High winds and high waves

I stopped by to take a look at the beach after leaving my folks' place this morning. The wind nearly tore my car door off when I opened it. But the ocean is so beautiful to watch when it's stormy.

When I went for a walk on Thanksgiving morning, at the southern end of North Beach the seawall and the sidewalk were just covered in seaweed. My mother said that the tides were unusually high the week before because the sun and moon were aligned (so, around the eclipse). According to space.com's eclipse page, last Sunday the moon came closest to the earth "just one minute after the official occurrence of New Moon":

So both the Sun and Moon will be positioned on the same side of the Earth, with the Moon practically at its closest possible point to the Earth. Such "Proxigean" Moons can produce the highest tides of the year and indeed, ocean tides will be experiencing a far larger than normal range during the few days immediately following this New Moon. Low tides will be much lower and high tides much higher than usual (hence the term "spring tide," to "spring up").

10:41:22 PM      trackback [] 

Portsmouth shops: near occasion of impulse buys

My mom and I went on our annual day-after-Thanksgiving shopping trip in downtown Portsmouth, NH. The crowds weren’t too bad. We went early, and it was raining so maybe people went to the malls. This year I’m on a mission to control spending because things have been tight. I’m buying a lot online, but I still wanted to see if I could find a few unique things in the little shops.

I did pretty well – picked up a couple of nice kitchen items at Attrezzi, some boxed Christmas cards at The Paper Patch, and a few birthday cards at Paradiza. We dried off and warmed up with some coffee and tea and scones at Breaking New Grounds. We had everything we needed, but decided to stop in at City & Country just for fun – very cool shop. I avoided all the housewares goodies – very tempting – but then there was this Jellycat zebra. They also had Jellycat bunnies, teddy bears and elephants. Unbelievably cute. (They’re made in the UK – website here. I don’t even know where else you can buy them stateside.) There was only one zebra and I was completely unable to put him back in the bin. Sigh. So now he’s mine. I figure it’s a substitute for my dearly departed dog, who we’ll be missing this Christmas. At least that was my justification. ;-) Anyway, the damage could have been a whole lot worse given the great stuff we found.

We skipped a favorite shop, Serendipity, because I’d just been there recently. I’m bummed I missed Stonewall Kitchen – meant to go but forgot. I think it was raining harder by then and we were getting hungry for some of that leftover turkey – mm mm. For more info, see Frommer’s Portsmouth city guide and seacoasteats.com dining guide.

9:30:41 PM      trackback []