Last night, we received 3 inches of wet snow, the kind that sticks to tree branches, creating a beautiful winter wonderland. After clearing the driveway, I set out for some aerial photography and a honey-do list of errands. Pictured above is a distant view of the Old North Bridge and Visitor Center. My shopping list included an offset spatula, Portobello mushroom caps, candles, a zucchini, a red onion, and a yellow squash. This mission required stops at three different stores and was not completed to the satisfaction of my boss. I forgot the candles, and apparently, I do not know the difference between a zucchini and an English cucumber. In my defense, I doubt Jeanine knows the difference between a Forstner bit and a brad-point drill bit.

I met Kyle in Lowell to tour a multi-family dwelling he is considering acquiring. He is serious about investing in real estate to create a source of passive income. We then traveled to Somerville to tour a triplex that Jeanine and I are considering purchasing.

Jeanine noticed from the windows of her sanctuary that the roof vent for our cooktop had been dislodged by the ever-so-slowly (think glacially) advancing sheet of snow sliding off the roof. If snow or rain were allowed to enter the exposed exhaust pipe, water would drip down onto our cooktop and potentially damage the fan motor. I decided that an immediate repair was called for. I must admit that the idea of climbing a 20-foot ladder onto an icy and snow-covered metal roof in below-freezing temperatures was not something I was looking forward to in the least. Even so, postponing was not an option. I made one trip up the ladder to assess the situation and a second to return with the necessary tools and hardware to complete the repair. When I completed the work, I decided to take a picture of the river from the rooftop. It did not occur to me to take a picture of the repaired roof vent until I was back on the ground, and at that point, the risk of a third trip up the ladder seemed like a bad idea.

Most evenings, just after dusk, our driveway sensor chimes. When no visitors or deliveries appeared responsible for the alert, we eventually figured out that it was being triggered by members of our local deer herd. Pictured here is one of three that visited last night, as captured by one of our security cameras.

When it came time to install path lighting for the driveway, I opted to install a 300-foot LED rope light along one side. The white light string can be programmed for different types of animation, which makes for a fun greeting to the house. When covered by snow, the lights can still be seen as a soft glow in the snow bank, which is even more fun.

Homeowners often seek to remove heavy snow from their roofs. We designed our home to handle a substantial snow load and selected a low roof pitch, hoping to keep fallen snow in place on top of the house. This is because snow, on average, has an R-value of 1 per inch of snow. That means that our recent 15″ snowfall added R-15 to our R-50 insulated roof, helping to further reduce energy loss from the house. Pictured above is the right side of the garage roof with an entire slab of snow and icicles inching their way off. By design, neither rain nor snow falls over an entrance to the house.

For Christmas, Jeanine gifted Nico two tickets to the world premiere engagement of Wonder: The Musical at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. By all accounts, it was wonderful.

You adore people like your favorite foods,
from varied cultures and corners of the globe;
I gather lenses, flashlights, and tools,
researching them all while still in my robe.

You plant tiny seeds of basil and thyme,
then bask beneath the sun in a state of rapture;
I chase the light through forests and canyons,
the perfect image hoping to capture.

You’re at home where conversations wander,
where shy souls bloom, and joyous hearts sing;
I’m at home with wood shavings on the floor,
and the quiet hum of a well-tuned thing.

You watch hawks circling the tree line,
fox tracks stitched in fresh-fallen snow;
I frame you there in my viewfinder,
the one wild wonder I never outgrow.

We’ve raised three remarkable humans,
each odd and brilliant in their own way;
sometimes I wonder how we pulled it off-
then I remember: you, leading the fray.

You’re the generous friend, the fierce defender,
the one who shows up, casserole in hand;
I’m the nerd checking flight times and weather,
plotting our next half-baked travel adventure.

Yes, we are gloriously different creatures-
you, the warm hearth, me, with my toolbox and charts;
but somewhere between spice jars and spreadsheets,
we learned how to embrace each other’s hearts.

