As much as I have enjoyed Prague, I was happy to hit the road this morning, headed north. The city congestion soon gave way to wide open spaces as I pursued my theme for the day: things made of rocks. We start with a small church (St Ignatius Rock Chapel) carved into a massive boulder, complete with seating for a dozen parishioners.

Next, we have a two-story house built into a naturally split mountain of rock.

How about a private event space built atop several rock columns, previously the site of an unassailable medieval castle.

Speaking of columns, here we have Mansion Rocks, a magnificent example of basalt columns.

My ultimate destination for the day was the Pravčická Archway, the largest sandstone arch in Europe. Reaching it requires a strenuous 4.4-mile hike from the hostel I am staying in this evening. It is nestled somewhere atop the cliffs shown below. Rain in the afternoon kept me from starting the climb until 5pm. I determined that I had sufficient time to reach the arch just in time for golden light. The plan would have been perfect if not for the fact that I climbed the wrong trail (I am not so good at reading Czech). When the relentless uphill trek turned into an equally arduous decent, I realized this could not be the trail to the arch and then it started to rain again. It was a 5-mile mistake that I will not soon forget. It remains to be seen whether my legs are up for another dose of abuse tomorrow, especially in light of the fact that the morning sun will be on the wrong face of the arch for a good photo.

While on the subject of rocks, I passed two kidney stones this evening, a common occurrence for me after flying.

Given that I am a tourist, I have no standing to complain about the throngs that are drawn to Prague. I will say that it makes it nearly impossible to create images that are not populated by strangers all trying to take the same selfie in front of the same attraction. That said, I have found two ways to avoid the masses. First, by using the drone. Even though the people are still everywhere, they are very tiny.

The second is to photograph at night using long exposures. I particularly like the photo below of the Prague Astronomical Clock. Installed in 1410, it is the world’s oldest astronomical clock still in operation today. It is a medieval marvel showcasing advanced horological and astronomical knowledge of its time, created by the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň and Jan Šindel, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Charles University. There was not a moment of daylight when this clock was not surrounded by hundreds of people. Even at 3am, I had to time my exposures to avoid people milling past on the way home from the many pubs in the area.

Uneventful travel concluded with my arrival in Prague this morning. I wisely parked my rental car outside the city center and walked to the apartment I have rented. Prague is an overwhelmingly beautiful city. There is something magnificent to enjoy around almost every corner. That said, the number of tourists here is staggering. They are of every age from seniors to elementary school kids on class outings and of every nationality you can imagine. The energy here is vibrant and there were people still out at 3am when I did a bit of night photography.

Drone use is permitted here, but it presents a significant challenge. Finding good launch sites amid the narrow streets lined by tall buildings was difficult. Instead, I opted to launch from the bridges and fly to my subjects, often far away.

In total, I walked over ten miles, and that’s before my night walk, which will be factored into tomorrow’s numbers. At the end of the day, I was utterly exhausted and have decided I will take a more leisurely approach to my explorations tomorrow.

I am headed to Europe for the next two weeks. I will spend one-third of my time in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Italy. My soccer team is playing in an over-60s tournament organized by the Italian police on the final weekend. I predict that our team will either place first or last, depending on the consumption habits of our opponents regarding the bomboloni (Italian donuts; my attempt at police stereotype humor). I will travel by foot, train, and bus while in Italy and by rental car elsewhere. For this reason, I am packing very light. My camera, drone, telephoto lens, tripod, laptop, and full soccer kit take up 80% of my baggage volume. The rest is for a minimal set of travel clothing and weather protection. Wi-Fi connectivity permitting, I will try and post from the road.

I have spent much of my life making things. I have never, however, made a human. That is a miracle that only women can perform. Jeanine has delivered three such miracles and nurtured them through adulthood. I could not have been luckier than to have shared my life with her.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mamma.

After three days, the rain finally let up this afternoon, allowing me to photograph the new Concord Middle School at the request of our local newspaper. Ribbon cutting for the $100,000,000 project is scheduled for June 11th , and once fitted with solar cells is expected to be a net-zero building and among the most energy efficient in the world.

Thus far, the primary use of the surveillance cameras on our house has been to apprehend culprits in the act of eating our plantings. This groundhog made short work of two Cone Bushes (upper right corner in the photo below).

An ideal solution to this problem would be to introduce the fox who routinely patrols our yard to the woodchuck.

