Author Archives: Mark P

A dog’s age

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I walked Zeke down Fouche Gap Road every weekend when I was working, and now since I have retired I walk him every day. When we got Lucy after my mother died, she began to accompany us. When we got Sam, he accompanied us. For a long time our two-mile walk took a little under an hour. We never hurried. There was always something to sniff, a squirrel or a passing car to watch.

A while ago our walks started taking around an hour, partly because I let Sam and Zeke play at the turn-around point. Sam is a whirlwind; he dives in and grabs Zeke by the leg or neck, then jumps away, spins and dives back in. For the most part, Zeke stands and parries, or rolls over onto his back and pushes with his legs while Sam dances around. Sometimes Zeke chases Sam, at least to the end of the leash. Sometimes Zeke even seems to initiate the play. So, that takes a little while.

Lately our walks have been lasting closer to an hour and a half. It seems like I’m always urging Zeke along. He stops and stares into the distance. He cuts in front of me and stops, forcing me to stop. He drags along slowly as we climb the mountain and then climb up our driveway. I find myself wondering if he is slowing down because he’s getting old.

old-zeke

His white face makes it hard to tell whether he’s getting gray. If you look closely in the brown on the right side of his face, it seems like there are some white hairs mixed in, but nothing like Lucy.

old-lucy

We have had Zeke since around the middle of 2006, so we know he is at least 10 years old. He was an adult when we got him; I’m sure he was at least a year old then, maybe even older. That’s pretty old for a dog, especially a big dog.

So I wonder. It’s inevitable, of course. Sooner or later the signs will be obvious, and that’s going to be hard for him and for me.

I suppose I’m not that far behind him.

Cameras cameras cameras

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I’m afraid I might have a slight case of the new camera bug.

We have several cameras.

cameras2

cameras1

Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. I bought the one on the left, a little Canon Elph, to take with me when I traveled for work. The really neat thing about it is that it can fit into a pocket easily. The bad thing is that it is extremely slow. It’s slow to take a picture, which can be maddening if you want to catch a specific moment, and it is slow to cycle so that you can take another picture. It’s so maddening that we bought the next camera to the right, a Nikon S9700.

The little Nikon is still barely pocketable. It has a wide zoom ratio, and it has some nice features that make it a little more than just a point-and-shoot. It also suffers a little from slowness, although not nearly as much as the Canon. Its main drawback is that it has trouble focusing a little more often than it should.

The next camera is an Olympus EPL1, an early mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera. It’s a decent camera, but it’s also a little slow to cycle from one shot to the next. It has a larger sensor, so theoretically it can take “better” photos than the first two.

The last one is a Nikon D60, one of the older Nikon amateur cameras. It is a very nice camera. It takes good photos and it has little trouble focusing. It’s relatively quick to shoot. Its main drawback is its size. Look at it compared to the others. We end up just not taking it with us because it takes a commitment. For instance, I would never take it into the Dark Side of the Moon bar, where we have been going for jazz Tuesdays.

Tuesday of last week I took the little Nikon S9700. I was wearing cargo pants and it fit reasonably well into the big leg pocket. I fiddled a little with it, turned it from fully automatic to manual and adjusted the light sensitivity (ISO) and took this shot.

bartender

We know the bartender, but, I’m sorry to have to say that we have forgotten his name. We’ll remedy that next time we go.

I took another shot after we left. This one is taken from the same location as one I took the previous week with my iPhone. The Nikon shot is quite a bit better.

nightcity

For example, the streetlight is much better rendered.

We also found this fellow on Broad Street.

scarecrow

The iPhone takes good movies. So does the little Nikon.

I wanted to post this one because it shows the neat cycling colors on the liquor shelf, plus you can hear the band a little — not well, but at least it has that bar ambiance. You can’t tell how loud the band is from this video. My ears were just barely not ringing when we left the bar.

So what does all this mean for a slight case of new camera fever? And why do I have it anyway? Well, since we never take the big Nikon, there’s no reason to keep it. It takes good pictures but if we never carry it, it doesn’t take any pictures. The small Canon has great pocketability, but its picture-taking is just too frustrating. So there’s no reason to keep that. The Olympus is showing its technological age, so I think it needs to go as well. The little Nikon has that big zoom, and it takes reasonably decent pictures. It can also fit into a big pocket. But I want something a little better. A successor to the Olympus, one model older than the current model, remedies most of the old Olympus’s drawbacks and it can be had with an extra tele-zoom lens for quite a reasonable cost. It’s biggest drawback is that in its current form, with a kit short zoom, it won’t fit into any pocket in any clothes that I currently wear.