So here’s to our not-yet-written chapter,
to golden years we’ve only just begun:
may we roam new trails, make new stories,
and keep laughing and having fun.

If time is kind and luck holds steady,
there’s still so much mischief left to do:
because, my love, my favorite adventure
has always been simply – growing older with you.

My cousin Vincent, a fellow inventor/maker, just purchased a CNC router and shared some visual simulations of the machine in operation. He cannot set up or use the machine until he moves a car out of his garage. My desire to see the tool in action prompted the following excerpted messages:

Vincent:

Anyway, that’s what I’m chomping through these days. When the snowbank behind the garage melts, we can move the Nissan out, organize the garage, and make a home for the CNC router. 

Carl:

They have a tool now called a shovel. Some are even designed for use with snow. Perhaps you could use such a tool to make space for the Nissan now rather than waiting for the Earth to get closer to the sun.

Vincent:

It seems the entire population adjoining the alleyway behind the garage has conspired to move all their snow, waist-high I might add, to the place where the Nissan needs to go. Since the snow came weeks ago, it has now frozen into a virtually immovable mountain. 

Could it be moved, it could be set afloat in the ocean as a small but impressive iceberg. Failing free access to explosives or a flame thrower, it will have to wait while I investigate this shovel tool you speak of…

Carl:

<I replied with the image above and the following caption>

Have flamethrower. Will travel.

Last week, I thought the migration of my website to a new hosting service provider had been completed without issue. In fact, everything seemed to be working as expected until I tried to make a new post. I received an error message indicating that I had reached the 262,000 file limit for a shared hosting server. My choices were to delete some of my 20-year posting history (not an option) or migrate the site again to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Fortunately, my new service provider did much of the heavy lifting, but even their experts failed to complete the transition without issues. Today, after several interactions with their support team, my site is back online and appears to be functioning normally, fingers crossed.

Jeanine and I are lucky to share a great dentist. In his free time, he relaxes by milling tree trunks into slabs of lumber. Last year, he gifted us a large quantity of spalted beech. Originally, I planned to use the wood to build the desk for Jeanine’s sanctuary, but the exceptional spalting proved too frenetic for such a large piece of furniture in a room meant for meditation and soothing energy. Instead, I used some of it to build a small bench for our mudroom.

As of this moment, my website is being hosted on a new service provider. It has taken me ten days to fully implement the migration, delayed primarily by the release and transfer of my domain name by my previous provider. For most websites, such a migration is not a big deal. Mine, with a twenty-year repository of daily photos, however, is considered quite large (40GB). Moving files of this size proved more than most common tools could handle and often triggered bandwidth or time-out limits on the hosting server. It is difficult to convey the frustration of having a transfer or backup fail after 20 hours of operation, with no clues as to why. I am a hardware engineer by training, and my software skills are modest at best. Suffice it to say that I’m not very comfortable editing PHP files, searching for and replacing old URLs with new ones in my SQL database, or re-indexing the Permalinks on my site. AI proved a helpful guide, but also offered some very questionable recommendations. I hope and trust that I will never have to undertake such a migration ever again.

Update: No sooner than completing the migration, I learned that my website has just exceeded the 262K file limit of a shared hosting environment and must now migrate to a virtual private server (VPS), Please expect several more days of downtime.

Jeanine proudly unveiled her second attempt at an Almond and Espresso Torte with Velvet Chocolate Cream. The first one didn’t make it past the inversion stage; in an instant, it transformed into what she later christened “Mish Mash Moo Super Bowl Dessert.”

As she groaned, “Oh no,” Kyle looked over and asked, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“There’s a problem,” she sighed.

But Nico, ever solution-oriented, jumped in with a quick fix—sprinkling chocolate chips and pecans across the wreckage to make it taste as good as it looked messy. A fine treat while we watched the Super Bowl with the boys.

Undeterred, Jeanine woke up early the next morning, baked the cake again (a little longer this time), and carefully inverted it on the tray before soaking it with espresso syrup. Success.

