Making you say

Water is a clear liquid at room temperature which you can drink. I like water. If you get it very cold, it turns into ice, and you can use ice to make regular liquid water cooler.

If you raise the temperature of water enough, it will start to “boil,” which means it will bubble. Although it looks like carbonated (fizzy) water at this point, you should NOT drink it or put any part of your body in boiling water, or pour boiling water on yourself or other people. If you let water boil long enough, it will get embarrassed and disappear. If you let boiling water cool a bit, it will stop bubbling, and then you can add some leaves or beans to it and drink the results.

I’ve updated a lot of things about this blog, but the most noticeable is the look of it. It is also now iPhone-friendly. It should automatically provide an iPhone-formatted version when accessed from an iPhone or iPod Touch. Yay!

Oh, look! My new page design has space for sponsors! If you are dumb enough to pay to advertise on this blog, or know anyone who is dumb enough to pay to advertise here, please contact me. Affordable rates! Or, what should seem affordable to someone dumb enough to pay to advertise here…

Look at what a risk-taker I am!

I am staying about a three minute walk from the beach here in Rockport. This beach is called Front Beach, and it’s the main beach in town here. I went today to splash in the ocean for ten minutes this morning and took these pictures while my feet were drying.

I hadn’t been writing much about restaurants since arriving in Rockport because, well, restaurants aren’t that great here in my opinion. But I made a real find tonight in Gloucester.

Gloucester is a working class fishery town, the home of Gorton’s. It’s also a tourist spot. The most famous landmark in Gloucester is the Fisherman Statue. Sorry, I dont have a photo, but you can Google it. It’s the next town over from Rockport.

So I found this restaurant called Alchemy using the Urban Spoon app on my iPhone. Most restaurants in Gloucester are pizza joints and run of the mill seafood places. Alchemy was a real surprise. They are long on creativity, and emphasize using local resources. There was even good live music tonight (a Wednesday)!

The menu is filled with interesting dishes I haven’t seen elsewhere. I had a local mushroom pizza, vegetarian pierogies, asparagus slaw and a griddled rice cake. Everything was great! While most restaurants overseason everything, I could really taste the ingredients in everything I ordered. I hope I can go back and try more things from the menu! The restaurant itself was attractively designed and unique in that regard as well. There was nothing typical or run-of-the-mill about it.

I should say a word about the service, too. Our server was named Sara. She was an excellent fit for this restaurant — a Peace Corp veteran who served more than two years in Senegal, and working now to become a Yoga instructor. Also a very beautiful and sweet young woman.

If you happen to find yourself anywhere near this restaurant, it’s well worth finding. They have a website at alchemybistro.com.

It was dark in the restaurant, but I hope you’ll be able to make some sense of these pictures.

The unofficial official foods of Rockport are New England clam chowder (chowdah) and lobster (lawbstah). To try to provide a true “Rahkpawt” experience, here is some associated imagery.

Lobster pot markers, AKA lawbstah pawt mahkahs, or LPMs, are the unofficial official knick-knack souvenir and de rigeur decorative item of Rockport. Here are some LPMs.

When you read in my entry on Bearskin Neck that it is the second most famous thing in Rockport, you probably wondered what number one was. Number one is Motif #1. This is the nickname of the old shack on Bradley Wharf. If it has an official name, I don’t know it.

It’s called Motif#1 because it’s the most painted object on the east coast of the US. When I heard that as a kid, I thought it meant that they were always slapping another coat of paint on it. But what it means is that it is featured in an awful lot of paintings. It may, therefore, look strangely familiar even if you’ve never been to Rockport.

Here are a few shots:

Bearskin Neck is the second most famous thing about Rockport. Supposedly, it got its name from when an early settler of the area, James Babson, put out some bearskins to dry in the sun on this small peninsula. Nowadays, Bearskin Neck is known for its knick-knack shops and ice cream parlors. Here are a few pictures of the neck.