Author Archives: Mark P

Finally fall

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Fall has finally come to north Georgia. We had about an inch and three quarters of rain a few days ago, and then a couple of cloudy days, but Monday morning was clear and cool. It was foggy when I took the dogs for their walk.

suninthefog_2

suninthefog_1

There was a little wind that blew the fog through the trees.

It’s prime time for funnel web spiders.

funnelwebs

There are so many along the road, it’s a little mind-boggling to think about how many of these spiders must inhabit this little patch of forest.

A little further down Fouche Gap Road the sun made another nice shot above the trees.

fogontheroad

It was too bright to get a good shot of the fog, but I did catch something else about 35 or 40 feet above the road, just below the treeline.

webinthefog

I would never have seen it if not for the dew on the web and the angle of the sun.

We walked up to the house on the way back so I could check on a material delivery. Most of the fog was gone.

fog_at_the_house

As we west down on our walk I could see that the valley was pretty much filled with fog. I had been thinking that we were up in the clouds, but we were actually just sticking up above the fog.

The framers are flying

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Our framing crew started work last Wednesday, Sept 30. The framing contractor showed up late in the morning with his crew and we discussed what was going to be done. Then he left his six-man crew with a supervisor and a translator and the crew got started. Here is most of the first half-day’s work

am9sept30_wed

They have framed the front of the basement and are starting the interior partitions in the basement. Here is the work they finished the next day.

5pm01oct_thurs

They have completed everything in the basement except the stairs from the main level, and they have put on the main level deck. That was Thursday. Here’s what they did on Friday.

pm3oct2friday

They didn’t start work in the morning because Friday morning is payday. But they came after lunch and worked till it was too dark to work any more. They finished almost all the exterior walls, save only the rough openings for the living room and bedroom windows and the front door. That was my fault. I had to bring them the dimensions of the rough openings for all of those, which I did not have at the time. Most of the interior walls are framed as well. The exterior of the garage was almost completed except for the sheathing and the front wall, which required a long beam that had not been delivered at that time. They ran out of material Monday afternoon. Here’s what the house looked like then.

pm1230oct5_mon

It’s hard to see what they did, but they did quite a bit on the interior.

I couldn’t get the next material load delivered until later in the day on Tuesday, so the crew worked on another job that day. They came back on Wednesday and flew some more.

pm7oct7_2_wed

What’s obvious is that they have started on the front porch. What you may not be able to tell is that they have essentially all the ceiling joists up for the main level.

Here’s the back of the house.

pm7oct7_wed

Both of these pictures were taken just after sunset, so they are pretty drab looking. The long, reddish brown beam over the front of the garage is laminated veneer lumber (LVL), which is sections of wood laminated (glued together) into a single beam. LVL’s are relatively thin, which means that two were required, but they are easier to handle than a single, wide beam. You can also see the garage ceiling joists here.

The lumber in front of the garage is most of what’s needed to frame the roof — we’re going with stick-built instead of roof trusses — and the front porch. Another load of lumber is supposed to be delivered on Thursday (today).

I am impressed by the work this crew has done. They are all Hispanic, Mexican I presume. One can speak English like a native, but the translator has a little more trouble. He and I have been able to communicate well enough that can understand what he’s talking about when he describes the little problems and detours that any construction project involves. From what I can tell, their work is good as well as fast.

I suspect that if the framer I originally contacted had actually shown up to work, the framing would be nowhere close to this far along. I’m glad these guys are doing the work.

Sam

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sam eyes

Meet Sam, neighbor (and grading person) John’s dog. His incredible eyes are his most distinctive visual characteristic. His ears are probably the second.

samears

Sam is the most skittish dog I have ever met. I fed him for a week earlier in the summer when John and his family took a vacation. He watched me from the woods but never came close. Prior to the last few days I have been able to pet him only when John’s helper Ron was petting him. Ron picked Sam up from his previous owners for John and took him to John’s home. Apparently for that reason Sam thinks Ron saved him. Sam also lets John’s wife’s son Logan pet him. But never me, or Leah, or even John.

And then Zeke escaped on Friday and ran for hours with Sam. And then Zeke escaped again on Saturday and ran for hours with Sam. Logan and Sam have taken evening walks with Leah, Zeke, Lucy and me (and the other dog next door), and now Zeke has recruited Sam as a pack member.

