trying to fulfill your desperate need to feel important. I guess this is a side effect of gaining tons of new followers. The more people come in, the higher the likelihood that a few idiots wander in like raccoons looking for trash.


2. A goal for 2026 is to get back to my prime running weight. I don’t know if I can ever run like I did at my peak in 2014-15, but I do know that the running I have been doing over the last several years has been at a weight 25-30 pounds above where I was back then. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say I can’t run like I used to, but trying to run at a far heavier weight is naturally going to make running harder on my body. So, in trying to drop weight, I have become far more focused on my diet. This has got me down 10-11 pounds since Christmas, which is not bad. It’s still a way to go to my goal, but if I go slow and steady, it should be a success. Also, I have to try to run more as the weight comes off. My stamina hasn’t been the same since Covid, but in the past week, I managed three separate hour-long treadmill sessions of mostly running. After the third day, my body was so wiped out that all of my plans for content work went out the window. All I could do was sit back and watch cartoons while my body melted into my chair. The hope is that maybe in another month I’ll be down another 5-6 pounds, which gets me a little more than halfway to my goal. Just keep moving forward.


3. In the continuing saga of frozen Cape Cod, we have a new chapter. The ice floes that have clogged up the north side beaches for nearly the last month have begun melting. What’s left? Oh, nothing, just gigantic ice and snow chunks. By gigantic, I mean 7 feet tall and 10-15 feet across. There are legit hundreds of them stretching from Dennis to Orleans. It makes the tidal flats look like another planet yet again. I was able to go one evening after work down to a nearby beach at low tide. There was a layer of ice and snow about 20 feet across at the very edge of the shore. Once you got past that, it was a quick hop down onto the sandy tidal flats. There, you could fully explore the enormous ice blocks scattered as far as the eye could see. In the past month, we’ve had the slush wave phase, the entire north side is a sheet of ice phase, and now the dump truck-sized ice blocks phase. I’m sure it’ll all melt and be over soon, but I do wonder if there’s a 4th even crazier phase to this winter.



4. I’m not against scratch tickets. If people want to spend money they have for a very, very slim chance of winning a lot more money, go ahead, it’s your choice. It is kind of sad when you see people digging through trash to find losing tickets in the, again, very, very slim chance that the person who bought the ticket didn’t realize they had won. This week, I saw perhaps the topper of all wishful thinking. On a pretty rainy afternoon, I was headed into the supermarket. A woman was walking with what had to be her son. She spotted 3 or 4 discarded tickets lying on the soaking wet asphalt. She went over and scooped those dirty, wet tickets up in that 1 in 1,000,000 chance that there might be a winner. There wasn’t, and she seemed surprised. She did carry the trash in and throw it away, which was nice, so I hope her next scratch ticket wins her something.


5. I swear that spam emailers count on people being either stupid or blown away by fake praise that they will fall into their trap. I had a ‘person’ email me raving about my latest book, In Their Footsteps: The Interesting People, Places, and Events of Cape Cod History. If you couldn’t tell by the title, it’s a book about Cape Cod history. It’s an anthology of 40 stories in chronological order. This idiot, who is naturally selling their services in marketing, tells me they sat down to read my book, thinking it was going to be a ‘dystopian thriller.’ What? But then they were pleasantly surprised by the ‘complex narrative to the story.’ Again, what? They said my book wasn’t reaching a large enough audience, fine. I’m sure you read more than just the cover on Amazon. By the 3rd paragraph in this insanely long email, I figured out it was a scam, and I sent it to my spam folder. I do wonder if any other authors received similar emails and didn’t read them, but only saw the heaps of fake praise and quickly entered their debit card numbers. Luckily, being a Gen-Xer, I am always skeptical of even the most sincere praise, and that has served me well most times.

My 'dystopian thriller' according to the scammer.

6. At my work, we have an overwhelmingly positive clientele. I enjoy interacting with 99% of those who come in. That being said, it makes those in the 1% far more noticeable. We have one such lady who, sadly, has become a regular. She routinely comes in for our pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. It is great for healing and recharging your body at the cellular level. This lady was high maintenance from the jump. Having questions about the therapy you're doing is fine, actually encouraged. However, she went from asking questions to treating us like we were her servants and that she ran the place. She brought a negative vibe to a usually pleasant work environment. The biggest issue came with her demands that we turn the music off in the therapy room. We have office music, and I have music at my desk. Since they weren’t the same music, she flipped and asked us to turn one of them off. Incredibly rude. Then, another time she was in, she made the same complaint, but this time about my music in the gym while I was training a client. She made someone close the gym door. We like to leave it open so people can come in and see what we do, or so the boss has easy access to it. The best part of her time at my work is when the door closes behind her as she’s leaving. Just awful.


7. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: New England is in line for yet another huge snowstorm. I feel like we’re at the point in the winter where it’s like Jason popping up one more time just when you think he’s dead. Literally, this weekend, we had nearly all of the snow and ice melted away on Cape Cod. Now, it is predicted that we’re going to get a foot or more of fresh snow to replace it on Monday. The National Weather Service predicts 11”, so we’ll see. Plus, to top it off, we’re not getting the cold blast afterward, so whatever snow we have is going to be the heavy, wet, back-breaking kind. I had a blast shooting the photos and videos of the Cape Cod ice floes, but man, enough is enough. Spring can’t come soon enough.

