Sunrise at caniconfidimus

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Mark P

Sunrise on Sunday from our bed:

The sun is edging south as the season progresses. It has been rising just out of view to the left of the window from our bed, but it’s now almost visible. We don’t have any window treatments, so it’s going to serve as our alarm clock soon.

We don’t have curtains, but at last we have cabinets. This was our kitchen on Tuesday.

I had already cleared out the boxes that had been sitting on the floor, the bifold door for the master bath, and the shelves you can see just inside our dining/living area.

This was our kitchen on Thursday, after a day of work by cabinet installers.

Zeke is thoughtfully searching for spilled food.

The dishwasher hasn’t been installed. At the time of this photo, neither had the range. The countertop installers are supposed to do a final measurement of the base cabinets soon, and then, after around two weeks, we should have quartz countertops. That will be nice — a completed kitchen. Well, complete except for window trim, base moldings and crown molding.

To bookend things, this was the sunset on Sunday.

This was shot with my iPhone, as usual, cropped down so you can get at least a hint of what the sunset really looked like. And, as usual, it was shot on a city street, the only place we have now where we can actually see the sunset.

The City Clock

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Mark P

Robert Redden, a locally well-known pen-and-ink artist, sent my parents a card in 1970. It shows a rendering of Rome’s most famous (again, locally) structure, the City Clock, or the Clock Tower.

The brick tower was built in 1872 to house a water tank, Rome’s first source of piped drinking water. A year later a large, white clock was added to the top. The tower stands on Neely Hill (now often called Clock Tower Hill), two blocks from downtown. It’s visible from much of the immediate city. It’s also visible from our new house.

This is our view east off the front porch of our new house looking towards downtown Rome. The arrow indicates the tiny speck that is the City Clock as seen from around eight miles away.

The arrow is pointing towards the Clock Tower.

I zoomed in as much as I could with my little Nikon point-and-shoot to get this shot.

That close to the ground there are air currents, particulate matter and temperature gradients that compromise visibility even on a clear day. The blue sky also tends to give the scene an overall blue tint.

Leah’s mother Venita was a china painter. Here is her rendering.

This is hanging on our living room wall. My father’s sister Francis did this needlepoint or petit point rendering of the City Clock in 1977.

Here is a photograph Leah and I made Friday night.

The area several blocks around the City Clock is known as Between the Rivers. This Google Earth image shows why.

The upper river in the image is the Oostanaula. The river at the bottom is the Etowah. They join at the 100 block of Broad Street to form the Coosa River, which then flows into Alabama and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. The building with the green roof to the left of the clock tower is the old US Post Office, where my father worked for many years.

This is a zoomed view.

I labeled the Clock Tower. This view is almost straight down to the clock. The tower’s shadow is visible pointing slightly to the left of up in the image. We took the picture standing near where the “m” is in “Camera.” The street that runs above the City Clock roughly bottom right towards top left is Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue is a very steep downhill two blocks to Broad Street. When my father was a kid, he and his friends would time the traffic light at Fifth Avenue and Broad Street so that they could push off on their bicycles right at the base of the clock tower, zoom down the hill and hit a green light on Broad Street. I think he was a lucky kid.

Leah’s father’s family lived about a block from the City Clock. My father’s uncle Charlie lived for a time on Third Avenue.

Some of Rome’s oldest and most impressive homes are in this area. We took our photograph next to, and later on the steps of, a house that recently sold for over $1 million. You can see one of its columns to the left in our picture. This house as well as many of the others in this area are huge monuments to something or other. Conspicuous consumption, I believe.

Although Between the Rivers is a prestigious area, living there does have its drawbacks. One of them is a 32-inch-tall bronze bell at the top of the City Clock that chimes the hours. Every hour. Day and night.

The next time Leah and I are near downtown, I want to use some binoculars to try to see our new house from the City Clock.

Post-Christmas roundup

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Mark P

Christmas day was quiet up on the mountain. I’m not sure we have done less on any given day in the recent past. We mostly sat around and listened to the rain. The only time I went outside was a quick trip up the road to let Zeke take care of his business, and a couple of even quicker trips around the house to let both dogs do their business. The rest of the time we stayed inside, and did nothing and saw no one.