Sam lets me pet him now. In fact, he voluntarily approaches me for petting. If I happen to touch him when he doesn’t expect it, he still jumps away, but he comes back. He took a walk with me and the dogs on Sunday. I tried to shoo him away because I didn’t want him to get hit by a car, but I couldn’t bring myself to be harsh enough to make him to go back. He actually did quite well on the walk. He stayed fairly close, and he ran up into the woods whenever a car approached.

Here he is with the little brown dog I mentioned earlier.

sam and copper

Sam’s coat is probably just as dirty as Zeke’s was after his rain-soaked romp, but its color is almost perfect to hide the red clay we have around here. The neighbors who have been taking care of the little brown dog have named him Copper. We have trouble remembering that and usually call him Cooper, which is the name of my nephew’s dog.

Copper is supposed to go to the neighbor’s mother’s house soon. I hope she spoils him. Sam, on the other hand, seems quite happy lying in our driveway.

 

Dog – House

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Friday morning we got the first real rain we’ve had for about a month and a half. We ended up with nearly two inches. That was both good and bad news. The good news, of course, was that we got some much-needed rain. It was bad news on two counts.

The first was that some time during the morning while it was still raining, we somehow left a door open and Zeke escaped for a long morning romp. He came back some time after noon looking like this.

dirtydog

If you know Zeke, you know that he should be more white than Georgia-clay red. He has been muddier, but not much. I had given him a bath only a few days before, but now he really needed another one. In fact, he really needed two, but he only got one.

The second part of the bad news comes along with some really good news. The good news is that we now have a framer who could start as early as this Monday. Our Realtor neighbor, who handled the sale of my mother’s house and our purchase of our new lot, gave us the name of a builder, who found a framer. His price is higher than the estimate our erstwhile framer gave us, but it doesn’t matter how cheap a contractor is if he never shows up. So we’re going with the new framer.

The bad news is that we have had nearly two inches of rain and more is expected for the next few days. That means the framer will almost certainly not be able to start work on Monday. What makes this even worse is that the weeks that the first framer cost us have been nearly perfect for framing.

Cloud spotting

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The sale of digital cameras is apparently slowing down because everyone now carries a cell phone that can take pictures almost as good as many cameras, at least much of the time. I have fallen prey to that same practice; the camera on my iPhone takes such good pictures in many situations that I rarely take a camera with me. Leah and I regretted that choice on Tuesday.

We had been downtown that evening and were driving back home just as the sun was setting. We were commenting all the way from town about how beautiful the clouds were, and how they looked like a painting. Then we turned onto Technology Parkway, which turns into Huffaker Road, and leads almost due west for several miles. That put the sunset directly ahead of us down the road. This sunset was one of the most beautiful, impressive and unusual ones that we had ever seen. Most of the clouds were dark against the sky. The sun was directly behind some clouds in the far distance. Those clouds were outlined by a brilliant, neon orange rim, and pink and gray crepuscular rays shot out around them. So I pulled out my phone and tried to take a picture. Unfortunately, since this situation was not one of those that a phone camera does well, you will have to take my word for it. Here’s the photo.

silverlining

Cell phone cameras have wide angle lenses, which I usually like for landscapes, but in this case I desperately needed a zoom lens. The part of the image I wanted is very small in the original shot, and cropping down that much requires a lot more resolution than the cell phone camera can provide. I cropped it down here so you can get a vague idea of what we saw.

silverzoom

It is an understatement to say that these images don’t do justice to the scene as we saw it. I’ve learned a lesson from this: from now on, I’m taking a camera.

However, the cell phone did a great job for this image.

K-Hinstability

These clouds show a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the atmosphere. They are basically just like breaking waves in the ocean. There are plenty of much better examples online, but this is one of the best I have seen recently.

One of the things I like about seeing phenomena like this is that they tell you what’s going on in the atmosphere. From a distance I can tell that the atmosphere is stratified and that there are layers of air moving at different velocities. The wave clouds are right that the interface of those two layers. That kind of information doesn’t give me any practical benefit, but I like having it anyway.