I enjoyed it for a while but we need spring now please.

8. I have to laugh when some rando on social media tries to educate me about Cape Cod. I’ve had 2 such experiences in the past week. One was innocent. A guy wanted to drive down to the Cape to experience the ice floes. I said they were melting and might not be worth an hour-plus drive. He told me that Grok (the stupid Twitter AI bot) told him that the ice was still good down on Cape Cod. I was nice and just told me that I live on Cape Cod, Grok doesn’t. The other was some dumbass lady who tried to explain to me where Eastham was. She claimed it was in the middle of the Cape. Nope, it’s the Outer Cape; Yarmouth and Hyannis are in the middle of the Cape. I told her I was 12th generation, and she should probably stick to things she actually knows, like cigarettes and cheap vodka. Normally, I just ignore social media fools, but she caught me at a bad time and had to get put on blast.


9. While watching the Stephen King series 11.22.63, I developed a bit of a celebrity crush on Sarah Gadon, who plays the character Sadie Dunhill. She’s an award-winning Canadian actress who got a lot of notoriety acting in David Cronenberg films in the 2010s. It got to the point in the series that I cared less about the plot of the show, which was trying to prevent the assassination of JFK, and I cared more about Sadie and the main character, Jake, living happily ever after. The next series I began binging after finishing 11.22.63 was another Stephen King series, Castle Rock. It’s a great show, but you could imagine my thrill when, suddenly, in Season 2, Sarah Gadon shows up as a side character. She’s only in it for two episodes, but that was enough to take Castle Rock up a level. I won’t spoil anything for those who haven’t seen either show, but all I’ll say is that her characters have nearly the same fate in each. Pretty wild. She’s also starring in the new Netflix series Wayward, so I might have to just make that next up on my binge list.

Sarah Gadon in 11.22.63

10. We end this blog and this weekend off playing the waiting game for the blizzard. Every time the forecast is updated, it seems to get worse. The snow is one thing, but the wind and flooding are another. I slowly prepped over a few days to make sure that everything is good to go, whatever happens. I fully expect to lose power for a time. How long is another question. I went earlier this week to Crosby Beach in Brewster earlier this week and got some fun footage of hundreds of ice blocks all over the tidal flats. When I went back on Sunday, they were all gone. So the irony is that we’ve gotten rid of most of the snow from the previous storm a month ago, just in time for an even bigger storm to hit us. The only silver lining to this winter is that it’s been the coldest and snowiest on Cape Cod in over 20 years. Hopefully, it’ll be a few years before it’s as bad as it’s been this year.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #108: Super Bowl, Still Frozen Cape Cod, Valentine’s Day, etc.

1. Super Bowl LX has passed. My New England Patriots didn’t finish their story and go from the outhouse to the penthouse in one season. The Seattle Seahawks defeated the Patriots 29-13 and deserved to win. Their defense lived up to the hype. Patriots quarterback Drake Maye looked rattled at many points during the game. His right shoulder was still somewhat injured, but he didn’t make excuses. He’s only 23, the 2nd youngest quarterback to ever start a Super Bowl. Despite the team losing, I have no doubt that they will be back in the Super Bowl within the next 3-4 years. The Patriots are a young team, with most players signed, and tons of money to spend. There might be a step back next year with a harder schedule and other teams getting a bit of a playbook on the Patriots, but rest assured, this is only the beginning of this chapter. So Patriots fans like me have no fear, and Patriots haters, sorry, but get used to them being contenders for the foreseeable future. Until then, though, hats off to the Seahawks; they are the champions and deserve all of the accolades.


2. The ice floes have been clogging the north side of Cape Cod for three weeks now. It has almost become just another part of life. I have been at some beach nearly every day getting photos and videos, as you who have been reading the blog know. When something feels common, it can also feel less dangerous. I have been climbing out on the ice chunks to get better vantage points. Of course, I’ve been doing it safely, but when you’re maneuvering on pieces of ice, how safe are you really? I have had a few slips and gone down during the last few weeks, but that didn’t stop me from taking it one step further this week. I went for a sunset shoot at Sea Street Beach in East Dennis. I carefully made my way out onto some of the ice and shot a video. Then I wanted to get some more footage since you never know when the temperatures will rise, and the ice will become only a memory. So I started walking further out until I was probably 75 feet offshore on the ice. Then I heard what I thought at first was a wounded bird. It was a high-pitched squeak. Then I heard it again, but it was no bird. It turned out to be the sound of ice splitting. Think about what an ice cube does when you drop it into room-temperature liquid. It kind of squeaks and cracks. Once I realized what it was and where I was, I got back to the beach as quickly as I safely could. That squeaking noise definitely was a reminder that I needed to respect those ice floes, no matter how cool the photos and videos could be.



