Author Archives: Mark P

Night view

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nightview1

We picked a cold night to see what the night view is from our new front porch. The picture is fuzzy, but the  best I could do under the circumstances, which means putting the camera on the handrail and trying to hold it steady during the exposure. It was just below freezing, the coldest temperature we have had so far during this extraordinarily warm fall.

We, or rather the various trades, have made significant progress on the house. The plumber says he’s ready for the rough inspection. I think the heating and air conditioning is also ready. The electrician wants to check with the well driller before he says he’s ready. I also need to check with the framing contractor to see whether he thinks he’s ready. If so, maybe we can get all the rough-in inspected before Christmas.

If we pass those inspections, I can start insulating the walls. I plan to do that myself, as much to make sure it’s done right as to save money. The electrician recommended choosing a contractor to install the garage doors so he can put the low-voltage garage-door sensor wires behind the sheetrock. Once that’s done and the walls are insulated, we’ll get a sheetrock crew in.

But before we get sheetrock, I have to decide what we’re going to do about installing a wood-burning stove. I imagine that it will be easier to install the chimney, or parts of the chimney, before the attic is closed in by sheetrock. I also want to install a blower and ducts from above the stove across the attic to the master bedroom and bathroom so we can get some of the heat from the wood stove into those rooms. Part of that will also be easier without sheetrock.

The framer sent a crew to clean up debris around the exterior of the house and clean and sweep the interior. We now have a nice, big pile of construction debris that will have to be hauled to the landfill.

The framer is supposed to provide the exterior painter. I expected him to start last week, but he didn’t. Of course we had rain last week; that’s probably the reason. We picked out a color called Hunter Green. It’s a fairly dark green, one that I think will be appropriate for a woodsy setting. Even though I’m 100 percent with this choice, it is still a little outside my comfort zone. It will be interesting to see how it looks.

Sam still is

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Our neighbor’s dog Sam is still here. We have explored the possibility of having him board a transport for points north, where, apparently, dogs are wanted as pets and are not thrown away as often as down here in Georgia. But so far, I haven’t had the heart. He still stays with us almost 24 hours a day, sleeps in a dog house in our yard and accompanies the dogs and me on our walks. He also still chases a cat if the cat runs, so Leah is not exactly happy with the situation. In fact, I’m not either. We already have two dogs, which is generally one more than I want at any one time. Three would be a big stretch for us.

When we are inside sitting on our couch watching television and the dogs are lying around snoozing, Sam is often on the front walk, staring in.

sam at the door

Staring and staring.

A few days ago we brought him in on a leash. He found Lucy’s peanut butter bong and was fascinated. But Sam’s previous life must have been completely devoid of interaction with people or things. He wanted to get the peanut butter out of the bong but he couldn’t figure out how to do it, because it kept trying to get away. With some coaching, he eventually figured out to hold it with one paw.

sam with bong

A few days later, after our regular Wednesday huevos rancheros and a visit to the grocery store, Sam had his own peanut butter bong. We brought him in (actually he followed me and Zeke in on his own) and put a little peanut butter in his bong. Again, it was a mystery to him.

bong getting away

Leah helped him out for a while.

sam learning bong

Eventually he figured it out again.

sam pawing bong

But every time one of us moved or made a slight noise, he ducked and stepped away from the bong. You can see in the picture above that he’s keeping an eye on me.

We also gave Zeke and Lucy a little bong treat. At one point Sam decided to try out Zeke’s, but Zeke explained in an emphatic way that the bong was his. There were no hard feelings.

After a while we put Sam out again. Neither of us trusts him enough to let him stay inside unsupervised, and, as I mentioned above, we are not really committed to keeping him. He stared at us for a while through the storm door and then went out to his house.

