FYI: Santa will arrive in Rockport Harbor this Saturday December 3rd aboard the Freemantle Doctor promptly at 3:45PM with a Dock Square tree lighting at 4PM. Don’t miss the hot chocolate with marshmallows and cookies.
Author: paultmorrison
A Sunny Sunday Morning on Cape Ann
but it was foggy in Lanes Cove. High tide too.
FYI: Santa will arrive in Rockport this Saturday December 3rd aboard the Freemantle Doctor promptly at 3:45PM with a Dock Square tree lighting at 4PM. Don’t miss the hot chocolate with marshmallows and cookies.
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Rubber Duck Hanging Out With a Lanes Cove Sparrow!
“You’re not from around here are you?”
“Homie heard about you hanging out with a sparrow.”
“Funny joke sparrow, but you rushed the punchline.”
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Dangers of Breakfast with Joey
Great fun had by all at breakfast this morning and I was able to get a Richard Belzer punchline out without any of the other tables hearing. But back to the Dangers of Breakfast with Joey. He insists on taking a photo of all plates especially at Passports where everything looks yummy. The trick is to just stick a fork in it and give a stir and he’ll bail on your messy plate. Pictured is a lovely Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon in danger of becoming cold before Joey brackets it with several exposures. Nice to also see the boss keeps his nails clean and doesn’t chew them. You can check his cute cuticles by clicking on the photo.
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Sunrise this morning with 3 lighthouses
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The Morning After
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OK, I’ll show my turkey but
first I gotta explain. We put the Morrison flag motto out on the pole first:
So we need to bone two 16 pound turkeys (except for legs and wings) then they sort of intertwine in a kind of 69 and voila, choice and tasty”
(Note the little red pop up timers not popped up because when they pop it means your turkey is overcooked. Also, that plate is three feet long. ) The stuffing in a a huge crockpot and the gravy from the stock of the bones from the day before. The rest of the horde brings something and I think I may pop but maybe just one more slice of pumpkin pie. My favorite part of Thanksgiving, leftovers. The lobster was gone way before the birds hit the table.
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Thanksgiving Sunrise
Sunrise over the Rockport breakwater this morning. The one time I wish I had a video camera. The sunbeam started over on the left then tracked like an enormous searchlight across the Dry Salvages before lighting up the Straitsmouth Lighthouse.
Click on the photo to go to a G+ album with the Rubber Duck contemplating a wave before overeating on Thanksgiving and another wave off Andrews Point. (Clicking into the album also gets you the bigger photos.)
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Rubber Duck and Homie Offspring
Looks like a standard Mendelian trait of incomplete dominance of the rubber gene.
Proud parents:
Woops, almost forgot the one ugly duckling who may grow up to be 100% Homie:
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What is Happening Today in Gloucester?
I’m heading out the door to the dump and shopping. But I want to go to the Farmer’s Market and something else Joey posted that was happening today. Why doesn’t Joey have a calendar I can go to? But then I can already hear his response, “Use the search!”
But search for what? And then the dim lightbulb goes off! Search for “19th”. Check it out:
https://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/?s=19th
Look at that! A long list of Christmas Fairs. Shoot I’m missing the cleanup at Burnham’s Field breakfast. Gotta go.
[ps edit] And on tomorrow the 20th, guess what works?
https://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/?s=20th
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Today the Moon does not rise!
Weather Underground says the moon will not rise today:
But not to panic. The “last quarter” moon rose last night just before midnight. 11:47 PM to be precise. At 11:55 PM over the Rockport breakwater it looked like this:
The moon will not rise again until just after midnight tonight or 12:57 Sunday so there will be no “rising” on Saturday.
The quarter moon looks exactly like half a moon. It’s just a quarter of the cycle to new moon. If it stays clear you can see it set at lunch around 12:40PM but if you really want to watch it set get a bead on it about 30 minutes before setting as it will get pretty faint in the noon day sun as it fades into the haze on the horizon. If you’re logging in to GMG at sunrise just look up. The moon will be as high as it gets and a bit to the south.
Rubber Duck Fun Fact: The moon was a waxing gibbous moon until last night and now it is a waxing crescent.
Rubber Duck Fun Fact II: If we were standing on the moon where Neil Armstrong stepped out of the LEM right now we would have watched the sunset over the last day or so and the earth would look like just like the moon does right now except quite a bit bigger and very blue.
[morning edit] I was sleepy when I posted the photo and did not really look at it so possibly a small explanation:
It was kind of cold and my manual settings for shooting were a tad rushed so I shot a half dozen at different shutter speeds 2,4,8,15,30 seconds on a tiny tripod and went home to photoshop. In order to get some foreground I shot out of the little chasm to the left of Angle Point. I didn’t notice until this morning that the rocks did show up in the photo. The reason for that is I took two photos, a long and a short exposure and layered them together to try to get a decent photo out of crap. The wicked over exposed one I put on top and then just erased the overexposed moon so the the underexposed moon would come through from below.
That explanation does not explain much does it? Maybe I need more coffee.
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Rockport to be visited by Santa on Saturday December 3
As an annual tradition dating back centuries Santa Claus rides into Rockport Harbor on a fishing boat and then makes his way to Dock Square to light the tree.
Get it on your calendar; Saturday, December 3PM. Santa arrives at 3:45PM and the tree lighting is at 4PM.