3. As we are in mid-February, thankfully, we’re closer to the end of winter than the beginning. I am craving warmer temperatures and things blooming. It feels as though this has been a classic New England winter when we haven’t had one in several years. For as much as I want spring to get here, I am torn. The ice floe videos have been a boon for my social media, so I am not too keen on giving them up. That being said, I believe that Cape Cod in general is a great place, and videos of it will keep bringing in new viewers. Also, no matter how much I want the ice floes to stay, I can’t do anything about it. Or can I? No, I can’t. But I can shoot so much content that I can repost and repurpose it until I get sick of it. Of course, the biggest issue with spring on Cape Cod is that we don’t get one until May. Before then, we get a mass of mid-40s and fog, which makes us all feel like we’re in some horror movie waiting for the killer to pop out from the fog to end us. Yay.


4. The older I get I try not to look past today to get to tomorrow. What I mean is I see so many people on social media ‘dreaming of summer’ currently. Summer is 4 months away. These people are wishing away so much time that you don’t get back. Sure, I might be taking it too literally, but I am trying to make the best of each day rather than sitting back wishing it was spring, or summer, or sunny, or warmer, or that I was doing something more exciting. I think that’s a big reason why I have enjoyed Cape Cod’s icy winter. It’s like it gives each cold winter day purpose rather than these days being looked at with scorn and wishing it were summer already. Don’t forget, the sooner it’s summer, the sooner it’s winter again. Just make the best of each day you have; summer will come right on time as it does every year.


5. Dedication to the Craft is something I’ve mentioned a lot in this blog. It is something my buddy Steve and I coined about getting a photograph, no matter what might be in our way. This typically means putting ourselves into some sort of less-than-ideal situation for the good of the shot. One such way I can do this is by running on a treadmill and then deciding to go chase a sunset at an icy beach. My adventure to Chapin Beach in Dennis included me in shorts, trudging through a foot of crackling snow to get amazing photos. A pair of women, all bundled up, saw me out there and fled. There was also a nice older man shooting photos who didn’t seem too surprised when he saw me up on a hill, standing on a picnic table looking for the best vantage point. All in all, it was a fun trip, and the photos were worth it.

6. Dedication to the Craft can also take the shape of standing underneath a tree full of fighting turkeys, trying to capture some sort of National Geographic video. It was a ‘jerk the wheel and pull over’ type of moment as I spotted what was probably close to 20 turkeys in a tree. A few were fighting over the best branch and gobbling at each other. When trying to leave, I was boxed in by the rest of the turkey family, probably another dozen or so. These ones casually swaggered across the street and hopped onto a snow bank, all while I tried to reason with them. Luckily, I knew the password *gobble*, and they let me by without hassle. That was a close one.


7. I had a cute interaction with a little girl at the supermarket this week. As I was walking, she was facing me in a shopping cart. She looked like she had just finished a frosted donut, as it was all over her face. She smiled, waved, and even said hi. I made sure to say hi back, and she seemed happy with that. She also said hi to everyone else who passed by, but I didn’t hear anyone else actually say it back. I’m sure they all waved or something because who could resist engaging with a cute little kid? Psychos maybe. I would interact with every kid I saw if I could, but I think it would start to look like I was a creep, and we can’t have that.


8. Valentine’s Day is interesting in that I’d love to have someone to celebrate it with, but I also love the fact that I can just do for myself and not have to stress about whether I did a good job. It’s not really a holiday. It’s more of a spend more money on a relationship day. You can put in almost no effort, like getting flowers at a gas station on your way home from work, and be rewarded like a king. Or you could go all out, spending handfuls of money you don’t have on a celebration, and still be looked at as less-than. You sometimes never know what you’re going to get. I have always thought that if you’re a big Valentine’s Day person, that’s great, but not overly impressive. Everyone who cares about their partner does something on that day. More impressive is being the hero of the day on a random Tuesday in August when nobody else is watching. That’s when you know you’ve found the right one. Would I do something like that? I’d like to think so, but there’s only one way to find out.


9. Speaking of Valentine’s Day, mine was spent on a treadmill in the morning. While I was there, trying to run like it was 2019 again, I spotted this cute girl I had seen several times there. She’s a combination of mousy and serious, if that makes sense. Like, she’s not there to hang out and chat. She’s there to get her work done and go. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to get her attention. We wear the same brand of shoes, Brooks, but I don’t know if that’s much of an in. On this day, we each finished our respective cardio at the same time and ended up next to each other in the stretching room. Sadly, for as much as I’d like to think I would be coming off as genuine, I stayed silent and stretched rather than try to talk to her. I know most women don’t want to be approached by a stranger at the gym, and I had to respect that. There’s not much else I can do but try to be in her line of sight next time we’re both at the gym and smile like an idiot. Yeah, I’m sure that will suddenly break the ice.


10. Sadly, the wonder of the Cape Cod ice was shattered this week when a husband and wife fell through the ice. It happened at First Encounter Beach in Eastham. Unfortunately, the ice can look thick and stable and actually be ounces of pressure away from cracking. The couple had been out with their dog and walked out on the ice. This week saw temperatures getting into the high 30s on most days, which seriously compromised the ice. It was apparently also high tide at the time that they were walking, which was a perfect storm for a tragedy. Incredibly, the day before the event, I had been not far away at Skaket Beach in Orleans. There it was, low tide, and I hiked nearly ¼ mile out onto the ice for one final adventure. There were several other people out wandering on the ice at Skaket. The big difference between my walk and the tragedy in Eastham comes down to knowing your surroundings. Skaket Beach is the epicenter of the tidal flats on Cape Cod. Essentially, any erosion of the beach itself just gets dumped right offshore onto the flats. This makes it possible to hike great distances offshore, especially at low tide. To the untrained eye on social media, it might appear as though I throw caution to the wind with some of my photo adventures, but in reality, it is a lot of low-risk or highly calculated risks. My condolences to the family and friends of the people lost in Eastham this week.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #107: Leap of Faith, Frozen Cape Cod, Watch Your Step, etc.

