Nancy spotted a gem on the
discount table outside Books on the Square on Saturday,
the proceedings from a 1998 conference on seahorse
husbandry. When she went in and purchased it, the cashier
said she was the second person that day to describe it as
a gem. Apparently someone had ordered a bunch of them
back in 1998 and never returned to pick them up. Why they
waited until 2004 to put them on the discount table may
never be explained.
While Nancy was mining the gems of
Wayland Square, I was at the new visitor center at Parker
River National Wildlife Refuge for this season's plover
warden orientation. While, as you might guess, I can
accurately and passionately describe the life cycle of
the piping plover and why keeping people off the beach is
important in my sleep, this training was a must for two
reasons: the new visitor center and the radios.
For a few years now, the new
visitor center has been going to be open "next year".
"Next year" is finally almost here. Really. The building
is no longer swathed in blue tarps and was quite useable
for the training. It's big. Spacious. Worthy of PRNWR.
Big. Did I mention big?
Oh, and radios. Plover wardens are
nothing without radios. Besides communication with the
gatehouse and law enforcement, radios are useful as
badges of authority - they make you look official -
and as
weapons when you need to
threaten someone who is threatening you, which doesn't
really happen anymore as the general attitude of
beachgoers toward the piping plover, the beach closure,
and the plover wardens is infinitely more positive
nowadays than in 1996 when I started. So these new
high-tech radios with too many buttons but way better
signals came on the scene since the last time I did the
plover warden thing in 2001 (I took a year off to work at
Starship Startup and then involuntarily took last year
off because I couldn't lift my binoculars 'cause of the
rotator cuff thing.) So now I know how to use the new
radios for communication. There's no change in how to use
them to make you look offical or to threaten people with
them.
After the training, I headed to
Middle Street Foods for the coffee formerly known as
Fowle's. Somehow this ended up involving a long browse at
Jabberwocky first and I ended up with two new books:
My Famous Evening and The Big Year. In a
way, both are about birding, though My Famous
Evening is billed as a travel book about Nova Scotia.
More about these at some later point. I did get the
coffee, had lunch, and got home all before the time I
would normally get myself out of the house on a Saturday.
Still not satisfied at having packed an entire week's
worth of activity into one day, I plied Nancy with
bowlfuls of my fabulous vegetarian version of Portuguese
kale soup and we read aloud from the seahorse conference
proceedings, treating the panel discussions much the same
way we've been reading Japanese puppet plays. It works.
Trust me. Great lines too, like "seahorse taxonomy is is
chaos!"
Today's expedition to Arlington for
the Lumen Contemporary Music Ensemble concert
added even more activity to the weekend. Apparently I'm
over my "I never go out" phase. Featuring works for two
marimbas (you don't get to hear that every day),
including one by former Cosmodemonic Telecomm colleague
Stu
Jones, for this awesome
percussion duo Double
Play , it was an afternoon
of really excellent brand new sounds. I like new sounds.
Nancy used to dislike these concerts but has come to
appreciate them and really liked today's concert a lot.
The composers have all matured and are truly composing
for themselves and not for their academic colleagues. I
left the post-concert reception still on a high from the
music.
And so new radios and new music and
seahorse taxonomy have taken over for war, famine,
pestilence, and death in the brain blender
today.
