Your mind working out this salty little scene
The water
rushthatspeaks and I found was at Castle Island. It was brilliantly cold and almost deserted, the crushed mirror of the waves as harsh and richly blue as the dissolving sky. We identified the planes coming in to Logan as predators or prey by their countershading or aposematic coloration.

The cranes of Conley Terminal. The new ones, shipped last summer from Shanghai to service the Neo-Panamax container ships which the channels of Boston Harbor were dredged to accommodate. Close to, they were bleached almost as pale as the winter sky.

Beneath the pavilion out on the causeway that loops in Pleasure Bay. It looked like Escher from underneath.

I suppose this transparency of water is too green to be glaucous in English, but in classical Greek it could describe the eyes of Athene.

The banded iris of the shore. I have no close photos of the assorted waterfowl we saw bobbing among the reflections all around the bay, none of which we could name. With recourse to the internet, I am reasonably confident of the American black duck, the harlequin duck, the brant, and the bufflehead, with a lesser degree of certainty regarding the common eider and the white-winged scoter. A friend of mine who is a serious birder refers to this time of year as "weird duck season."
We collected dinner on the way home from Mamaleh's: a corned beef Reuben for me, a pastrami Reuben for Rush-That-Speaks, a 50/50 for
spatch and the fortuitous discovery in the freezer when I had to wait around for our order—not ideal from a perspective of avoiding other people, but at least they are enough in demand to backlog the kitchen—of a quart of borscht, because Rob and I had just been watching The Talk of the Town (1942). We can eat it with sour cream when the polar vortex cracks the mercury on Friday. I just wish in all this broken-glass brightness it would snow.

The cranes of Conley Terminal. The new ones, shipped last summer from Shanghai to service the Neo-Panamax container ships which the channels of Boston Harbor were dredged to accommodate. Close to, they were bleached almost as pale as the winter sky.

Beneath the pavilion out on the causeway that loops in Pleasure Bay. It looked like Escher from underneath.

I suppose this transparency of water is too green to be glaucous in English, but in classical Greek it could describe the eyes of Athene.

The banded iris of the shore. I have no close photos of the assorted waterfowl we saw bobbing among the reflections all around the bay, none of which we could name. With recourse to the internet, I am reasonably confident of the American black duck, the harlequin duck, the brant, and the bufflehead, with a lesser degree of certainty regarding the common eider and the white-winged scoter. A friend of mine who is a serious birder refers to this time of year as "weird duck season."
We collected dinner on the way home from Mamaleh's: a corned beef Reuben for me, a pastrami Reuben for Rush-That-Speaks, a 50/50 for

no subject
no subject
Thank you!
Do you get mandarin ducks over there?
Not personally—the internet tells me there are some isolated, feral populations in the U.S. resulting from zoo escapes, but we don't live near any of them. They look spectacular.