1. For the last few years, I have felt like I am caught in between two worlds. One step one way could get me to everything I’ve ever wanted out of life. One step the other way could leave me with nothing. Honestly, most of the time I don’t know which step is the correct one. I end up staying right in the middle as day after day goes by. It sounds a bit dramatic, and I am very lucky and blessed to be where I am in my life at this point in time. That being said, the fact that I spend nearly every waking moment of free time working on creative projects tells me that, despite being blessed, I am clearly not satisfied with where I am. The big problem for me is that there likely won’t be a sign pointing me in the right direction. It’s going to end up being a leap of faith, which is terrifying.


2. It’s interesting how one’s mind works. A few months ago, on a dating app, I had a cute girl show interest. I didn’t feel ready for anything, so I let that pass by. I know, why are you on a dating app if you aren’t ready? Again, funny how the mind works. So I regretted not reciprocating almost immediately, but she was gone. Fast forward to this week, and she has shown up again in my search. Here we are again, where I have the opportunity but am holding back. I don’t know if it is the fear of getting burned again. I don’t know if it is fear of losing independence. I think it’s me overthinking. I am hoping that I snap out of it, but the irony is that sometimes I think that the thought of a relationship is better than having a relationship.


3. The ice floes on Cape Cod Bay are simply surreal. After the full moon high tide, it seemed like the ocean completely disappeared and left only square miles of gigantic swaths of sea ice. Naturally, I had to be out in it to get some video since I don’t know when they will be this extreme again. The beach I chose in Dennis had the best ice floes. This included chasms and crevices that I could use my selfie stick to get some great perspective shots. Of course, better than lowering my phone down into a crevice was lowering myself into a crevice. I was in ice up to my neck. This was great for getting killer perspective shots. Then reality set in. Getting down there was easy. Getting out? Not so much. I spent a couple of minutes trying to claw my way out of my icy tomb with no luck. The only option for me was, unfortunately, going scorched earth on the ice. I just smashed and stomped the floes until I could climb out. Sorry nature. Hey, I got my photos first, though.

Inside my potential icy tomb.

4. At my work, we have had loads of icicles hanging everywhere. Each day, they seemed to just keep growing and multiplying like they were Gremlins. Sure as time passes though, we finally got temperatures above freezing, which meant it was time for the icicles to start coming down. Luckily, as far as I know, nobody in our building has been struck by falling ice. That’s not to say that there haven’t been any wacky events. I was in our gym leading a potential client through a movement screen. I had my music off, so the room was pretty quiet. Then, out of the blue, we hear a loud crash outside one of the windows. I figured it was icicles. Sure enough, I went over to the window and not only was it one icicle, it was probably 7, all attached into what looked like a set of fangs. These fang-cicles had come down in one clump. They didn’t hit the ground, though. Nope, they struck and got caught on a set of wires. No idea what these wires are for, but they are pretty damaged even though the icicles are not long gone. That’s why they’re the perfect weapon; they melt and leave behind no evidence. Not that I’m suggesting anything.


5. It’s an interesting concept when things start to happen that you’ve wanted to have happen. For so long on social media I’ve been sharing photos, videos, promoting my content I work so hard on. Sure, I’ve done all right, but I had always wondered what it would take to go viral and what would happen. This past week, I had a video of slush waves on Cape Cod go viral on IG and TikTok. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of videos getting thousands, or tens of thousands of views. I’ve added hundreds of new followers to the point where I had to share a video introducing myself to all of these new people. I open up IG or TikTok and feel a bit overwhelmed with all of the likes, comments, views, and followers. The thing is, one of my mantras for 2026, and I mentioned it last month in this blog, was to be open and ready for any good things that might come into my life. I’m not saying that social media clout is the end all be all, it’s not, but having legit hundreds of thousands of strangers enjoying your content is a pretty cool feeling. Maybe it leads nowhere, or maybe I get recommended to someone on social media who becomes the right set of eyes on my work that I am always hoping for.


6. So much of getting interesting photos or videos is being in the right place at the right time. For example, one afternoon this week, I went to shoot the sunset, naturally. I had one place in mind, but on the way pivoted and went to another spot. The place I went to had a beautiful view with a sheet of ice on the water. That wasn’t all. I did a bit of a walk and was able to get a cool video of a plane coming in to land at the nearby airport. As I followed the plane, I was able to immediately pan to the sunset in a great visual. To top it off, when walking back to my car, I noticed that the irrigation system at a summer home was on. It wasn’t a sprinkler, but more like a small geyser gurgling water from the ground. I stopped and waiting and got a great slow-motion video of that with the sunset in the background. All of that happened in 5 minutes. I think making that change of plans paid off.