This month, my blog will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. If you told me I would still be making daily posts two decades into this project, I would have thought you were crazy.

To date, I have made 9,293 posts containing 12,989 images. What started as an experiment with something new called a “blog” and an expectation that it would help improve my photography turned into something entirely different. It became a personal/family/travel journal that helped me find the discipline to write every day.

As I look back, most of the photos are OK, some are pretty good, and a few are great. Occasionally, I manage to write something funny, clever, or insightful; more often than not, I settle for not overly boring. Although I genuinely enjoy hearing from followers, I have never attempted to seek a broader audience than the one intrinsically drawn to these pages, whatever their reasons might be. At times, it has been a nightmare to keep this site up and running. You have no idea how hard it is to keep 20-year-old posts compatible with the latest software, or how long it took to detoxify the posts that were corrupted in a ransom attack. To say that maintaining this blog has been a labor of love would be an understatement.

I often think that it would be nice to take a break from the blog. Perhaps, going forward, I will extend myself the latitude to post less frequently. Perhaps not. When all is said, done, and posted, this blog has helped me to live the lesson I learned from the “Dead Poets Society”: Carpe Diem.

Construction is well underway for a house just down the road from us. Our new neighbors reached the same conclusion we did and opted to tear down the original house to build a new one. It is fun to drive by the site each day and watch the construction progress, especially when I do not have to concern myself with the work.

Memorial services for two of the three CCHS seniors who died 2 weeks ago in a car accident on a Florida highway were held this weekend. The third will be private. Students, family, and staff placed flowers in the shape of a heart on the school grounds as the community continues to mourn. Our town newspaper, The Concord Bridge, carries obituaries of town residents, which I routinely scan, comparing my age to those who have passed. I cannot express my sadness as I turned to the last page of this week’s issue and found the obituaries for two 18-year-olds and one 17-year-old. It is strange that I feel such profound grief for the loss of young adults that I did not know. Perhaps it is because, I share the fear every parent has that they will lose a child. I hope Jimmy, Maisey, and Hannah’s family, and friends can feel the love and well wishes I am sending into the universe for them.

Nico shared this reunion photo of his 2016 TREE (Teaching & Research in Environmental Education) cohort taken in Colorado this week.

Meanwhile, in a break with tradition, Maya is serving cat soup for Cinco de Mayo.

For the first time since we completed the house, my niece Rachel and her boyfriend Rob visited this afternoon. Maya and Kyle joined us for the mini-reunion with their cousin, Uncle Mark, and Aunt Marie. Nico was in Denver for work.

Mark came to my soccer game this morning and watched us systematically take apart our Russian opponents. The score at halftime was 1-0, a fair reflection of the match play to that point. In the second half, however, we ground them down and scored an additional 5 unanswered goals. It was a particularly satisfying win because our opponents played a very “dirty” brand of soccer and tried to physically intimidate us.

Jeanine and Maya helped Marie find an outfit for her son’s July wedding in Galway, Ireland. The trio disappeared for much of the day, returning triumphantly with their mission accomplished. Our whole family is looking forward to attending the wedding, the first of the next generation of Calabrias.

Jeanine, my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Maire, and I enjoyed a visit to Ferjulian’s Farm, where we visited their tulip field and picked a couple of dozen. The photos do little justice to the vibrance of the colors or the number of flowers, more than a quarter million.

After our tour, we looked at their donut-making operation before a brief visit to the Minute Man Air Field (my brother is a former commercial airline pilot). A short hike on the Heath Hen Meadow Brook Woodland Trail helped build an appetite for our dinner at the Less Than Greater Than speakeasy in Hudson.

My brother Mark and his wife Marie arrived this evening and will be staying with us over the weekend. Jeanine picked them up from the airport while I was playing soccer under the lights in a make-up match. We delivered a sound 5-2 thumping to the only team that has beaten us in recent history. Mark and Marie are looking down the road to building a new home for their retirement years, much as we have. While looking online at potential properties, we discovered this aerial view of an adjacent lot, which I found fascinating. If I had to guess, I would say that the tracks were made by a large excavator used for clearing lumber.

Normally, I am not happy when a tool I own stops working. Pictured above is the cordless pruner I have used for the last week while clearing the yard of trees, saplings, and downed limbs. Our local composting facility will accept such yard waste if it is less than 4 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. A twenty-foot 4-inch diameter tree requires about 10-20 cuts with the chainsaw and several hundred with the pruners to meet the requirements. Multiply by several dozen trees and hundreds of smaller bushes. I have little doubt that I made more than 5,000 cuts with the tool in the last week alone and who knows how many during seasons past. When it stopped working yesterday, I was surprised only by how long it had held up to the relentless use.