What I’d like to do, if Leah agrees to it, is to keep the little Nikon to carry around in my pocket (if I’m wearing cargo pants) and get the newer Olympus for some more serious photography. There is even a very short lens available for it that would make it only a little bigger than the little Nikon. It’s even a reasonable price, but maybe a little hard to justify for our current situation.

Leah and I will have to have a discussion of the pros and cons.

Cats in the house

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Our menagerie seems to be settling into the new location. Smokey is his usual self, looking for food first, and then affection.

faceoff

Leah has been worried about where Dusty and sometimes Chloe will go when it gets cold, assuming that it ever does. We put two cat houses on the front porch, where Leah feeds those two cats. One house is a store-bought dog/cat house. Since Chloe doesn’t want to be too close to Dusty, we thought we should have another house, so we made one by cutting a door into a plastic storage box. We were surprised on Thursday to find both cats sharing the dog/cat house.

sharing_the_house

I’m pretty sure this is as close to Heaven as Dusty gets these days. I’m pretty sure Chloe doesn’t feel the same.

How dry I am

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The weather here on the mountain has been very pleasant for the last couple of weeks. It has been sunny, warm during the day, cool at night, and dry. Mostly dry. This part of northwest Georgia is in “exceptional drought” according to the US drought monitor. Here’s the map, followed by the scale.

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Floyd County is roughly in the middle of the region; it’s the county that looks like of like a fist giving a thumbs up. Based on the official airport record, we have had exceptionally little rain on the mountain from July through October 26. This July was the seventh driest on record at 1.45 inches, far below the average of 4.71 inches. September was the driest on record; the airport recorded 0.24 official inches in September, although I don’t believe we had that up here. October at 0.01 inches so far is third behind 1963 and 1938, which had no rain in October; not much real difference there. I’ll come back to August.

Based on the precipitation record, we are on track to have the fourth driest four-month period since 1900. The only reason it’s not the driest period on record is that the airport recorded a huge amount of rain in August (6.42 inches) which we did not have up here on the mountain.

All the houses on the mountain rely on wells for water. So far we have not had any obvious problems with ours. However, when I took the dogs out to the street for a restroom break, some neighbors from up the street stopped on their way down to visit a friend and fill a large water tank on their trailer. They said that they had had a 400-gallon water tank installed in their basement for backup. In fairness, I think some other neighbors told us that  those neighbors had been having well problems earlier, so their current problem may not be entirely due to the drought.

On Tuesday there was a 160-acre wildfire on the other side of town from us. Other fires in the vicinity have been even larger. That might not sound like a large wildfire compared to those in the western US, but they are large for this area.

We have given up on the idea of planting anything in the yard until next spring; we simply cannot risk using well water to keep plants alive and maybe not having enough water for household use.

There is essentially no rain in the near-term forecast. The next few months are expected to be warmer and drier than normal. In addition to exceptionally little rain this summer, we have also had exceptionally hot weather. I expect to see a larger-than-normal number of trees dying in the next year or two as a result of the drought stress from this summer.

A few new shots

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Last Tuesday when we went downtown for jazz night at a local bar, the moon was close to full. The only camera I had was, of course, the one in my iPhone. This is how the moonrise looked from Broad Street.

night_triple2

The City Clock is at center. I have mentioned that before. The First Baptist Church is on the right. The large brick building in the center is the old, old Post Office, which also housed the federal court at the time. My father worked for many years in that Post Office before the it moved about two blocks away. He retired from what was then the “new” Post Office. The Post Office moved yet again after he retired. I still like the old, old building.

Here’s a sunrise, this time from our driveway, featuring the twisted old maple tree we saved when we cleared the lot.

maplesunrise

According to our Atlanta TV station, Saturday night was the coldest night since last April. It was not our coldest night, because of this:

inversion_sunrise

What looks like a vast sea is the top of the temperature inversion from overnight. It got down to around 40F beneath that fog; however, since the winds had died down and it was clear, our low up on the mountain was 51F.