7. I was down a rabbit hole of the funniest and weirdest dog names recently. I don’t know why, but giving dogs certain human names I find weird. Like a dog named Kevin, or John, or Mark would be weird. It got me thinking of the weirdest dog names I have come across in my actual life. There are two. One, my friend Barry told me about. He had a friend who named his dog ‘Dog.’ The thing was, he pronounced each letter so it sounded like it was ‘diogie,’ D.O.G. His reasoning? Why give a dog a real name if it won’t come when you call it? I guess that makes sense. The topper in my life though, is funny but also pretty mean. In my Nana’s neighborhood, probably 25 years ago, there was an old man who had a mid-sized dog. Its name? Stupid. Yes, he named his dog Stupid. My Nana would always laugh as she said, ‘Here comes Mr. Whoever and Stupid. I always laughed too, but also shook my head. Like, why even bother naming it at all? Just call it A$$hole or Sh!thead or something. Not with the symbols, the real words. I’m trying to at least be PG-13 in this blog.


8. The latest show I finished binging on Netflix is 11.22.63. This is the series based on the Stephen King novel about a man going back in time to try to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is 8 episodes, a total of about 9 hours of content. I highly recommend it. I love well-shot pieces of the not-so-distant past, and the 1960s fit that bill. I won’t spoil much, but the big plot point of the whole series is that the past doesn’t want to be changed, and if you start messing with it, the past will push back. It’s got drama, history, intrigue, love, and because it’s by Stephen King, some good bloody scenes. So there’s my quick pitch for why you should watch 11.22.63 if you haven’t already. As I said, highly recommended.

9. It’s important to be aware of your surroundings if you’re out taking photos of enormous swaths of sea ice on Cape Cod. I have been out nearly every day for the last week or so and have had a few incidents of a lapse in concentration. I have gone down on the ice a few times. Luckily, it was just flat ice near the shore, so just a bump or a bruise. The thing is, sometimes you have a near-miss that really gets your attention. The one for me was at Rock Harbor in Orleans. I was walking on a jetty, shooting a video of the ice that stretched out for thousands of feet. I was careful as I walked out so as not to slip and ruin my video, oh, and hurt myself, of course. When I got done and was standing at the end, I heard a woman talking to her two dogs. I turned to look and stepped down between two rocks on the jetty. Because I had been standing still, it was not a big deal; my foot went straight down, and I was able to brace myself with my hands and climb right back out. I realized after that if I had been moving, or even facing a slightly different direction, I could have easily gotten hurt. It could have been some bad gashes, or worse, a broken leg. So yeah, it’s important to be aware of your surroundings when you wander on ice sheets looking for cool photos.




10. This week’s blog, much like last week’s, is filled a lot with adventures in finding and filming Cape Cod’s ice chunks. Knowing that next week might see a bit of warming, and therefore some melting, I knew I had to get out and grab as much footage as possible. That meant braving wind chills in the low teens to get video at a frozen Sesuit Harbor and Cold Storage Beach, both in Dennis. I brought gloves and left them in my car. The videos and photos were spectacular, but my hands were numb. My buddy Steve went a short way back to the car while I took the long way to grab some more media. While on that walk, I managed to: see a dead bird in a pile of snow, slide on my ass down another pile of snow, become blinded by tears with the wind whipping in my eyes, and of course, the numb hands which made me drop and nearly break my selfie stick. I say all of that to again reiterate that it was all worth it, and the photos and videos prove it.




11. As the weekend approached, my lower back was feeling pretty bad. I mean, who knew that sliding, falling, and generally having poor footing on ice for close to two weeks would have consequences? All of the shooting of the ice floes that I did also meant walking in sneakers on snow and ice. I did my best to be smart and safe, but come on, my buddy Steve and I coined the ‘dedication to the craft’ motto about photography based on my falling on my hip and elbow on the rocks while trying to get a photo of Avery Point Light in Groton, Connecticut. I still got the shot. So it should come as no surprise that even with various aches, the call of photography was too much. I got copious use out of my heating pad and ibuprofen though, as I edited the photos.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #106: Neverending Winter, Going Viral, Being Stubborn, etc.

1. What a whopper of a snowstorm. On Cape Cod, we got around a foot of heavy wet snow, with nearly double that in some places off-Cape. With the way the roads were, I ended up with a day off from work on Monday. Rather than drive the slushy roads to the gym, I used shoveling the snow as a workout. I only had to do half of the driveway, and I ended up burning over 800 calories in more than an hour of shoveling. It was hard work but a lot of fun as I wore my headphones and played music while some flurries fell. Sadly, the weather shows that we won’t be getting much in the way of melting. It’s supposed to be around or below freezing for the next several weeks. Early in the week, it looked like we might be in line for yet another storm. Luckily, it was a bust, and we only got flurries.


2. After the snow ended, it was relatively warm, so I ventured out before dark. I figured run to the store and get home before it was dark and the really cold air returned. While I was driving, I had to avoid a couple of sidewalk snow plows that were taking wide turns into the street. That was fine. On my way home, I started getting a little comfortable. I thought the roads were nice and safe. Then I saw a plow stopped in the middle of the road ahead of me. It turned out that an SUV had rear-ended it. I don’t think it was a case of bad roads. I mean, they were free of any snow, so the plow wasn’t, you know, plowing. I am assuming that the SUV driver was going too fast, rounded a corner, and slammed into the plow, which was going slower. Seeing that immediately made me slow down and just concentrate on getting home in one piece.