Today, I took some time to figure out the failure mechanism and see if I could effect a repair. The brushes in the DC motor have reached the end of their service life and are not available as a replacement part. You have to replace the entire motor, which is half the cost of a new tool. Although there is still some usable brush material remaining, the angle of contact with the commutator is out of range for proper operation. Also, the pruning blades are quite well worn.

I did not hesitate to pick up a new tool (on sale, luckily) and am back in business. I hope that this tool will get a brushless DC motor upgrade in the future.

Maya will be moving to a new apartment in September. She will continue to room with her current flatmates, Fiona and Luke, and will be joined by Fiona’s boyfriend, Ben. The third floor, 4 bedroom, 2 bath apartment is located near Inman Square, a mile from her work and half that to her dance club. It has a front and back porch and a large backyard. Best of all, she will continue to live with Fiona’s sibling felines, Walden (brother, left) and Kurt (sister, right).

I was so tired after my soccer match yesterday that I took a 4-hour nap and missed the town-wide remembrance ceremony for the 3 seniors we lost last week. Today, Jeanine and I swung by the high school entrance to pay our respects.

My soccer match overlapped with this year’s Bionic 5K, but the rest of the family was fully represented. Jeanine womanned the Merch Tent. Kyle showed up with his entire running club and placed 28th overall in a field of 712 and 4th in his age group. Maya pulled in Owen, Fiona, and a few Formlings (people who work at Formlabs). Nico had a PR shaving more than 2 minutes off his best time.

My team managed a 12-0 shellacking of Medfield in our first home field match. By the end of the game, however, injuries had reduced our roster to 11, and I played far more minutes than I would have preferred.

Guess what our country stores in this facility. Read about it here.

Jeanine shared this picture of her sister celebrating her 73rd birthday. Apparently, after seventy, you get really tall candles on a very short cake.

Jeanine returns to Concord tomorrow. It remains to be seen if we will get to sample this yummy-looking cheesecake.

Yardwork remained the order of business for me today. There is a small window during spring when clean up and pruning are easiest (before trees leaf out and undergrowth pops up). Today, I focused on gathering and stacking wood and brush piles. The brush will go to the Concord compost station, and I have offered the logs to anyone in the neighborhood looking for firewood. Pictured here is but one of a dozen brush piles, and a small one at that.

Hearts are heavy in Concord as we mourn the loss of three 18-year-old seniors who died in a Florida car crash on Monday. A fourth is hospitalized in critical condition. The four were on spring break when the SUV they were driving collided with a tractor-trailer making a U-turn on the highway. Such loss is incomprehensible and a reminder to hold our loved ones close whenever we can.

Jeanine is in Burlington, VT all week to celebrate her sister Susan’s 73rd birthday (on Friday). She is pictured here sitting on the “healing rock” at The Carving Studio & Sculpture Center on the grounds of Vermont’s historic West Rutland marble quarries, source for many Washington, DC monuments.

I spent another long day taking down small trees and saplings at the front of our lot where it borders the road. I consistently underestimate the amount of work to section and clean up each tree. Thankfully, fatigue has served to moderate my enthusiasm. For the rest of the week, I will shift my attention to cleanup.

In the evening, I drove into Medford to help Kyle with a plumbing project. The toilet we installed three years ago during the renovation of his basement has started to malfunction. It is an uplift toilet designed to pump waste up to a drain pipe. It recently started to flush continuously. We isolated the problem to a solenoid valve that controls the water supply line. We observed it malfunctioning, took it apart, found it clogged with a ton of rust flakes from corroded pipes, cleaned it thoroughly, reassembled it, and tested it. We were 100% confident that we had identified the root cause of the problem. When we reassembled the toilet, an arduous and time consuming task, we found the problem had not been corrected. After much deliberation, we concluded that it made more sense to replace the entire toilet than try and order replacement parts that might of might not address the issue.

Before leaving for Vermont to visit her sister for the week, Jeanine casually asked me to clear a new section of the front yard. Six hours later, I was halfway done with the job, finished for the day, and covered in dirt. I was able to pull many of the small saplings from the ground, roots and all. Apparently, shaking the dirt from the root ball left some of it deposited on my head. I did not notice until I came in for lunch, and am now left to wonder what the neighbors I spoke with as they passed by the house must have thought about my appearance.

