Sunday, October 9, 2016

Paradise afternoon ponders...

Paradise afternoon ponders...  I made good progress today on the mud room electrical work.  Three outlet boxes are wired, and the most challenging bit (tapping into power for the lights, and wiring up a 3-way switch on the existing indoor switch) is finished.  Remaining: mounting the plates for the exterior lights (I've started that, but there's much to go), mounting the box for the chandelier, and wiring the three remaining outlet boxes.  I'll finish tomorrow or Tuesday, unless something bad happens.  I did have to make a run to Lowe's today for some parts; that always eats up more time than you'd think (two and a half hours today)...

I set up the trail cam yesterday to see if we have visiting deer at night.  The setup is shown in the photo at right – the trail cam is strapped to the tree trunk on the right side of the photo.  The salt lick is the orange blob hanging by a rope.  So do we have deer visiting the salt lick?  The answer is plain to see below.  Also plain to see: I've got the camera too close to the salt lick.  I'll fix that when I take the SD card back out.  The one color picture was captured during the day; I included it just to show the “other” mode of the trail cam.  In daylight, it takes nice color pictures.  At night, it uses an infrared flash (which the animals can't see) and takes black-and-white pictures.  As always, click any photo to embiggen...


I mentioned the other day that we'd received the rock veneer I'd ordered from Stone NW in Portland, Oregon.  I didn't show you what it looked like, though – so here it is:


I had a nice walk with the puppies this afternoon, a quick march on our usual route.  It was wall-to-wall blue sky, 62°F, a light breeze, fall color in every direction, and the lovely scent of drying hay wafting to us.  The puppies had a grand time chasing butterflies and crickets, and lunging hopefully at every song bird that flew within a couple hundred feet.  They studiously ignored a big red-tail hawk circling overhead.  Upon spying the remains of an exploded Mylar balloon, they suddenly got very cautious – they approached slowly, head low, and when the wind fluttered it they leaped back about six feet.  Then they'd approach again, ever so slowly.  Finally, Mako dared to touch it with his paw – and when it didn't fight back, the two puppies leaped upon it and within seconds had it in tiny pieces.  We came across the two giant mowers we saw working yesterday – these they ran fearlessly toward, and started snuffling everything within reach of a puppy nose.  With the dogs for scale, you can see just how big these things are.  The stair to the cab particularly interested them; something good must have been rubbed on there. :)  Along the walk we passed a little sign I've seen hundreds of times now, but which frustrates the heck out of me.  The sign wants me to protect a survey marker (generally a bronze plaque set in a concrete post) – but I can't find the darned marker!  I've searched the area around this sign probably 20 times, but I've never spotted that marker.  There are piles of weeds there, so it's entirely possible for it to be there ... but invisible to me.  Oh, well...


More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection.  It's family day today!

This is an undated studio portrait of my sister Holly.  I'm guessing it was from the early '70s (and she'd have been in her late teens), and was taken after I'd left home to join the U.S. Navy.  The original is an 8x10 on fancy embossed paper, and my mom wrote “Holly” on the back – I guess mom thought we wouldn't recognize her. :)  Gotta love those octagonal glasses frames!  From the distortion of her face through her left lens (right side of the photo), you can tell that she already had a fairly high prescription for myopia, just as I did at that age.  I'm struck by the necklace she's wearing (a little cross) – an overtly religious symbol that I wasn't aware anyone in my family ever displayed.

In fountain pen, my mom wrote “Acadia Park”, meaning Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine.  I have many wonderful memories of the coast of Maine, including Acadia National Park; we visited there nearly every summer while we were at our camp near Lincoln, Maine.  This photo is dated (by the lab) December 1959.  Left-to-right that's my brother Scott, my dad, and me, looking in the tide pools (where there are all sorts of fascinating things).  My dad had a lifelong fascination with tide pools; when he spotted a rocky shoreline, that's where he wanted to go.  On a conversation during one of our many trips, he told me about the many happy days he spent along the rocky coast near Naples, Italy during the war.  Whenever he had a short time off, he'd hitch a ride to some point near the coast, and spend some hours hiking around the tide pools there.

This is a very nice portrait of my dad, circa the late '90s.  It's an undated studio shot, and if you look closely you can see that my mom has been clipped out of the frame.  That sounds like something she would do – she was always ashamed of her appearance, and absolutely hated photographs of herself.  It's one of the reasons I cherish the few photos I do have of her.  This photo shows my dad during the last years when his physicality was still high.  It would only be a few years until he struggled to hike even easy trails.

