Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

First: we're all fine.

I got a phone call this afternoon from someone at the company we rent a storage unit from. She was calling to tell me that a construction crew doing something on the lot next door had last control of one of their machines, which breached the wall of our storage unit.

She was calling to tell me that, and to ask my permission to cut the lock on the door, so they can go inside and move everything to an undamaged unit. She wanted that ASAP, so they can start work tomorrow at 7 a.m.

I was on the bus when my phone rang, so while I could give her my approval right away, when she asked for my drivers license/state ID number, I told het I'd call her back, the information was hard to read on a moving bus

So, our plans for tomorrow now involve getting up early(ish) and going to Medford to look things over, and so the company can give us keys for the new lock.

I'm glad the phone was in my pocket when she called: otherwise I might not have noticed and listened to the voicemail before their office closed for the day.

Of local interest: JP Licks has fresh peach ice cream.

They didn't make any last year, because there was no local peach harvest, and I'm ery glad to see it this year: they make really good peach ice cream. Not all their flavors are as good as this, and I shop there primarily for this and the cucumber ice cream, when those are available.

Today's trip to the farmers market was successful and satisfying.

I left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.

What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).

Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)

Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")

The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.

Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.

A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.

Cattitude and I had pizza tonight, delivered by a new-to-us pizzeria, Pino's in Cleveland Circle.

I picked up a slice of pizza, folded it in half, took a bite, said that it was good, and added "this is the pizza of my people": tomato sauce, mozzarella, toppings (bacon and roast red peppers), on a (flour) crust thin enough to fold.

The sauce was a little too sweet, but we'll probably order from them again, the next time Cattitude and I want pizza and Adrian isn't home.

(It wasn't as good as the best New Haven pizza, but that's a high standard.)

JP Licks now has both peach and cucumber ice cream. Last week, they only had the peach, and I'd given up on cucumber for this year, but I looked at the list of flavors at the Coolidge Corner store, and cucumber was on the board, right above peach.

So, I bought two pints of ice cream, and hurried home with them, since I'd forgotten to bring an insulated bag with me. That meant I just bought the pints, and hurried to catch a trolley, rather than also getting a dish of ice cream and eating it on the trolley platform, letting trains go by until I finished my ice cream. (I don't think there's a rule against eating ice cream on the green line, but I can't mask while eating ice cream, or anything else.)

I just looked at both the JP Licks website and the phone app, and neither of them mentions the cucumber ice cream; both do show the peach.

I just learned that they are closing my current dental office (which is in Watertown Square) in about a month. They're suggesting patients either go to Westborough, which is out past 495, or a Gentle Dental in Belmont, but my current dentist will be working entirely in Westborough. I can get to the Belmont office about as easily as to the Watertown one, but it looks like I'm changing dentists anyway, and am looking for suggestions.

I'm in Brighton, near the ends of the B and C branches of the green line, and being reachable by transit is more important than distance in miles as the crow flies.

I want somewhere that still takes some level of covid precautions (masking, air filtering, and/or good ventilation), and that won't have a problem with me only masking in the dental chair.

After a stretch of a couple of weeks where I couldn't walk very far (or fast) without pain, I was feeling somewhat better yesterday, so walking to the Whole Foods and back was OK.

This morning I was, again, feeling better/a bit closer to what I think of as my normal. I went to Whole Foods to get a couple of things, hoping to be back before it started to rain.

It still wasn't raining at a quarter after 1, so I went out again, this time by trolley, to shop for socks at the nearest Target. They have only a small selection of clothing, but I was able to get two packages of cheap non-wool socks in different styles. Plain black for both, because the packages with colors and patterns were things like eight pairs in eight different solid colors, less than half of which I liked, or a three-pack of one pair with a black-and-white leaf pattern, one in black and yellow, and in plain black with a yellow toe.

When I got home my phone said I'd walked about 1.2 miles (which means it was probably about 8/10 of a mile) and I was feeling fine. I then took out the trash (which means a choice of two different sets of stairs, neither of which is great for my hips and knees), and that was OK, but after dinner I noticed some pain in my right foot and then hip. So, another naproxen (I had one before going out this morning), and maybe I won't go anywhere tomorrow.

Walking home from the supermarket, I saw a group of three turkeys--two adults and one poult--and then, half a block away, a single male turkey.

I reported them to the Massachusetts wild turkey survey.

We were seeing a larger flock regularly a couple of months ago, before some of them paired off, nested, and settled down to the business of making more turkeys.

I kept not thinking of the wild turkey survey in early June, when I was seeing more turkeys. They are asking people to report sightings from June 1 through August 31, and the serious Turkey Awareness Month* was may.

*At least some of the early-morning gobbling was aimed at each other, rather than at humans, of course.

The locust trees are flowering locally, and so I discovered yesterday from the scent that there are a couple of locust trees across the street from our new apartment.

I discovered locust trees as an adult, while we were living in Inwood, and came to like them a lot. They were a popular tree to plant in the northeastern US a few decades ago, but no longer are. Volunteer locust seedlings can be a nuisance, because the young/thin trunk branches have spines, presumably to protect them from being eaten by bison or horses or something. (They're native to North America.)

I'd seen locusts through the windows of moving buses and trolleys in the last few days, but wasn't sure of the identification--there are other kinds of tree that flower in the spring and produce clusters of white flowers.

We are still getting to know our new neighborhood, including finding some of the spring-flowering shrubs and trees.

I'm happily exploring spring in my (relatively) new neighborhood. I saw, and in a few cases smelled, a lot of flowers today.

There were two delightful surprises: several rhododendron bushes in flower (all red), and a white violet growing out of a crack in the sidewalk half a block from my apartment.

Unsurprising but still delightful: daffodil, forsythia, maple, periwinkle, and magnolia. Few people seem to appreciate maple flowers. These are the first periwinkles I've seen this year, and we've been watching the forsythia bushes and maple trees go from start blooming over the week or so. (The forsythias I saw in Cambridge on Monday were already covered with flowers, which these aren't yet.)

We also saw a dwarf cherry tree, and a few dandelions.

[reposted/expanded from a Mastodon toot, because this site doesn't have the same character limits.]