3. I swear that if the people who own the building where I work could, they would not do any sort of upkeep during the winter. We have had the plow people ‘not show’ after one storm. Now, this week, it looks like they hired someone who had never driven a plow to push piles of snow all over the employee parking lot. It wasn’t cleared; the snow was just moved to other areas still in the way. Also, their idea of ‘clearing the walkway’ was literally clearing one shovel’s width of snow. I shouldn’t be surprised, I mean, it took them two years to fix our mini split in the gym so we could have consistent heat. At this rate, we’re going to have to park at the beach and get taken via shuttle bus to work. What a joke.


4. Dedication to the Craft. I was asked by a big Boston Instagram account to get a video of the slush waves for a collaboration. They have close to 350K followers, so I thought it was a nice chance to get some exposure. I went in the morning before work. The snow was packed, but as I trudged through it, I started sinking up to my knees. I pressed on and walked until I reached what I thought was about the edge of the water. I started shooting and started feeling my feet getting freezing cold. It turns out I wasn’t at the edge of the water; I was standing ankle deep in slush water. Still, I couldn’t stop until I got an adequate amount of video. After 30 seconds, I was done. My feet were soaked and frozen. My toes were numb for an hour. I got to work and immediately took off my shoes and socks to thaw my feet out. Nothing like walking around barefoot at your job. I legit had to microwave my socks; that was a fun experience. That being said, my Instagram video, I got for the collaboration, as of this writing, has more than 50,000 likes and over 1 MILLION views. It actually went viral, so I’d say it was a fair trade. Here is that video.



5. Finding out I have a bad case of Golfer’s Elbow (Medial Epicondylitis) is good in one sense because I can get some exercises and a brace and hopefully be good as new in a few weeks. It’s bad in another sense because I do not, and have never, played golf. I found out that my case of it is from doing what I’m doing now, writing at my laptop. A funny side note is that on the day I got my official diagnosis from my boss, my 13-year-old client came in to train. He showed me no mercy like he was a sensei at Cobra Kai. He wanted me to throw a 10-pound slam ball as hard as I could at him. I did my best, but he continued to call my attempts weak. I might be almost 50, but being called out still can work. So my elbow was sore after work, but I’ll never let him know.


6. This week I finished binging Cobra Kai on Netflix. For those who don’t know, it is a series based on the Karate Kid original trilogy. It literally has everyone who was in those movies as part of the 6 seasons and 65 episodes. As a fan of the movies, I absolutely loved the series. It’s the perfect mix of action, drama, humor, and heart. I was every bit as invested in this series as I was in Stranger Things. I won’t spoil much, but having finished the main character has to be Johnny Lawrence and his story arc, despite Daniel Larusso being a big part of the series. It has tons of amazing 80s music, which always gets an A in my book. On top of that, there are so many great characters. There are the kids being trained in karate. There are the characters you remember from the movies. There are tons of Easter eggs from the original movies that fans will love picking up on. What I really loved was that, despite there being good and bad people in reality, everybody was a shade of gray. Even the worst villains had things that made you feel for them or even root for them. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a show to get into.

7. I was chatting with one of my clients this week about how it’s been the snowiest winter in years, and I can’t wait for spring. She is heading to Florida for a vacation. I said it was good for her, but that we still had about 7 weeks of winter left. She said, ‘Oh no, actually it’s only 4.’ What? Spring starts on March 20th. According to her logic, it would begin about February 26th. Maybe she doesn’t know the actual first day of spring? She is in her 80s, so maybe she’s just making up her own calendar now? I just smiled and nodded and said goodbye. In my mind, I’m guessing that in those extra 3 weeks she’s lost, we’re going to end up getting at least one major snowstorm because she jinxed it.


8. I was born blond, so sometimes my brain doesn’t work at full power. I had plans one day this week to get done at work and go to the gym to use the treadmill for an hour. On this day, the temperature was in the low 20s, so my motivation to drive 20 minutes and then work out was low. Then it dawned on me. I work in a gym. We were closed, and I had the entire place to myself. I realized I could *gasp* work out there! I simply punched out, changed into my workout gear, and got onto the treadmill. In the time it would have taken me to drive to the gym, I already had put in more than a mile on the treadmill. All jokes aside, I think I choose to go to the gym so that I’m not just hanging around my job after hours. Like when I was a cook, I didn’t want to then change and go sit out front and have dinner. I just wanted to get the F out of there.