The torte was made for a band leader who’d flown all the way from California to Malden, Massachusetts, on his birthday, just to perform protest songs for the Malden Reads program. Jeanine, with her friend Barbara Blankenship, has been developing an idea called “Baking for Good,” a mini-nonprofit that brings baked treats to other nonprofits—either to celebrate milestones or to help with fundraising. This was their second “Baking for Good” project, and since the band leader loves almond-mocha cakes, they knew exactly what to make.

This post was contributed by Jeanine.

I worked with Kyle this weekend to help resolve the frozen pipe problem at his home in Medford. We have a multi-phase plan to address the issue. With any luck, we will be able to fix the problem before advancing to the progressively more invasive phases. Phase one involved taking down a kitchen wall cabinet and removing the drywall behind it. This allowed us to inspect the most suspect area where a great number of water pipes come into close contact with the cinder block outside wall of the basement. Opening up the wall allowed us to figure out where all the water lines run, a critical first step for further work. We replaced the wall cabinet but not the insulation. While this increases the amount of lost heat to the outside, it exposes the water lines to more of the interior warmth. When the weather improves, we will add insulation to the outside of the house to regain the lost efficiency and further increase the water line temperatures.

Today I was on assignment for the Concord Bridge, our local newspaper, to photograph the demolition of the White House. Part of the original Emerson Hospital campus, it is being removed to make room for a new emergency room. I shot from both the ground and the air with an eye to establishing the context.

Kyle shared this photo and map of his running group/route after completing their morning workout. Not recorded was the temperature or wind chill, which was brutally cold. We are informed that he followed the run with a long soak in the hot tub at his gym.

With early morning temperatures dipping into negative numbers, it was a good day to spend indoors. I made use of the time to sort out all of the computer and phone tech issues in the house. This involved updating and optimizing five Apple computers, two of which I had to erase and reinstall the operating system, and two iPhones. I easily spent 8 hours involved with the work, with 80% of the time spent waiting for downloads or reboots to complete. Jeanine was the major beneficiary of the effort as she got a new desktop computer with a 34″ ultra-wide, curved screen display for her office.

In the evening, we joined another couple for a movie night to see Hamnet. If you are looking for a feel-good flick, this is not it. If you are in the mood for an emotional rollercoaster about love, loss, and redemption, then this is your ticket, a really well-crafted story with exceptional acting.

I spent the better part of the day setting up and migrating data to a new Mac Studio computer. My laptop has all but run out of its 4TB of storage, and I prefer to keep my entire photo collection on an internal drive. The new computer is configured with 8TB, which should last for some time. My laptop will now be used exclusively for consulting work and travel.

Earlier in the week, I experimented with some photo-to-sketch rendering software and was amazed by the results. It helps to start with a high-quality photo.

Note to Maya: I need to take an updated professional headshot of you.

When I learned that our good friends who live down the street would be returning from the airport at 1 AM, I joined a neighbor to clear the snow from their driveway. I worked the driveway with my snowblower while she handled the walkway with a shovel. Having cleared our own driveway in four passes over two days, this was my first encounter with the full accumulation of the last several days. It pushed my battery-powered machine to the max and left me feeling no need for a trip to the gym.

Strenuous physical activity has a way of motivating my kidney stones to depart their temporary residence in my bladder. This morning, I produced the seven dwarfs pictured above, ranging in size from 1mm to 5.5mm. Passing kidney stones is no fun, but I would much rather have them outside my body than growing larger inside.

Speaking of snow clearing, the last pass on our driveway was done by Jeanine, who wanted to learn how to operate the snowblower. She did a very good job.

Pictured above is the first piece of furniture I ever made, admittedly a rather ambitious project. I was guided by an article and plans I found in Fine Woodworking magazine. During the ensuing 25 years, I would be hard-pressed to single out anything quite so challenging to build.

