Miscellaneous

Have I Got Dogs?

Photograph taken on Friday, December 28, 2018 by Henry
Dogs

Dogs

When Dorothy was little, one of the books we got from the library that we all really enjoyed was called Have I Got Dogs! by William Cole and illustrated by Margot Apple. It’s a really fun book and we had most of it memorized, as you do with children’s books that you read over and over. Cathy happens to have a small collection of dog figurines and they are on top of a short bookcase in our sitting room. It needs to be dusted and I’m sorry for revealing that even to my very limited audience, but the dogs themselves don’t seem to mind, so why should we. My personal favorite is the dog with the bone in his mouth, just to the right of center in this photo. I also like the little fellow eating or drinking from a plate in the lower left. “Have I got dogs, pedigrees and mutts, I have so many, some people think I’m nuts” (or something to that effect).

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Black Rock Mill

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 27, 2018 by Henry
Seneca Creek

Seneca Creek

This morning, when I went to take pictures off my camera’s memory card, it started with December 25. The last pictures on my computer had been from December 23 and for a little while I worried that I hadn’t taken any on the 24th. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world, of course, but I’ve gone nearly eight years taking at least one picture a day and I was upset to think that I might have missed a day. It turns out that the script I use to copy files started in the wrong place for some reason and I had pictures from the 24th (which I thought was the case).

I worked on Monday and again yesterday but today I decided to take the day off. Dorothy and I went to the Lancaster County Dutch Market in Germantown and then to Black Rock Mill, on Seneca Creek.

Seneca Creek

Seneca Creek

The first picture is looking downstream from the the banks of the creek, standing just below the mill. As you can see, it was a beautiful, cool day. The second picture is just a small bit of rapids in the creek. I think it’s a pretty picture and I love the colors of the water, as they tumble over a few small rocks. I took a few pictures of the mill, as well, and if you’ve never been there, it’s an interesting piece of history. There isn’t a lot to see, but the mill stone and some of the large gears are still there inside the building, which is otherwise basically an empty shell.

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Persian Carpet

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 26, 2018 by Henry
Persian Carpet

Persian Carpet

After we took up the wall to wall carpet in our living room, we planned to put down a large rug that was at Cathy’s mom’s house. Because I having actually finished, though, we haven’t done that yet. There is still carpet under a bookcase, the TV, and the piano. We could probably fit the rug in already, but simply haven’t done so. In the meantime, we’ve put this rug down in the middle of the room. It’s too small for the space, actually, but it keeps the coffee table from sliding on the hardwood. It’s also a very nice rug in its own right adding color to the room.

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Christmas Beads

Photograph taken on Monday, December 24, 2018 by Henry
Christmas Beads

Christmas Beads

As I mentioned a little while ago, we didn’t do a lot of decorating for Christmas. We put up the artificial tree, which already has lights on it, and I put up the Peruvian nativity scene on the piano. Other than that, not much. A few days ago, Cathy and Dorothy added a little to the tree. Mostly this included garlands of sparkling tinsel and a few long strands of red and gold glass beads. This is one of the strands of gold, and I like the way it shines in the light of the tree lights. This will almost certainly be the last of my Christmas decoration pictures for the year. Tomorrow we’ll celebrate Christmas first at our house and then at mom’s apartment.

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Clopper Lake, Seneca Creek State Park

Photograph taken on Saturday, December 22, 2018 by Henry
Clopper Lake, Seneca Creek State Park

Clopper Lake, Seneca Creek State Park

We were out and about today. Cathy, Dorothy, and I made a trip to the Lancaster Dutch Market where it seemed half the county had gathered. In spite of the crowds, the line at the butcher was relatively short and I bought a few things. Cathy waited in the much longer line for pretzels and sausage rolls (which are the main reason we went, they are amazing). From there we drove to Seneca Creek State Park and drove through, seeing the lights that have been set up as a money maker for the park (and which we have no real desire to wait in line for after dark). I took a few pictures of Clopper Lake and like this one pretty well. I made bangers and mash for dinner, with roasted garlic and Parmesan cheese added to the mash. Comfort food.

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Christmas Lights

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 20, 2018 by Henry
Christmas Lights

Christmas Lights

I went out and drove around the neighborhood late this evening to get some pictures. It was raining lightly when I went out but started raining quite hard before I got back. Mostly I took pictures of Christmas lights, sometimes holding the camera steady and other times moving it about a little during a longish exposure. This one was not blurred by movement but is focused on the driver-side window with the lights themselves out of focus, but brought somewhat into focus in the drops of rain on the glass. I also took pictures of the large, old, house in our neighborhood that was built in 1914, predating the major development by more than 50 years. Those look a bit spooky, which I like, although the house isn’t haunted, as far as I know.