Here's one that triggers lots of memories for me.  The lab dates this February 1962, but given there are still leaves on the trees, it was probably really taken in the fall of '61.  My brother Scott is on the left, me on the right.  We're sitting on the left rear fender of my dad's International 240H tractor, which he bought new in 1959.  In this photo it's just a couple years old, and still looking quite nice.  It got much more beat up over the next decades; my dad kept it until the early '00s.  The building behind us is Julius Mate's little house.  The camera is looking to the southeast.  At the time this photo was taken, south of his house was our greenhouse, where Julius helped my dad propagate cuttings and seedling plants, mostly American holly trees.  I have many memories of working in that greenhouse, of repairing the glass in it, and of tearing it down in the late '60s.  My dad grew cuttings to duplicate a horticultural variety that he liked, and grew seedlings (which all have some genetic variation) in the hopes of discovering new varieties that would be horticulturally valuable.  Once he even sent off some holly berries to Rutgers University, where they were irradiated in the hopes of creating a beneficial mutation.  He gave that up when several hundred irradiated seeds proved mostly non-viable, with the few survivors being most unattractive.

The lab dates this December 1959, but it was almost certainly taken in the summer.  The location is just outside our cabin in Maine; the camera is looking to the north.  I'm on the left, my brother Scott on the right.  On the back my mom wrote “Carting wood into camp!”; I remember doing this many, many times.  The wood stove inside the camp both heated the single room and provided the stove to cook our meals.  You can see the dense undergrowth in the woods behind us, entirely typical of a forest in Maine.  Looking at that I can almost smell the forest there.  You can see a bit of the crude siding the camp was sheathed with, and one end of the sawhorse we used for cutting wood.  Just out of sight was the stump we used as a base for splitting logs for kindling, another thing I remember doing many times.  I'd have been almost seven when this was taken, and my brother about five and a half.  That's probably about the last time I could carry more than he could. :)

And yet another major memory trigger...  This one is also dated December 1959 by the lab.  Like the photo above, it's almost certainly from the preceding summer.  This was taken inside our cabin in Maine.  The rocker that I'm sitting on is now in my barn.  The upholstery is a little threadbare, and it's got a few dings, but I loved it as a kid, and I love it still – so many good memories around it!  Most of those memories involve either my dad (who like to sit in it, and would rock us on his lap) or Doc Johnson (who liked to sit in it while nursing a drink, which he'd occasionally share with me).  I remember that rug, and I remember my grandfather (my mom's dad) telling us the story of how he got it – but I've forgotten the story!  All I remember is that when he told it, all the adults laughed uproariously, and was always worried that one of the local cops might see it.  He'd joke about needing to roll it up if a stranger's car drove in.  On the back, my mom wrote “love this picture in camp -”.  I do, too, mom.  I do, too...

My mom wrote “Scott” on the back of this one, and it's a good thing she did.  I'd never have recognized him in this photo, which is pretty clearly the best he's ever looked. :)  The photo is undated, but he's still wearing his hospital ID bracelet, so it must have been taken within a few days of his birth – in late December of '53.  Look at those little fists, and that expression!  It looks like he's getting ready to punch out someone, doesn't it?

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  I spent most of yesterday working on the electrical bits of our new mud room.  First job was to find out where the switch was that controlled an outlet that used to be embedded in the soffit outside our front door.  That outlet is now in the mud room, and it looked like a convenient place to steal electricity from.  It turned out that a switch we'd never discovered the purpose of was the culprit – a switch very conveniently just inside our front door.  That solved one challenge very easily!  Most of the mud room is new construction, and the inside isn't sheathed yet – that makes wiring a breeze.  One wall, however, is “old work” – the wall containing our old front door.  I worked yesterday mostly on routing power for the two outlets that will be in that wall, and exposing the switch on the opposite side of the wall that will control the overhead chandelier in the mud room.  Naturally I had to make a parts run. :)  Overall, though, this wiring will be easier than I had expected it to be.  Progress!

In the early afternoon I took a walk with the puppies, on our usual route to the east of our home. We walked just over two miles, and it was very pleasant indeed.  The temperature was in the high 50s, the skies mostly clear, a light breeze, and the aroma of freshly mown hay filled the air.  The alfalfa fields we were walking by (at right) had been mowed just a few hours before; the giant mowers were still working in the distance.  At the mid-point of our walk we passed the field where the mowers were working – two huge machines that looked a lot like combines.  One was being driven by a young woman, sitting high above us, who gave the puppies a big smile and me a cheery wave as she turned her monster machine around at the end of a row.  The puppies were fascinated by the machines, and oddly enough, not at all afraid.  The drivers sit in comfortable chairs in air conditioned glass cubicles, and I could hear the music they were listening to over the noise of the machine.

I'll be concentrating on the electrical work again today...