We had been having egg nog every evening since Thanksgiving, so Thursday night when we realized we had run out of egg nog before we ran out of Southern Comfort, I went back down to the grocery store for more. They were sold out. I checked a couple of liquor stores, and they had run out, too. I stopped at a convenience store and they didn’t know what egg nog was. So we didn’t have egg nog for Christmas night.

We had another foiled Christmas tradition. Leah has made it a custom to give the guy who makes our eyeglasses a spiked fruitcake every Christmas. We prepared the fruitcake and took it by his office on Tuesday, only to find out that they had closed their office until the Monday after Christmas. I think it will be okay to deliver on Monday; I’m pretty sure it has been properly preserved.

Late in the day Leah started preparing Christmas dinner. We had deep-fried turkey (store bought) and cornbread dressing (home made, and very good) with turkey gravy (let’s say half store bought and half home made). It was good, so I ate a lot. Leah says she ate a lot, but she really didn’t.

A few days before Christmas we had given in and put a couple of decorations in the living room, but we didn’t put up a tree. That was OK, since we had each bought our own presents weeks earlier.

All in all, we both thought it was a pretty decent Christmas. We hope everyone had at least as good Christmas as we did.

The most memorable features of Christmas here, as well as most of the East Coast, were rain and extraordinarily high temperatures. A lot of places west and south of us had much more rain and much worse weather than we did, but we had a lot of rain. When I went outside Saturday morning, I could hear the dull road from the rush of water in all the streams flowing down the mountain. The rivers and most of the larger streams around Rome were at or over flood stage, although there was no severe flooding. We don’t know exactly how much rain we had on the mountain, because our rain gauge is broken.

Saturday morning we saw sunlight for the first time in days.

A little later it looked like the clouds would disappear.

And then a little later than that, it looked like it would rain again.

It did rain, but only a light mist that didn’t even get me and the dogs wet when we went up to look at the house. The house weather tight now, but someone left a window open before it started raining, so the floor sheathing was wet in some places. I wanted to see if a particular place was wetter. It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t dry. I don’t know whether it’s a leak, or maybe someone just dropped a water bottle.

We had a rough inspection on December 23. It covered plumbing, electrical, heating and air conditioning, and framing. The inspector left me with a list of eight things that need to be addressed before he will sign off. Two are fairly serious framing issues. The ridge beam needs more support for one thing. That should be straightforward. The other issue is a butchered i-joist where the plumber cut away some of the upper part of the joist to get the master bath shower drain in. When I saw that a few days earlier I knew it was going to be a problem; I just don’t know why the plumbers didn’t know that. I have to call the framer to see what we can do about those two issues.

The plumber also missed a few places that need metal plates to protect pipes from drywall screws and nails. I also don’t know why they missed those, but at least all those will require is a metal plate and a few nails.

The inspector found no problems with the electrical or heating/cooling system. That’s good. He also said we can proceed with insulation, since that won’t cover any of the required fixes.

So insulation is the next big project, and I intend to do this one myself.

Night view

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Mark P

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.

Late fall color

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Mark P

The fall leaf colors are past their peak here, but there are still some trees that are stubbornly hanging onto their leaves and their color. Leah mentioned a couple of times that we should drive up into the northeast Georgia mountains to see some of the fall leaves, but we couldn’t seem to find time.

The best view up here is on the Huffaker Road side of Fouche Gap, down into the valley. This was from Friday morning’s dog walk.

Another view:

The most common hardwood up on the mountain is oak, but the maples and hickories provide by far the best color. The hickories are brilliant yellow. The maples go from greenish yellow to orange to bright red. This little maple is trying to make a living too close to the road.

Right next to it is another, yellow this time.

They won’t survive long. A county road crew will eventually cut them.

The oaks, mainly chestnut oaks, turn yellowish brown on their way to an overall drab brown. Here a maple shows an oak the way it’s supposed to be done.

Down deeper in the valley a few trees burn brightly. It’s hard to get a shot that captures the glowing brilliance almost hidden by the surrounding forest. This one was closer to the road.

I was lucky that the rain and wind we had on the previous Wednesday didn’t end what little was left of the color.

CaniConfidimus

Loyal. Trustworthy. Sometimes with fleas.

Category Archives: Views from the mountain

Sunrise at caniconfidimus

The City Clock

Post-Christmas roundup

Night view

Late fall color