Maine Missives

I almost feel a kind of Catholic guilt as I confess I have been a bit remiss in not blogging about my trip to Maine play by play, but then again I WAS to busy having fun. And as some of that fun is none of your damn business I will only focus on the highlights in no specific order: seeing Heather again, Rosemary Lamb, lots of laughter, practicing Akiedo, swing dancing and waltzing in quick succession...

A walk with Chance (Heather's dog) through a graveyard which turned into a river trail whose end was fortified with what looks like tank traps.

The mighty Lewiston upper falls were once used for water power but not any more...

The original turbines still sit, a bit forlorn really, outside of the boarded up building it use to power.

Homemade sushi lovingly made and consumed with gluttony (and of course all her rolls turned out perfectly, beginner's luck I say) with Eddie Izzard stand-up on the Laptop...

Driving through the Maine outback and roughing it through roads covered with snow thanks to a sure-footed Subaru until the snow deepened to about a foot deep and we could not continue on...

The alternate roads we took lead us through this beautiful landscape...

And finally to this gorge where the only thought that kept going through my mind was how damn cold the water looked...

And this is a watercolor of a set of Oxbows I did for an empty frame that demanded something fill them...

I returned to Pittsburgh this morning. At 5AM I sat the Portland Airport waiting for an hour past our scheduled departure as they got my plane ready after a delay due to an ominous sounding "computer error." I watched with amusement as a soda vending machine started spitting quarter at a lady who was just trying to buy a soda (around maybe $8 worth or so). The closest thing to Vegas Slot in Portland, and given the hour delay for my flight, the only lucky part of it.

There was an iconographic moment in the bus ride home from the Pittsburgh Airport. Right before you get to downtown there is a 150 foot tall cliff on the riverbank, and as I peered into the bare trees I saw two thing, one was a pile of trash common to a homeless squatting area, and in the middle of it like a king presiding over an empty court, a huge turkey with his tail feathers on display. On the side of a cliff. 300 yards from downtown. Stock-still.

It only can get stranger from there.