The People in the Computer Box

Since our whale watch was canceled, Geoff and I spent the afternoon just wandering around Gloucester, admiring the buildings and looking out to sea. ( Wanna hear about it? )

Now we're home and up to our eyebrows in work again. Except that I slept until almost eleven on our first morning home (with chemical aid; I can't sleep that well on my own, dammit, which is why I occasionally need to take some Benadryl and crash for ten or eleven hours!). Now I'm trying to work on four rites of passage simultaneously without getting them confused, and also figure out what I'm going to do for dinner tonight; we have Geoff's son here and probably also his mom as well. (Geoff's mom, not Geoff's son's mom.) Given how little I'm in the mood to cook at the moment, I may end up making my famous phone call to the Chinese place ("Xander, does your family even own a stove?").

Despite the 80%-chance-of-rain forecast yesterday, it turned out to be gloriously sunny and in the high 70s; we spent the day walking around Halibut Point State Park and downtown Gloucester, and I kept shedding layers of clothing every couple of hours. This morning I have a nice little triangle of color under my chin where my V-neck shirt was open, with a white circle in the middle of it from my necklace *g*. Halibut Point SP (which is not named after a fish; it was originally "haul about," for the maneuver that ships had to perform off the point) was lovely; it has a huge ex-quarry that is now a beautiful water hole, with plenty of ducks, and rocky seashore that we clambered along. There were a few other people there, enough for me to feel that we were part of a community of people enjoying the land and wishing each other well, smiling and greeting one another when we encountered each other along the paths, but few enough that it was quiet and solitary (and I could change shirts a few steps off the path, behind a big boulder).

Then we went into Gloucester, had a nice lunch at a pub, and walked around for a few more hours, looking at buildings and reading historical plaques and admiring the Fisherman's Memorial, which, as well as the famous statue, has plaques listing every fisherman lost at sea since records begin in the early 1600s. Toward the end of the day we wandered down a pier (working fishing piers are intriguingly stinky) and into a two-room museum-cum-hoarder's-den called the Diving Locker, where the elderly enthusiast running it startled out of a doze when we came into the second room where he was ensconced, and he happily told us story after story after story about deep-sea diving, and challenged us to name the three kinds of diving suits (dry, wet, and hot) and showed us various items salvaged from wrecks and a styrofoam cup that had been taken to the depths and exposed to pressure that crunched it to a fifth its original size (no longer styroFOAM, now solid styro!), and ignored the first several "it was so nice talking with you, thanks for your time!" conversational hints, but it was really interesting to listen to his stories, even if not for quite as long as he would have been happy to tell them.

After a brief rest in our B&B, we went back to Gloucester for a fabulously yummy dinner at a Mexican restaurant my stepmother had recommended. (She and my father came to Cape Ann many times and really loved it; she's nowhere near ready to go back herself, but was thrilled to recommend things to us -- including our B&B, several restaurants, Halibut Point State Park, and the whale watch company.) Geoff and I split salmon in an apricot-chipotle sauce (I seriously need to find a recipe for that, because it was amazing) and pay azteca, chicken and veggies and cheese and corn tortillas in tomatillo sauce (which was also wonderful), and also there was a pint of local brew and a blue agave margarita.

Today our whale watch is canceled on account of high seas and dense fog, so right now I'm blogging and Geoff is napping, and in a little while we'll make some plans. Apparently the Gloucester city hall has interesting WPA murals, so maybe we'll go take a look. It seemed to be clearing earlier this morning, but now the fog has definitely rolled in.