New Hampshire

I've recently begun working my way up and down the New Hampshire Seacoast photographing the natural and man made landscape. I've started a Flickr photoset to chronicle these adventures.

Thursday night and Friday a really impressive ice storm battered New Hampshire and the governor declared a state of emergency. Two days later, over 300,000 households are still without power, including ours. We're also missing our landline phone and internet services, and there's no reason to believe that any of this will be fixed anytime soon. Fortunately, we built our house shortly after another impressive ice storm left parts of the region without power for 23 days. As a result, we've got a 17 kW diesel generator out beside the garage that's been keeping us nice and toasty. I've been staying in touch with people using my cell phone, but Verizon's voice service doesn't work inside the house (weirdly, the data service does) so conversations tend to be limited to the length of time I can stand to sit outside on the porch. If you're comfortably situated, too, please join us in contributing to the American Red Cross, whose disaster services are being stretched thin caring for hundreds of people across the state.

Update: We got everything back Monday evening, but 70,000 New Hampshire customers are still without power.

Royal Irish Artilllery
American Independence Festival
Exeter, New Hampshire

I spoke with the major earlier in the morning and asked permission to be as close as he felt was safe. It paid off in this shot.

Kudos to NH Republican chairman Fergus Cullen for calling in to NHPR’s The Exchange this morning to argue for the inclusion of third-tier candidates in the final presidential debates before the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday. It is not for ABC or Fox, argues Fergus, to decide who’s in and who’s out before NH voters themselves have spoken. He seemed particularly aggrieved that sitting U.S. Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd could be watching the debates on TV instead of participating.

Fergus sounded so sincere in his media criticism that I didn’t even mind the not-so-hidden agenda: the more air time given to candidates who are unlikely to be the Democratic nominee in the fall, the less voters will hear from front runners Clinton, Edwards, and Obama, one of whom is almost certain to be.