I should know what sort of fish this is, but I know only that it resembles a member of the seahorse family and it’s dead. Poor thing.

We track where the sun sets in relation to the rock o.6 nautical miles offshore. When it’s north of the rock, we think summer, and when it sets south of the rock, we know summer is gone. The truth is that this shift from south to north this happens close to the Equinoxes. The sun set right behind the rock a couple of days ago.

We have been busy and we are not ill. We gathered over 80 pounds of trash in January and well over 130 pounds in February. We have been finding a lot of those silly little plastic cigarette stems washed up in the rocks, more than half a dozen diabetic syringes (only one with a needle), and many dizen trimmings from half inch plastic pipe, each only about a centimeter long. (Forgive me for mixing measurements here.) There’s about six pounds of plastic in the bin at left. Much of it the size of postage stamps, but some of it several mils thick—commercial plastic containers broken down. We’ve found shards of plastic that have been at sea long enough to grow a beard of seaweed. Less polystyrene foam this week but bots of blue plastic bottlecaps with Asian characters. Plastic rope trimmings too. I understand that fishermen find it inconvenient to collect and properly dispose of waste, but wonder why it is any more convenient for me to do it?

I swore to purchase no more than eight items of clothing throughout this year. I put three really stunning pairs of patterns French cotton socks in an online cart and then did not buy them. So far, all I have bought is a sweater on serious mark-down and I regret that. I would rather knit myself a sweater. So that is a mistake. Seven items to go.

I did not buy much at the Twist sale, but I am wearing a new pair of earrings. Does that count as clothing? Oh, dear.

We have not missed seafood, which we decided to give up and become true vegetarians for the year. Vegan? Maybe, some day. Both of us love cheese.

The shoreline has been shifting around and this morning’s walk allowed us to walk far out on sand that really should not be here in mid-March.

I will have an essay on the Brevity blog later this month. Someone hated in-class writing prompts. I don’t like them much either, but they might be characterized as a necessary evil. It takes courage to write what you do not want to put in words, to address (or even to write counter to) a prompt you don’t like. Every publication I have received was of writing that began from an assignment or prompt, rarely one I deliberately chose. It’s always a risk.

Three men—sometimes four—have been nailing down decking next door for two weeks. They spend a curious amount of each day standing or sitting around, mostly on their cell phones. One man might hold the board down while the other two are on their phones. Perhaps they need to call their mothers for confirmation about their work? They must be using some tropical hardwood decking since they drill pilot holes for each nail and then discuss it before drilling the next hole. Have they never heard of a drill jig? The boards are as much as three feet too long, which suggests they have ordered the wrong lengths. They trimmed some of the decking but not all the way level with the finish length, and not all of it is trimmed at all. (This is generally a very fast step.) What they’ve done so far has provided a couple dozen 1′ trims. Useless off-cuts. Perhaps they have some masterplan I cannot figure out? (It looks like a pretty simple operation. They doubled the number of joists because the old deck was 2x and this one is 1″ lumber. That went reasonably fast compared to putting down the actual decking, which I swear I could have have completed in three days, and I am old. There is nothing tricky about it that I can see—set up a jig to mark pilot holes, nail it down with a nail gun, next board almost as fast as I can type it. Then the trimming with a skillsaw at the speed of a slow walk along the edges of the deck.) Not to mention the deck is not built in a way to shed water. Yesterday there were puddles until late afternoon from the night’s rain.

The May-blooming rhododendron is opening pink blossoms already.

Maybe we are all a little confused.