Zoning out in a small town...Vacationland!

My second weekend in Machias has come and gone, and its been an interesting one. This weekend I got to play tourist and meet more people again, which has been great. (In a sidenote, I am guessing this week I will meet with the PR guy from the university in which a press release will go in all the local papers...then I will never be some anonymous person from Iowa again....)

Let's get some photos up here for you all, since photos tell 1000 words!

I am not sure that I have given enough description to you all of what it is like transitioning from being someone who has lived solidly in the middle of the Central Time Zone for her entire life to living ten miles away from the Atlantic Time Zone (huh, what is that, we don't ever hear of that!?!). Washington County is known as the Sunrise Coast because in the U.S. we are the first ones to greet the sun (if it comes out here) every morning.

You will see that the sun rose this morning here at 4:56am. Yes, that's right....in the 4am hour. Now, as you'll notice if you are any person who gets up at sunrise, that the time that they "post" is different than when the sun is actually "getting up".

To give you true perspective of what that looks like in "real life", I took the following picture to illustrate what 4:32am looks like.


I'm not kidding, the clock said 4:32am.

Think that is crazy? Well, check out what December looks like for me. I will still be at work for at least an hour after the sun sets at night!

There are a few ramifications to the sun coming up this early for someone who is sloooowly adjusting to being Eastern Eastern time zoning. 1) Betty the Cat has gotten used to being fed by me when I get up in the morning, which is not too far after sunrise. This presents a problem in Maine here, when I have usually just gone to bed about 4 hours before the sun rises! 2) I constantly think I am running late to something (not sure what, since I don't have a job for another few weeks!) because the sun is up so high when I get up around 8am. 3) Betty is super sluggish in the mid morning. This shouldn't be much of a problem when I finally do get to start my job, though, as I anticipate being able to work out before going to work in the morning, thus I'll be up early in the morning. But for now...here's my temporary solution until I find actual drapes I want in my bedroom:

Needless to say, it seems to have tricked Betty the Cat and my head thus far.

In other news, I wanted to offer you some of the news up from the local paper! It's not online, so I thought I'd occasionally take some photos of clips from the paper to share with you news around here. Here's some highlights:

I think I mentioned this previously, but it POURED on 4th of July in Machias, after the lobster boat races were canceled in Jonesport. Needless to say, the local paper has a good tinge of sarcasm and "this is how it is" in their reporting. Yes, I am sure no one minded the "traffic" in Machias...because I am sure they went car to car to ask about it.


Eureka! The steeples of churches don't only get blown off in Back to the Future! This is from one of my first nights in Machias when there was that really terrible thunderstorm that was rattling my house and threw the power off for a few hours. A great way to start my first nights off campus..ever...


The towns here are SO small that everyone knows one another....and evidently knows where everyone lives....so you just throw an ad in the paper with "their place" as the address and folks will show. (Everyone that I meet asks where I am living and I tell them and they say "Oh yeah, above Donny's mom's insurance place, yeah")


I have made it a goal to meet several of my neighbors this next week, since I have failed to meet any of them when I've been out on my neighborhood nightly walks. Although, I have been lucky because two of them have introduced themselves to me already!
These two cats belong to Don's mom, who lives across the street from me (his sister lives down the road). These two kitties evidently sensed that I love kitties, because they have come by almost everyday to visit me. The small tortoise shell one (sorry for the bad quality photo, he's a tad jumpy) is the one I call Earnest, because he has six toes! I don't have a name for the black one yet. However, the other morning, I woke up and padded into the bathroom first thing in the morning without my glasses to be greeted by Earnest sitting on the outside of my window sill. Now, for those of you who don't know...I live on the second story. Little Earnest has some jumping legs in him, because he jumps from the landing on my stairs to the handrail (a 1x4) and then up to the small eave outside my bathroom windows. There he sat, just meowing at me. Interesting. Betty hasn't seemed to notice that there are neighbor cats meowing outside my door yet, or she could just be ambivalent about it like she is most everything else.

Some odd things around town that I've noticed:


Oh, and in case any of you were wondering...this is what the wheels look like these days:

And, as a shout out to my Ames folks....it was meant to be people, it was meant to be (this is the road leading up the hill to the university....I'm not kidding):