Last year’s tree:
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Rubber Duck hits the town with summer in November
70F in Boston so the Rubber Duck and her new friend the Devil Duck hit the big city. Getting thirsty, they stop by the fountain at the Christian Science Center for a sip.
Next stop the Mapparium and then Devil Duck wants to make a phone call To Mary Baker Eddy! Bad Duck.
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Close Encounter of an Asteroid with Cape Ann Tonight!
No panic in the streets. I’ve read the articles in thousands of kilometers and they don’t have a good way of explaining how close the asteroid 2005 YU55 will get to earth tonight.
But I will translate: Take your standard 24 foot Aquasport outboard sitting in the harbor. Put an NBA basketball on the top of the bow cleat of the boat and balance a tennis ball on the engine cover of the Mercury outboard. The basketball is the earth and the tennis ball 24 feet away is the moon. The asteroid is going to come screaming in at 34,900 miles per hour in between the moon and earth. But where in relation to the boat? A little less than 4 feet from the tennis ball balancing on the motor. The basketball (earth) will be safe and sound way up on the bow.
You could actually see it and if you have a six inch mirror or larger on your telescope it might be worth googling Asteroid 2005 YU55 to find where to look. But the aircraft carrier sized rock will be somewhat underwhelming as it spins past us tonight.
With it’s size and speed, this asteroid would make a crater on earth 4 miles across, 1,700 feet deep and create a magnitude 7 earthquake. Unpleasant if it was going to land in Dogtown, but not tonight.
Well, shoot, all that yammering and 2005 YU55 wiki page has a picture that really shows how close:
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Waxing Gibbous Moon rose 2:15 PM today
2:15 PM this afternoon a waxing gibbous moon should have popped up just to the left of the Rockport breakwater in the photo. I got to chatting with some Brit geocachers at the end of the Pigeon Cove breakwater I was standing on and complained that my moon had not shown up. Maybe I screwed up the time change? Nope. Twenty minutes later it arrived out of barely visible haze. It’s directly even with the bow of the boat and about a boat length from the horizon. The color is all weird because I had to adjust the crap out of the saturation and temperature in iPhoto to even get it to show up.
I told the Brits when they were getting warmer on the geocache and they too found what they were looking for. I’ll try again closer to a full moon so the sun is not bleaching the moon out. Rubber Duck stayed home to finish off Fred Bodin’s pickled herring. I’m trying out a handfull of EJ’s Canadian Bacon leftover from the deviled eggs mixed with Beth’s chocolate covered pomegranate seeds. Wowiekaflowie that’s a tasty combo. Huge bennies throwing the Mug-Up today. Clean house and all the leftovers are mine mine mine.
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Rubber Duck says: Make it fall
Sick of these green trees? Want everything to be Rubber Duck orange like fall is supposed to be? Just crank the “temp”.
Much better.
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Mug-Up Sunday 10AM Returns
70 Phillips Ave (corner of Phillips and Haven Ave) in Rockport. Sunday 10am-noon. Don’t be a Homie and stay home with a chunk of herring. Gather with the FOBs of GMG for the really maybe the last Mug-Up of the year.
Rubber Duck has already got the fire going, set the clocks back and is dreaming of some cheesy sweet pastry that someone is creating in the kitchen tonight. With or without something under your wing, stop on by.
January 1 when crazy people go for a swim is a Sunday! Sounds like a good Sunday Mug-Up is needed.
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Last Mug-Up this Sunday in Rockport
Or maybe it’s not the last mug up but at least one more is happening this weekend.
Sunday, Nov 6, 10AM to Noon, Rubber Duck’s House, 70 Phillips Avenue, Rockport. Do you miss mug-up? Miss no more. Just go to the furthest place away from the last mug-up at Madfish Pier while staying on Cape Ann and you found the right place near Andrews Point. Park under the Santa locked in the attic of the old red house.
EJ has already promised her award winning deviled eggs, everything else in this photo you need to bring except for the coffee. (But think pre-holidays diet.)
Rubber Duck will be showing off her new wood burning stove installed in her shop that she just bought from Bob at Cape Ann Chimney and Hearth along with a free one ton of BioBricks. Hot Coffee, toasty wood fire, stop on by. EJ also said she might make Paul F’s Pillsbury doughboy meat pies. Top that! All friends of GMG invited.
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Sunrise an hour ago
Find Rubber Duck
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Lobster Diavolo on a dark and stormy night …
Yesterday Joey doesn’t tell me it’s his birthday (like I would be able to spank him 24 times) but he does tell me he has a hankering for lobster diavolo. Once described I grab some lobsters and head back to the homestead. I figured if I said “honey, I’m making lobster diavolo”, I could chop up the lobsters but by the time I get to throwing them in the dutch oven someone would take charge. But it was all, “that’s great I’ll just have a glass of red wine and not even watch.”
Yikes, I gotta do it all by myself? A search of GMG and I have the recipe. Basil, parsley and the hot dried red peppers out of the garden. If I do say so myself, it came out pretty tasty.
Click the photo for more photos of a wave an hour ago, a grabbo dike pointing right at the North Tower on Thacher, Shalin Lui in the background, and Rockport harbormasters Scott and Rosemary coming back from an emergency run off Halibut Point. Rubber Duck stayed home.
Good Morning Gloucester 