Morning Coffee

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Morning meditation.

Caught a tugboat going down the channel, breaking the sheet ice on the bay;

the moon just hanging in the sky above it.

When we first moved here, there was a large coal-fired power plant on the far bank of the bay. They used the water from the bay to cool the turbines, and as a result, the upper bay was, for a long time, a lot warmer than the lower Narragansett Bay. They decommissioned and dismantled the power plant about a decade ago, and since then, the water in Mount Hope Bay has gone back to normal temperatures. So much that in recent years, the bay below us has frozen over on several occasions.

A view from the top of our street. Ice and snow on the bay.
This is following a week of temperatures not rising much above freezing.

I have a neighbor who was born and raised in this town, and remembers a time before the power plant when the bay would freeze so solid they would skate on it. Considering she is just a few years older than me, that does not feel like it was all that long ago.

They have done a remarkable job of cleaning up the bay; the shellfish (clams, oysters, etc.) are remarkable. We now even have oyster farms a few miles down the coast from our home. Makes me feel there may actually be hope for the planet.

Just a peaceful morning. Savor them when they happen.

Onward,

Rade

The importance of kindness, consideration, and empathy.

Thank you, Debra of "She Who Seeks" for gifting us a beautiful poem by Danusha Laméris, "Small Kindnesses", on your blog this morning.

This is the second time in as many weeks that fellow bloggers have posted a passage or poem that stopped me in my tracks; made me sit. Exhale. Read. Contemplate the careful words, their order and meaning. Moving With Mitchell did that for me with his moving tribute to his late sister on "The Kids in the hall" blog post. It made me realize we need more of that. To stop speed-reading passages and posts; to instead read with the heart.

We need more poetry in our lives. I think the last time I let myself get absorbed in poetry was listening to Amanda Gorman reading her "The Hill We Climb" at President Biden's inauguration.

Perhaps, through poetry, we can learn to breathe... to heal.

Thank you, Debra and Mitchell!

Rade

I report only the best news here...

“First president to audibly crap himself on live television,” one commenter wrote. “That’s impressive.”

Henry Guardina of QUEERTY reports Baby Trump made a boom-boom. Apparently the camera crew from Forbes picked it up on the video feed. Otherwise, I have found no other verifiable source.

I speculate that someone splashed water on him and he began to melt.

"Oh, but his CPAP machine, Biden is SO old and frail..."