9. Over the last few years, I have felt less guilt about not reaching out to people I don’t hear from because communication works both ways. If I’m not reaching out, it also means they’re not. Still, there is an old friend I haven’t spoken to in over 5 years now that has been on my mind a lot recently. We were very similar personality-wise. This could be the best or worst thing. I tended to see a lot of myself in her, and some of her quirks were like holding a mirror up to myself. That can be hard to deal with. One similarity we have is extreme stubbornness. This comes back to the ‘not reaching out’ thing. We had a bit of a falling out. It mostly came down to my alcohol problems. I was not ready to accept my issues and instead cut her off. By the time I got sober, she was ready to move several hundred miles away. We never did reconnect. She also isn’t on any social media. However, I do still have her in my phone. Remember the stubbornness? I just can’t bring myself to text her. I don’t know if she’ll be happy to hear from me, or if she’s held onto the anger at our falling out. Knowing that we are similar, I think of what I would do. I honestly don’t know if I’d be happy or if I’d immediately go back into the last argument we had. So for now, I’ll share a few cryptic posts, hoping that another friend of hers will see and mention it to her. I thought I had left that stuff back in 2013.


10. When slush waves arrive in winter, it can’t be long until the icebergs return as well. It has been well below average temperature-wise on Cape Cod in the last month. We routinely have highs stuck in the low 20s or worse. On a day this week with highs in the mid-teens and a wind chill hovering around zero, I took a ride. I stopped at a popular photography spot, Bass Hole. It is on Cape Cod Bay, and sure enough, it was totally iced over. It looked, and felt, like I was standing on Antarctica. I lasted 5 minutes in the cold before tapping out. As much as I can’t wait until spring arrives, in 7 weeks, remember, I am glad I got these photos. You can actually feel the cold through them. Side note, it took close to 10 minutes for the tips of my fingers to get their feeling back.

11. The frozen over Cape Cod Bay has been a goldmine as far as photos and videos go. The last trip out this week was to Rock Harbor, which is a part of both Orleans and Eastham. I knew it would be a vast sea of icebergs. The issues had to do with the deep snow and ice. I wore sneakers, which work well on stable ground, ice not so much. The snow was playing jokes. I was walking on it, and it held just long enough for me to think it was solid, only to sink in up to my knees. It made it hard to walk out and back from my car. I also had a few fun times on the ice. I went down a couple of times, including a nice bruise on my right shin. My hands were pretty frozen as well. Despite it sounding like I hated my time out there, I loved every second of it, especially when I looked over the photos. Still can’t wait for spring though.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #105: Best Workout, Northern Lights 3, Snowpocalypse, etc.

1. I ended up being right. Where I am on Cape Cod got between 3-4” of heavy wet snow that was like cement. I didn’t feel like going to the gym, so I took this as an opportunity to burn some calories by shoveling the driveway. I made sure to turn on my Fitbit for a workout before starting. It turns out shoveling the snow was my best workout all week. I burned 440 calories in 40 minutes while shoveling. I was totally wiped out after. In all honesty, I probably didn’t need to shovel. It got up to 36 degrees, and the sun poked out, so we got a bit of melting. Still, I loved being able to get a great cardio and strength workout without having to go to the gym.


2. For the third time in 15 months, I was able to see and photograph the Aurora Borealis on Cape Cod. It started off cloudy. I wasn’t feeling good about seeing anything, so I decided to go out early, about an hour after sunset. Checking the radar, I saw clouds moving east, so I drove west. I got to Barnstable and found a great location called Scudder’s Landing. What made it great, besides the fact that nobody else was there, was the fact that there was no lighting to ruin the photos. I immediately got several amazing photos and was able to get creative with the shots since there was nobody around.

I will never get tired of this.

3. Since I was already out and about for the Northern Lights, I mapped out a few locations I wanted to shoot. One was the popular Sandwich Boardwalk. I hadn’t been there in several years, since a disastrous first date that we will move on from. I got there, and it was dark and cold, but the wind had picked up. I was using my selfie stick as a tripod, which works great when there is little to no wind. In the breeze, though, it made it almost impossible to get any good photos that weren’t blurry. I did my best. The highlight, or lowlight, was a group of several people who sounded like they were around 60. As I was staging photos, I could hear one of the men whining about the temperature and asking why they ‘don’t have Northern Lights in the summer.’ I would have mentioned that the Aurora happens all the time regardless of the season, but this guy sounded like he has enough trouble with 2+2 being 4, so I packed up my gear and moved to another location.

More muted colors at the boardwalk.

4. When is the right time to take down your Christmas decorations? I know some people have everything down by sunset on Christmas Day. Then others keep everything up until their tree begins to decompose. We are currently a month out from Christmas, and my decorations are still up. I don’t plan on having people over to judge me if my decorations stay up well into February, but there has to be a cutoff date, right? I mean, I don’t want to be tripping over Christmas stuff when putting my A/C unit in. Then again, my Halloween pumpkin is still going strong 3 months after I got it, so I might not have the best judgment when it comes to moving on. By the way, the pumpkin will likely survive well into spring and then be destroyed in spectacular fashion. Stay tuned for that.


5. In classic fashion, it is time for another New England winter storm in time for the weekend. I say ‘classic fashion’ because, as of several days out, it was reported that we on Cape Cod could get anywhere from a few inches to well over a foot. Not only that, but depending on where you went for your forecast, the amounts shifted drastically. The Accuweather app said 3-6”, which is no big deal. Weather Underground said 12”, which is a much different story. The snow won’t hit us until this blog has been posted, so I guess this is an unintentional teaser for next week’s blog. How much snow will we get, and how many calories will I burn shoveling? Stay tuned.


