Slow News Day

Slow News Day

Saturday May 29, 2021

It started raining yesterday evening.  It seemed to me that it rained most of the night.  Today it’s been raining most of the day with a few gaps here and there.  The wind is from the north so it’s cold and damp.  We have really spent the day hanging around the boat, reading books, napping (that would be me) and trying to stay warm.  On days like this it’s hard to compose an interesting post for the blog.

Yesterday as we walked along a street in St. Michael’s, I saw a pay phone box.  It wasn’t one of those full length ones of the dim and distant past— just a head enclosure type of pay phone.  I scurried over to take a look.  Sure enough there was no phone left, just the box attached to the pole.  Also present was the plastic phone book holders, if you remember what those looked like back in the day.  Do you remember the rotary dial telephones –all black-- that were so common across the US?  They were super heavy which might have come in handy it an intruder entered your home.  It’s almost hard to connect that thing we now carry in our pocket with that old black rotary dial. 

Some of us are old enough to remember other things that have passed out of existence.  Remember when your television had an antenna on the top—we used to call them rabbit ears.  If the reception was bad, you’d be forced to get up and twizzle the ears around. Sometimes in very dire circumstances you might add aluminum foil (most commonly called tin foil) flags to the “ears”.  For the “normal” stations there were the rabbit ears, for the UHF stations (years later, I think) there was a circular antenna, which never seemed to do much.  In those days, you had to get up and change the channel by hand.  After some amount of time, the tuner knob didn’t work so well.  As I recall, when I was a teen, we had a pack of matches crammed behind the knob on our TV to keep it working.  Then there was the horizontal hold (or was that vertical)?  Whichever it was, if improperly adjusted, Walter Cronkite’s mustache would slowly progress down the screen and then re-appear at the top.  I always thought that some programs were improved by a slow rolling of the image down the screen.  When the TV was turned off the screen went dark except for a small spot at the center that slowly faded out. 

Maybe tomorrow will be drier...

Gloria

38 46.244 N, 76 13.754 W

Looking back towards the entrance of San Domingo Creek with the powerboat anchored off our stern. 

Two other sailboats anchored to the south of us. It stayed crappy like this all day