I WAS IN MAINE

Cadillac Mtn

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 4 likes

I had a whole entry going about the deliciousness of fried clams, but I never got a chance to finish it and post it and it seems a little outdated now. Let's just say if your only experience with fried clams is the Long John Silver's experience, you need to get your butt to Maine. LJS is really serving you fried rubber bands. Then I started a new post about driving to the middle of Maine in search of moose and how we ended up at a divey motor lodge (Moosehead Motor Lodge, to be exact) outside of a teeny town called Dexton. It was snowing and we never saw a moose. That post didn't really get finished either because I fell asleep. The next day we drove to Augusta and then on into Portland to eat one more lobster before boarding flights to home. 

As per usual, Talaura and I managed to pack in a whole lot of sight seeing in a very short amount of time. We saw all of Acadia National Park including a sunrise on Cadillac Mountain (the first place the sun hits the US in the mornings). We saw a little bit of Roosevelt Campobello International Park. They are still closed for the season. We did manage to catch one of the rangers to ask a few questions and he kindly let us in to stamp our National Parks passports though. We saw lighthouses. There was one in Canada that you can only get to when the tide is very low. It's sister lighthouse on the American side is the Pete's Dragon lighthouse, safely guiding ships into the Passamaquoddy Bay. It was also closed for the season, but we still managed to walk around and take pictures. 

It was the farthest East I had ever been and the farthest North I had ever been. I had never been to Canada before either. Truly, we couldn't have gone any more east and still be in the continental US. The Pete's dragon lighthouse, Quoddy Head Lighthouse, is the Eastern most point in the US. Talaura and I are on a roll. Two years ago, we stood in the geographic center of the continental US. I think we need to go to Alaska next for several reasons: to stand in the farthest North spot in the US and the most Western spot in the US (I think), but also to see a dang moose (I don't believe they exist). In fact, our wildlife list for this trip seems a little short. We saw a dozen or so deer and some Eider ducks who nearly killed Talaura because we climbed out onto rocks we probably shouldn't have climbed out on to see them. We saw squirrels and chipmunks and grouse and sand pipers and gulls. We also saw plenty of roadkill porcupines and figured that the porcupine is Maine's armadillo. Again, I repeat, we did not see a moose. Because they're not real.

Here are some pictures in no particular order! Enjoy.

THIS IS HAPPENING

I caught a fairy

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 1 like

I woke up Sunday morning and turned on the TV for CBS Sunday Morning and got nothing. I down graded our cable plan weeks ago to just high speed internet. We knew this was coming, but I just didn't think it would be so sudden and dramatic. We have to hook up an antenna to get the local TV channels. In the meantime, I ended up watching CBS Sunday Morning through the CBS News app on the Roku. When the show ended, I sat on the couch with my coffee mug and thought "now what do I do?" Turns out I've been devoting a lot of my Sundays mindless watching crap on TV and when I no longer had over three hundred channels to scroll through, I didn't know what to do with myself. 

I really have to pack. I've really done nothing but clean the trash out of my backpack and I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Cold Spring Harbor to attend a conference on nuclear organization and function. I keep saying this to myself over and over because I think that maybe if I say it enough times I'll actually be smart enough to attend this conference. I am feeling intimidated by my conference selection. Then I remind myself that I am not presenting a talk or a poster. My whole job is to go and learn. Relax and learn! That's really about all I can do. It's in a pretty isolated area and is very much a sleep, eat, conference kind of conference. I'm still a little anxious about it and I am having a hard time planning out my wardrobe because I don't understand weather. But also because I'm not just packing for this conference. 

I am also packing for a few days in Maine. Friday morning, I'll leave from the conference to meet Talaura at JFK . From there, we'll fly to Portland Maine where we plan on Thelma and Louise-ing (minus the dramatic suicide) up the Maine coast. My goal is to eat a scallop the size of my hand and take some pretty pictures. Maybe I'll work on acquiring a Maine accent. It's moose season, so I'm expecting to see a moose and I might even step into Canada. I've packed my passport. Hey! That's one thing I've packed. I'm still trying to figure out how to pack shoes or what shoes to even pack. 

I don't really know what if anything is going to happen in this space this week. I may get a chance to tell you about the AIDS Walk and how it rained like usual, but then the sun came out just as we all started to walk. I may mention something about how we had to pick something we all wanted to watch from Netflix and the Cabbage saw the Anamaniacs and said "Oh, I love the Anamaniacs!" This is probably my most favorite thing she's said in forever. I don't know. I don't know if any of those things will get blogged about. It all depends on free time and brain power. I just thought I'd give everyone a heads up in case a week goes by without me posting here and the few readers I have get all worried about me. Don't worry about me.