Last week, my brother sent me the image below of a nearly identical table built by the father of professional photographer Chris Gotz (https://www.chrisgotzphotography.com/). Either he was the author of the article in Fine Woodworking or was similarly inspired by it. My brother made this connection when he purchased some used turning tools from him. What are the odds? His son’s photographs are phenomenal, and I encourage you to visit his website. It appears that we have travelled to virtually all of the same locations in search of natural beauty. As I looked at his photographs, I felt an unexplainable connection to a person whom I had never met. I believe we are kindred spirits and hope to one day make his acquaintance.

We woke up this morning to 14″ of fresh snow with two more expected this afternoon. The ruler placed in the snow mound on our outdoor bistro table indicates 18″, but there was already a 2″ base before this latest storm started. Clearing all the snow provided a great workout. Digging out both of the boys’ cars proved the most time-consuming part of the job.

Kyle, Nico, and Teddy sheltered in place with us this evening as snow fell throughout the day and night. We watched the Patriots beat Denver for a ticket to the Super Bowl. It is the first football game I have watched all season, and it was quite boring. By contrast, the later game between the Seahawks and Rams was very exciting.

When I was in high school, I did math on a slide ruler and personal computers did not exist yet. The conduit of design communication was an engineering drawing, commonly prepared on a drafting table with pen and ink on velum. Pictured above is the set of 12 pens of various sizes that I used for such drawings. When I came across them today while organizing some drawers in my shop, I was immediately transported to my 11th-grade drafting class, where I have fond memories of perfecting my drawing technique, a skill that still serves me well today.

I have decided to migrate my website to a new hosting service provider. The one I am currently using has been the source of untold technical aggravation over the last 20 years. I am hoping that the transition will go smoothly, but I think it is more likely that it will not.

I would appreciate your patience if I am unable to make new posts for a period of time or if the site becomes temporarily unreachable. In the words of Arnold, “I’ll be back!”

Volunteering as the aerial photographer for our local newspaper, The Concord Bridge, has been very satisfying. Today, my assignment included three locations in town: the Middle School, the West Concord Train Depot, and an area known as Heywood Meadow. Between travel, flying, and post-processing, this job consumes less than 2 hours per week, allowing me plenty of time for my paid consulting work, travel, and hobbies. Increasingly, I have been thinking about other ways I can volunteer, something I have done throughout my life.

The first time I volunteered, I was in my early twenties. It was for the Special Olympics as a Hugger, possibly the best job ever, even if it has likely been retired in light of modern sensibilities. I would hug athletes of all ages and abilities as they finished their events. I wish I had saved my official shirt that had the word HUGGER printed on the front and back. Next, I did construction with Habitat for Humanity. Although I love building things, I enjoyed this less because I did not like taking direction from people who knew less about what they were asking me to do than I did. I moved on to volunteering as a soccer coach, first for an over-18 women’s team (6 years), and then for the youth soccer teams for all three kids.

On the professional front, I was a mentor for the MIT Gordon Engineering Leadership program and Vice Chairman of the Video Electronics Standards Association.

Most of my recent volunteering has been centered on photography for non-profits, including Open Table, the Bionic Project, and the American Amputee Soccer Association, where I also served on the Board of Directors.

Hopefully, readers of this blog will have recognized yesterday’s photograph as artificially generated. I provided the photo above and a two-sentence description of the scene I wanted. Three minutes later, I had “created” Moto Maya.

We now live in an era when virtually anyone can create a photorealistic image, limited only by their imagination. Although it takes more processing power and time, the same is true for audio and video. As with all new tools and technologies, this will have beneficial applications. My fear, however, is that the range of negative and unintended consequences is far more consequential and potentially destabilizing to society.