Left to my own means for preparing dinner, I opted for a healthy salad that I purchased in kit form. The meal was not really photo-worthy, but I thought Jeanine would be impressed that I was not eating junk food.

In the 22 years we have lived in Massachusetts, Jeanine has never watched the Boston Marathon in person. Today, we rectified that situation. I took her to Wellesley, arguably my favorite spot to watch the race. It is just shy of the midpoint, and the eventual winners are generally among the lead pack. Once again, I managed to photograph the men and women winners of the elite and wheelchair divisions.

Pictured above on the right in the light blue shorts is John Korir of Kenya, who won his first Boston Marathon in the professional men’s division, joining his brother, Wesley, who won it in 2012 (the first siblings to ever win).

Below on the far left is Sharon Lokedi, also of Kenya, who won the professional women’s division in a course record time, defeating defending champ Hellen Obiri, who finished second.

Marcel Hug of Switzerland won his eighth Boston Marathon in the men’s wheelchair division, and American Susannah Scaroni won her second championship in the women’s wheelchair division.

The Wellesley supporters never disappoint with their enthusiastic encouragement.

I was back on the pitch this morning with my Concord United team for the first time since the fall season ended last year. I did a 50% rotation at right wing and had a solid game with no ill effects from the 10 miles of walking I did yesterday. We managed a total of 7 goals. 5 for us and 2 own goals for them! It was not our prettiest game, but we got the job done. Several of my teammates were missing, so I will be taking another photo later in the season.

The kids all had other plans for Easter, so we invited our good friends Irene and Eric over for dinner to celebrate the holiday.

After months and months of preparation, the 250th anniversary of the battles of Concord and Lexington finally arrived. The center of town was closed to automobile traffic as tens of thousands arrived to watch reenactments, a parade, speeches from our governor and state representatives, and an evening drone show. Jeanine served as an ambassador to provide visitors with information and to alert the police in the event of trouble. She rode her bicycle into town, as did Maya, Owen, Fiona, and Ben who left pre-dawn so they could watch the reenactments. I walked into town arriving by 6:30 AM with plenty of time to stake out a good vantage point for the parade. I also attended the speeches and ceremonies at the North Bridge.

Although quite exhausted by the time we returned home, Jeanine and I drove to Gilette Stadium, where Nico and his New England Revolution Amputee Soccer Team played against the New York Metro Amputee Soccer Team after the MLS teams concluded their match. The Revs won 2-0, and the Amputee Revs won 6-0, a great night for New England fans.

When Kyle and I renovated the basement in his house, we installed an upflush toilet rather than a gravity toilet to avoid excavating his concrete basement floor. Unfortunately, it recently started flushing continuously, suggesting a problem with the valve that lets water into the tank. To his credit, Kyle disassembled the complicated toilet to troubleshoot the problem, but was not able to find any obvious issues. He pulled me in on a video call, and we made more progress, but we still have not figured out what is wrong. I will be making an in person visit soon with some diagnostic tools that Kyle does not have at his disposal and hope to get it working again. Nicolai and amputee soccer teammate and Bionic teaching partner, Jovan, will be moving into the basement in the near future and Kyle wants to ensure that all is ready for them.

While driving through Somerville on my return home after a day of consulting work at Formlabs, I saw this art installation in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant. Traffic was stalled at the time, so I was able to capture a quick photo through the windshield with my phone. It expressed a sentiment that I share, so I decided to post it here.

Pictured above is about 1/20th of the pruning debris I produced during 6 hours of working in the yard. I removed 100s of saplings and cut down a few 20-foot-tall trees. The prior owner of our property let the forest grow wild for several decades, and we are hoping to introduce a little more diversity to the ecosystem. I was quite exhausted by the end of the day, but also 3.1 pounds lighter at my next morning weigh-in. Normally, I prefer to chip away at such large undertakings, but this is the first dry day in several and I will be busy for the next few. The work is much easier before the trees have had a chance to leaf out which is just about to start.

Several months ago, I helped construct stands to support a number of photo cutout boards that are going to be used for the Concord 250th Celebration this weekend. Today, I completed the project with my partner. We cut out the face openings and finished drilling the mounting holes for each of the four boards, which feature Revolutionary War characters.