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Christmas Tree Lights

Photograph taken on Sunday, December 16, 2018 by Henry
Christmas Tree Lights

Christmas Tree Lights

These are either Christmas tree lights or we’re making the jump to hyperspace. I’m not entirely sure which. Well I am, actually. I haven’t knowingly been in hyperspace, in months, at the very least. This is our Christmas tree. Technically it’s my mother-in-law’s tree but it’s up in our house, because she lives here now and we weren’t up to getting a live tree. We made room for it by moving the sofa over and pushing the eagle lectern against the wall. The tree has lights already on it, all white, as you can see. Also, we don’t have to keep it watered and won’t have to sweep up the needles that inevitably fall.

It doesn’t have any other decorations or ornaments on it, and that’s fine by me. I’m really not very big on decorations and the fact that the tree is up and there is a nativity scene set up on the piano is pretty radical for me. I don’t dislike Christmas, in particular. It’s more that I don’t associate the colors and decorations with the actual event being celebrated. That goes double for all the “winter holiday” type items and at least triple for anything Santa (especially red-Santa, who traditionally wears white).

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Peruvian Nativity Scene

Photograph taken on Friday, December 14, 2018 by Henry
Peruvian Nativity Scene

Peruvian Nativity Scene

I posted a picture of this Peruvian nativity scene last year (see: Saturday, December 23, 2017) but that was at my mother-in-law’s house. This year it’s in our living room, on top of the piano. Also, this year I confined myself to just the people and animals that actually go with the set. Last year I included two water buffaloes (one with a boy on its back), three parrots, a llama, a cow-shaped milk-pitcher, three brass monkeys (of the speak, hear, and see no evil variety), as well as various other figures. As you can see, the Pakistani Doll I photographed and posted a few weeks ago (see: Tuesday, November 27, 2018) is still on the piano.

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Safety Pins

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 by Henry
Safety Pins

Safety Pins

This is a small box of sefety pins in our bedroom. I really like the stark, hard lines and the different colored pins, as well as the slight variations of color in the metal within each one. It’s also nice that the pins vary in size. I am thinking about making this into a jigsaw puzzle. Or maybe I’ll take another photo with more pins covering more area. I think it would be a pretty challenging puzzle, especially with our tradition of not looking at the box top once you have started the puzzle. Do you do that? We consider it cheating, but apparently a lot of folk look at the photo on the box as a matter of course. To each his own, I suppose. But in our house we follow the rules.

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Cookbooks

Photograph taken on Sunday, December 09, 2018 by Henry
Cookbooks

Cookbooks

I know these “shelfies” aren’t really all that interesting but it’s an easy out when I haven’t taken a picture. Work continues to e quite busy and I’m finding it hard to get out during the day. That means I have to take a picture somewhere around the house in the evening, unless I happen to get a nice sunrise or sunset. This is (almost) one third of a large bookcase that I built when Cathy and I were first married and we had it in our apartment in Bethesda. Ralph had it in his basement while we lived in Alaska and while we were traveling. After we got back, I had it in our apartment and then in our two houses. It’s very sturdy, with 2×4 supports sandwiched between heavy plywood for the uprights. The shelves are fixed in terms of their location, although the whole thing comes apart for transporting. There is one more tall shelf space below the five shown here and the other two sections are basically the same as this one.

The books on all but the bottom shelf in this photo are cookery books of one sort or another. Some I use a lot, others almost never. I have pulled out some to give away and will probably get rid of some that are still here. I refer to some of these books quite regularly and others quite infrequently but most of the books have contributed at least something to my cooking know how.

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Watts Branch Tributary

Photograph taken on Friday, December 07, 2018 by Henry
Watts Branch Tributary

Watts Branch Tributary

This is a small tributary of Watts Branch, which comes through a culvert under West Montgomery Avenue (before it becomes Key West Avenue). On the other side of the road is a small drainage pond build for storm water management and in which there were beavers living until a few years ago. It joins a larger creek that flows through another storm water management pond between my cuilding and the rest of our company’s campus. It goes back under West Montgomery Avenue again before draining into Watts Branch near the Interstate 270 interchange.