• Non-Consensual Imagery: There has been a massive surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material and “deepfake” pornography, causing devastating psychological trauma, dehumanization, and reputational damage to victims.
• Democratic Instability: Hyper-realistic synthetic media are used in sophisticated disinformation campaigns to manipulate voter behavior, incite social unrest, and erode public trust in elections and objective truth.
• Financial Fraud: Cybercriminals employ AI video and voice cloning for “vishing,” romance scams, and elaborate corporate fraud, such as impersonating executives to authorize illicit payments.
• Institutional Crises: The “liar’s dividend” allows bad actors to dismiss genuine evidence of misconduct as fake, while fake clinical data and AI-generated doctors promote dangerous medical scams.
• Harassment and Surveillance: Advanced tools enable at-scale harassment, stalking, and “nudifying” individuals without consent, often disproportionately targeting women and minors.
• Economic and Legal Risks: The proliferation of synthetic content threatens to displace human creative labor, while widespread copyright infringement in AI training data has sparked extensive litigation.
• Psychological Impacts: Continuous exposure to indistinguishable fakes can lead to chronic distrust in media and a “crisis of knowing,” where individuals can no longer rely on visual evidence. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; now, ten words can create an image for which no words can remedy the harm.

Every time I look at this image of Maya, I am bothered by the fact that she is not wearing a helmet. Riding a motorcycle is dangerous enough. Doing so on a winding road next to a sheer cliff only adds to the risk. Failure to wear a helmet is where we cross the boundary into recklessness and questionable intelligence. On a positive note, the leather suit and gloves are a good choice.

UPDATE: Make sure to tune in tomorrow for an explanation of this image.

I woke up to the first proper snow of the winter. Overnight, we received four inches, adding to the two inches that fell earlier in the week. After clearing the driveway, I ventured out for a second day of photography. Second only to fall foliage, snowscapes are one of my favorite things to shoot.

Essentially by accident, I may have discovered a pleasing photographic perspective on downtown Concord. I managed to capture three churches, two cemetaries, the town flagpole and rotary, the post office, and several of the quaint shops and restaurants that make up the place.

Jeanine and Lauren got an early start on their drive to Burlington, VT, where they will spend the next couple of days visiting with their sister. Closer to home, we had a dusting of snow that was enough to get me out of the house for some photography. I managed a blurry shot of a Bald Eagle that was perched right in front of the house; he flew off before I could get my camera properly stabilized, and I took advantage of the nice reflections off the river to get a winter scene of the house with my drone.

In the evening, I attended a winter solstice party at our neighbors’ just up the street. It was originally scheduled for the celestially correct night last December, but had to be postponed due to the illness of one of the hosts. The evening included an outdoor fire lighting ceremony and sing-along. I retreated to the back of the circle, performing a thoughtful public service by ensuring my “singing” remained a strictly personal experience.

My recent auto-upgrade to the Tahoe operating system left my MacBook seriously compromised and me supremely irritated. I spent several hours backing up my nearly full 4TB disk, doing a full reset and clean install, followed by restoring all my files and applications. It is not the way I like to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Much more to my liking was a visit to Maya’s new apartment located close to Inman Square in Cambridge with her Aunt Lauren, Jeanine, and Kyle. Later, we walked to a nearby Portuguese restaurant where we enjoyed a delightful meal together.

To support our church, Jeanine donated her cookbook and dinner for six as an auction item. She partnered with one of our neighbors, who provided the wine and served as sommelier. The winning bid was for $1000, and after the auction ended, a matching bid was made for a second dinner. Jeanine teamed up with her sister, Lauren, to create a veritable feast.

• Apéritif and Appetizers
  • Brie Bites with Tart Cherry and Pistachio
  • Roasted Vegetables and Pesto Dip
  • Warmed Nuts and Olives
• First Course
  • Sizzling Rice Soup
• Second Course
  • Brisket & Mushroom Bourguignon
  • Roasted Crisp Potatoes
  • Broccolini
• Salad Course
  • Arugula, Beet, Orange, and Fennel
• Cheese & Fruit Course
  • Assorted Cheeses, Sliced Apples, Grapes, and French Bread
• Dessert
  • Swedish Almond Torte
  • Chocolates

I kept busy as a server, dishwasher, kitchen cleaner, and salad garnisher. These jobs kept me so occupied that I was unable to photograph all of the wonderful dishes, which is a shame because some of the presentations were just as exquisite as the food.