 

… as a young woman

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Every once in a while someone you think you know turns out to be not quite what you thought. My old friends from the Atlanta area who now live in Denver have a daughter/granddaughter that I don’t know nearly as well as I know her mother/grandparents, but from my limited time visiting out there, I assumed she was a nice teenaged girl who wanted a Honda Element, just like every other teenaged girl. It turns out she’s not just that, she’s an artist.

Here she is at work.

artist emily

Here’s what she was working on. The antlers are cholla cactus bones.

cholla buck

Here’s another.

colonel rabbit

And, just to show she’s at home in other media.

forest

Here’s a self portrait of the artist.

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I love the whimsy in a lot of her work. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Lighter than air memories

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When Leah and I went to Little River Falls on Wednesday (Dec 2), I saw something in the distance that I thought was a hot air balloon. It turned out to be a blimp.

directv blimp

So, not the Goodyear blimp.

As it happens I actually sat in the pilot’s seat of the Goodyear blimp during a flight over Augusta, Ga, back in 1978. Being a newspaper reporter didn’t pay much, especially in Augusta, but it did have its perks. When the blimp landed at the Augusta airport, they let some local reporters go for a ride. Each of us got a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat and twirl the large wheel that controlled its vertical direction. The wheel was at my right hand, next to the seat, spin it forward to make the nose go down, and backward to make the nose go up.

This is what I got after the flight.

blimp club

I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Goodyear Blimp Club.

A few days after the blimp left, we got a call in the newsroom that the blimp had crashed at the airport. It turned out that it didn’t crash, it just tore free from its mooring. There is a special line that unzips the blimp’s envelop and deflates the balloon if it comes free from its mooring. That’s what happened, apparently during a thunderstorm. I couldn’t find the article I wrote for the newspaper, but I found the Associated Press story we sent in another newspaper.

Way, way back in the very old days, my family used to go to Akron, Ohio, to visit my mother’s family. Once so long ago that the memory is dim, we drove by the huge blimp hangar at the Goodyear plant, located at Wingfoot Lake outside Akron. During the war (that’s World War II), my grandmother worked at “the Goodyear” as they called it.

Goodyear doesn’t build blimps any more. The current Goodyear blimp is not, in fact, an actual blimp. A blimp has a completely fabric envelope. The only solid parts are the gondola and its engines. When the blimp unzipped itself in Augusta, what you saw was the gondola and a large area that looked like someone had put drop cloths down for a huge painting job.

Today’s “blimp” is actually a semirigid airship, probably more accurately known as a Zeppelin, especially since it is what Goodyear calls a hybrid of a Zeppelin airship with Goodyear modifications. It was constructed at the Wingfoot Lake hangar.

Leah named one of the stray dogs that have passed through here Zeppelin, since we were on an initial-Z naming spree.

You can find more information about Goodyear’s blimp operations at their website.

The Directv blimp is, apparently, a true blimp.

Another perk I got as a newspaper reporter was a ride in a machine that is almost the polar opposite of an airship. I’ll post about that later.

 

Roaring falls

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We had a little over three inches of rain from Tuesday morning through sometime before dawn on Wednesday, December 2. When I took the dogs for their walk Wednesday morning, runoff was still sheeting across the road at our neighbor’s driveway. As I went further, I could hear the wet-weather stream formed from the ditch on Lavender Trail. A little further and the sound was everywhere. It was so loud as I walked down the mountain that it drowned out the noise of approaching cars. It made me wonder what the Little River Falls over in Alabama looked like. So Wednesday afternoon Leah and I drover the 30 miles over have a look.

Here’s what we saw. Click for a bigger image.

LRCpano2dec2015

Here’s what it looked like from the bridge just upstream.

upfallsLRC_2dec2015

The sound is necessary to appreciate the falls. Here’s a video I shot with our little Nikon point and shoot.

If you can’t view that one, try this one.

I have posted images of these falls before, once here and another time here. I thought I had seen the river high, but I was mistaken. This was really high. If I’m reading the USGS data correctly, this may be a new recorded instantaneous high flow.