Hello again y’all, and welcome to the second half of my second stint of… Eh, you know what I mean. For those that are curious, Robbyn and her father will be in Funchal, Madeira tomorrow, then will arrive in Lisbon on Saturday. Everything is apparently going well and she’s having a pretty good time on her trip.

I found myself somewhat short of ideas on what to bore y’all with for this edition of And Now For Something Completely Different, so I’m kind of winging it. What I decided to do was go out for a walk, take pics of whatever I saw that was interesting, and then bore y’all with those. Am I diabolical, or what?

I grew up in Southern California where anything built before the 1950s was considered “old”, and the closest really old building was 200 miles away at San Juan Capistrano. Things are quite a lot different out here in New England, where you can hardly throw a rock and not hit a building that isn’t, at least by my standards (I can hear any Europeans reading this snigger now!), older than dirt.

This old Victorian place is probably at least 100 years old, if not a lot more. I just love the look of places like this. As they say, they don’t build ‘em like they used to.

I really like this place as well, it’s almost built like a castle. Bummer I couldn’t find an angle that didn’t include a bunch of power lines.

A nice place, but I really have to wonder… What in god’s name were they thinking when they picked that colour?

This house always reminds me of a ship. A lot of houses around here are kind of designed like this, real narrow and long, but this is one of the more extreme ones.

This is Coburn Hall at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. My understanding is that this originally was the school and it just expanded from there.

There are squirrels all over the UMass Lowell campus, there’s tons of them and since they’re used to students constantly walking by they really don’t pay much attention to humans. This one was apparently trying to figure out what in the world I was doing, he eventually decided to ignore me and go about his business. Which mostly seemed to consist of trying to dig up nuts that he or one of his compatriots had buried.

I know at least one reader of this ‘blog is a fan of squirrel pics, so here’s a few more. If you click on the thumbnail you’ll get a bigger image in a new window.

The Merrimack river is just across the street from the UMass Lowell South Campus. I have no idea what kind of bird this was, this was about as close as he’d let me get (and this pic was taken at extreme zoom at that), but he was singing up a storm just happy to be sitting in a bush by the river.

And here’s what the Merrimack looks like when it isn’t frozen solid.

So that was my little walk this morning, I hope y’all enjoyed. I’ll probably be adding larger versions of some of these to my gallery later, probably tomorrow sometime, if anyone wishes to see other/higher-res versions. I’m using new gallery software now, hopefully a big improvement over what I was using, so the URL has changed.

And that’s pretty much it for me. I’ll be adding a tutorial Robbyn will be sending me on Friday. It’ll be sans pictures, she’ll add those when she gets back. Early next week your usually scheduled knitting ‘blogging will return.

I hope everyone is having a great week!

Myria