A Brilliant Soft Shell Blue Crab Season!

Which is good news in a way, for the ever-endangered Chesapeake Bay and the equally endangered watermen and their way of life.  A bushel of the Chesapeake *Blue Crab is currently selling for $130.00, that is a bushel sold right off the boat. Even so the cost of fuel and bait are eating into the watermen's profits.At a market that bushel's going to run a lot higher than that. So, down on the Bay, it's crabbin' time!  Our Shore and Baltimore friends are in a good mood. I do wonder, however, with the end of newspapers, how we're gonna eat crabs and lobsters and crawfish.The outdoor feast on newspaper covered surfaces, impromptu or planned, home or restaurant, is nearly a year-round tradition from the Bay to the Gulf.

In the meantime, I just learned noted Baltimore novelist, Laura Lippman's Baltimore PI protagonist of her Tess Monaghan series, graduated from Chestertown's Washington College. This information about Tess would have been meaningless to me only three years ago, when I knew neither Chestertown nor Baltimore, which are now permanent parts of my heart.  I learned this via listening to an audio version of Charm City (1997), the second of the Tess Monaghan series.  I also know how Charm City got to be used as a moniker for Baltimore, which I didn't even know was a moniker three years ago, much less why -- even though I already knew personally Madison Smartt Bell, who wrote the walking Baltimore book, titled, of course, Charm City.  But I didn't read that until I'd been to Baltimore a couple of times, though I did read it before **Madison gave a personally conducted walking tour of Baltimore that following spring.

Is it not wonderful to have cities to love -- even if you may also hate them, like I love-hate New Orleans and New York?  I don't know Baltimore well enough yet to have a love-hate relationship with it, but I know many Baltimore natives who do love and hate the city that they will never leave. I love Chestertown because it is so very satisfied to be what it is and has no pretensions or desires to be anything but what it has always been, except, of course, better! I also love Havana and Santiago, but these are not the cities of my own country, so I can't / don't have the hate part -- I have no personal responsibility for these cities, outside of whatever unpleasant designs my country has on them -- which isn't the fault or responsibility of the two cities in question.

So here I sit, attempting to get some energy flowing again. Therapist really wailed on me today.  The glutes are gonna hurt like sin by tomorrow, I'm betting.  At least I have until Monday to recover.

Hot and humid again.

We have construction of some kind or another -- or maybe only maintenance, next door.  Just the building of the scaffolding that envelops the entire building top to bottom took a week of clanging and banging.  What they will do once the scoffold is entirely up I have no idea. I hope it won't be water blasting to clean it .... If there is another hurricane like Irene from last year I shudder to think what will happen to our building as the steel scaffolding ribs are thrown into our walls.

There's also construction across the street, which is in reality preparation for deconstruction of the current ediface to build a newer! better! (much) taller! and MORE EXPENSIVE one.

And just to make it entirely fun, the block and the cross street are blocked off by a shoot -- whether for television or a movie, I have no idea.  Floodlights burning up the night all night long, and all like that.  So much fun ....

Well, at least cold penne, pestp and veggies, plus salad, for dinner to look forward to!
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* If you want to learn about Blue Crabs and their place in the eco and social systems of the Chesapeake, the book you want is Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay by William W. Warner, illustrated by Consuelo Hanks, which has never been out of print since publication in 1994. If you visit anyone on the Bay the book will be guaranteed to be on their shelves, and you probably will be gifted with a copy. There was a copy in the House when we arrived in C'town, and the second weekend we were given a copy of our own.

**Hey, thanks again, Madison.  It is a day I still recall in detail and with great pleasure.