6. I’ve been through tons of major snowstorms in my life growing up in New England. One thing I’ve never understood is the ‘essentials’ that people are supposed to get at the store in anticipation. Bread I get, but eggs and milk? If power goes out, what the hell is the point of having eggs? You gonna eat them raw like Rocky did? Anytime I anticipate being stuck inside for an extended period, I look at getting water, bread, peanut butter, and jelly, maybe single-serve protein shakes. Things that don’t need power to be consumed. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. How many of you out there rush to the store for eggs before a snowstorm? I have never done it and am pretty sure I never will.


7. Maybe I’m now officially the old man, but I feel like a big reason why people seem disconnected these days is the fact that everyone wears headphones everywhere they go. I see way too many people inside stores with earbuds in. It’s your life, do what you want, but the fact that people go out into public and just have others tuned out is kind of stupid. What if some sweet old lady needed help getting something off a shelf, but you don’t hear because you can’t disconnect from your headphones for two friggin’ seconds? This week, I saw a scummy-looking kid walking down the aisles at a supermarket, earbuds in, singing a foul-mouthed song. There could be little kids around, and they have to hear that crap from some dirtbag? Like I said, maybe I’m the old man now, but it’s just a bad sign of society. Oh, and it’s not all young people, I see people older than me doing the same thing, so it’s everybody.


8. It’s amazing the things you remember from your childhood. There are certain phrases, lyrics, or orders of words that are embedded in your brain. Sometimes you have no idea what they are, what they mean, or even how they got there. Quick story time. I have a vague memory from the bygone days of the mid-1980s. It revolves around two children’s songs back to back, Bingo and Little Dutch Girl. One I know, the other song I have no idea how I know. For some reason, when I think of Bingo, Little Dutch Girl follows close behind. I figured it had to be from a commercial I had seen when I was a kid. While stuck inside during the winter storm, I decided to do a little internet detective work. I quite literally typed in ‘Bingo, Little Dutch Girl, children’s songs, commercial.’ Lo and behold, I found the answer to my 40-year-old earworm. It is an album called Children’s Favorites, released in 1978 and recorded by some group called The Jingleheimers. I found the commercial, and when I watched it felt like an old door was being unlocked in my memory. No, I’m not going to order that album for my collection, although it says there’s an 8-track which might be cool. I do enjoy the fact that even all of these years later, I can solve mysteries that my memory has been hiding for 40 years.




9. When I am not at my day job, on the clock getting paid, I do not think about it. I have many other projects that take up much of my free time. I am also not a paramedic, or some other job where I am on call sometimes 24/7. That means if I am not inside the walls of my job, therefore not getting paid by it, I don’t want to be sent work-related messages. It’s a boundary I need to set and enforce in 2026. Seriously, my free time is mine, not an opportunity to have some unimportant work stuff sent to me.


10. We had the coldest day in a few years this week. The wind chill was down around -15 on Cape Cod, and even lower off-Cape. I stayed inside as long as possible. Eventually, I got the courage to venture out. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. The wind died out, and so the 16 degrees felt downright balmy compared to what I was expecting. I went on the hunt for slush waves, which happen at the ocean when it’s been particularly cold. Sadly, I guess it hadn’t been cold long enough because the ocean was just as it always was. I was actually a bit disappointed. Then I saw that the temperatures are going to be at or below freezing for the next few weeks. I feel like I’ll have slush wave overload by the time February is over.


11. The flakes started flying by 10am on Sunday as the biggest snowstorm in 4 years hit New England. It was too cold to go for a morning walk before the snow started, so I hit the gym. Unfortunately for me, so did everyone else within a 10-mile radius. The gym was set to close at 11am, so everyone got in their workouts. It was so cold, about 20 degrees, that I wore track pants to the gym instead of shorts. That’s a rarer occurrence than seeing a four-leaf clover. 


12. The New England Patriots are going back to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2018. They beat the Denver Broncos in a wild AFC Championship Game 10-7. Drake Maye actually did something Tom Brady never did, and that was win a playoff game in Denver. The weather was crazy. Sunny to start and then a blizzard by the end. The snow was so bad that the announcers weren’t even sure where the ball was on the field. The Patriots’ white uniforms might have actually helped them since Jarrett Stidham, Denver’s quarterback (their backup), threw an interception late, and who knows if he could even see the defense. Now we wait to see if it’s the Los Angeles Rams or the Seattle Seahawks. Ironically, the Patriots have beaten both teams in the Super Bowl, so either team would be looking for some revenge. Either way, this feels like the beginning of another long run of high-level play from the Patriots after a few years of retooling.




13. I’m finishing this blog at 7pm on Sunday night so I can get it up for my usual Monday morning. As we speak, there is likely about 8-9” of snow on the ground. I was out helping do a little preventative maintenance shoveling at 5pm, and we had close to 6” then. Luckily, it was light and fluffy, but I still burned 100 calories in 15 minutes of shoveling. Cape Cod is supposed to get a mix with rain overnight, meaning the snow will get heavy and wet. Shoveling will be a load of fun on my back. I have already been given a snow day at work since I have a sedan with front-wheel drive. I love my car, but it doesn’t do well in more than 3” of snow. 53 more days until spring.