peterography

We haven’t had any real rain in so long that whatever reserve of moisture the soil once had is gone. Every day I pour water directly from the hose, sans nozzle, onto the soil around my squash and tomatoes for a long time and the ground just drinks it in until it disappears. For awhile my plants perk up, but the next day they’re folded and limp again. I’m probably violating the local watering ordinance but what can I do? All the towns around here have tightened up -here we can water lawns 3 hours a day, every other day. Other towns have banned watering entirely.

The rest of my life has been dry, too - no new poems or paintings, no shoots scheduled - I miss my models - and at work I got a new computer before my Bermuda vacation and it still isn’t entirely configured! I went to work on Sunday of the long, Labor Day weekend to try to get some work done and got messages about missing libraries in our software development environment when I tried to build. I work for a Famous Huge International Corporation that You’ve Heard Of, and I cannot understand why even the simplest things are so long and complicated. At home I use essentially the same software development tools as at work and when I buy a new PC I’m up and running in a few hours.

My one big accomplishment in the last few days was finally launching my new music blog: Music4Peter. Music4Peter will cover all my musical interests - from concert reviews to technology to the music business, and unlike the little personal blog you’re reading now, I’m hoping to generate some real traffic on it.

One of my first entries was a review of the Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert my wife and I attended in Lowell on Friday night. Outstanding. Read about it in my blog.

Today we went to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich and stayed there until the sun set, turning the sand and water into ever deeper shades of gold and orange. Afterwards we ate lobster at Woodman’s, a local establishment that for years has maintained legendary status among fried clam and lobster lovers. People drive in from surrounding states and stand in line for an hour for the privilege of eating there, but I don’t get it: my lobster tonight was good, but no better than what I could make at home by tossing one in a pot. The cole slaw was above average; the clam chowder was below average - milky, not creamy. Everything is served in cardboard and styrofoam containers under conditions I would generously characterize as Spartan.

But the worst thing about Woodman’s is its sheer chaos - you place your order and collect your soup and sides at one counter; the lobster is purchased in a separate transaction in a different spot and if you want a beer you buy that in a third place. And it has to be the right third place because if you want to eat upstairs you can’t buy the beer downstairs.  The stairs are on the outside of the building and you can’t take a beer outside in that town, so they have an upstairs bar and a downstairs one and big signs warning you about this. My wife and I bought our drinks downstairs took them upstairs and somehow managed to avoid arrest.  Assembling a meal at Woodman’s is like a Dungeons and Dragons game where you wander about a maze of twisty little passages collecting bits of treasure and avoiding danger. But the treasure at Woodman’s wasn’t valuable enough to make the quest worthwhile.