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Eagle Reflections

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 06, 2018 by Henry
Eagle Reflections

Eagle Reflections

It was getting late and I hadn’t taken any pictures today. I was in the living room a looking at the reflections in the corner cupboard. I posted a picture in August (see Sunday, August 26, 2018) but I thought I’d try to get a shot with a reflection of the eagle lectern this time. The lighting was the tricky part, getting enough light on the very dark wood of the eagle without getting too much on the glass itself. This one works pretty well. It doesn’t show as much of the waviness in the glass as I’d have liked, but some, anyway. I also with the wooden door frame had been in better focus. I took some with a smaller aperture but they were not as good for other reasons. It’s hard to judge these things completely on the small display screen on the back of the camera. Still, it’s better than the old days, when we had to wait to get the film back from Kodak before we knew if we had anything useful.

Also, with the cost of film and processing coming to somewhere around 20¢ per shot, we tended to be a little more careful how many photos we took. The nominal cost for a photograph now is pretty small. Od course, there’s the cost of the hard drive divided by how many photos there are but with a six terabyte drive selling for under $200, even when you consider multiple copies of a file (you do back up your files, don’t you?), the cost is less than 1¢ per photo. If you delete your bad photos, the cost goes down, of course, because the won’t have cost you anything.

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Dot’s Plate

Photograph taken on Wednesday, December 05, 2018 by Henry
Dot's Plate

Dot’s Plate

This is a plate that my mom made in 1955 and I’ve always loved it. She was at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She insists it wasn’t graduate school because she didn’t get a degree, but I still think of it as grad school. She had finished college and was in art school. Ceramics wasn’t her main thing, but they did a little of everything including painting and sculpture, as well. Her interests were in textiles and she did a lot of silk screening. I still have the curtains that she made and which we now use as drop cloths for painting. But this plate is, I think, really nice. I wish we had some clue about the composition of the glaze, which is lovely. We have her wheel and kiln and would really like to get around to using them again.

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Lake Needwood

Photograph taken on Sunday, December 02, 2018 by Henry
Lake Needwood

Lake Needwood

Cathy and I went for a walk on Lake Needwood after church today. It was overcast but pleasant and we walked part way around the lake. I took this picture from near the boat house at the southeast part of the lake, looking north, more of less. The trees are bare and with the overcast sky, they looked particularly stark and gloomy. That’s not to say they aren’t beautiful, though. I think they look pretty nice. The water was quite still, also, which added to the mood.

For the few of you who follow me here, I apologize for the brief hiatus. My main workstation has four hard drives (including a relatively small boot SSD). Two of them, one 5TB and the other 6TB are dedicated to photographs. Unfortunately, I have a lot of photographs and they two drives are full. That kept me from being able to “process” my photographs for about 10 days (not that I rushed to rectify that matter, of course). I ordered another 6TB drive so I should be set for a while now.

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Doors Closing

Photograph taken on Saturday, December 01, 2018 by Henry
Doors Closing

Doors Closing

Cathy and I went to the storage unit today to pick up a few things, mostly related to Christmas—nativity scenes, tree decorations, the tree itself— and I decided to take a picture of the automatic doors closing. There is a slight delay after they open (which is nice, because it gives you time to get through them) and then they close. I set the camera to f/22, which gave it an exposure of 0.8 seconds at ISO 100. I moved close enough to trigger the door opening sensor, and then quickly moved back to the wall opposite and positioned the camera against the wall, with the bottom edge sitting on a piece of molding. That allowed me to hold the camera fairly steady for the long exposure. I tried opening them by voice command but all I got back was, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

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Pakistani Doll

Photograph taken on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 by Henry
Pakistani Doll

Pakistani Doll

This doll was found at some point in the process of clearing out my in-laws house. It has a tag on it that says “Pakistan” so I assume it’s a Pakistani doll, although someone who actually knows these things might say differently. My assumption is that it was labeled by whoever bought it.

Anyway, it’s a little misshapen. Somewhere along the way it seems to have been subject to either excessive heat or pressure or possibly both. The neck is bent into a somewhat unnatural angle the left arm and wrist are effectively broken and the “bones” fused back together with the arm bent twice into a 30° angle or so. Also, the joints, which appear to have been functional at one time, are “calcified” and won’t move. It’s a pretty doll, otherwise, but the angle of the head, in particular, is a bit disturbing.

She is currently standing on the piano but she moves around a bit (not on her own, as far as I know) and she’s been seen lying along the top of the piano and on bookcases, etc. around the house.

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Manor Run

Photograph taken on Sunday, November 18, 2018 by Henry
Large Rock in Manor Run

Large Rock in Manor Run

After dropping off the Operation Christmas Child boxes we went to the library to return some books and to get a few more. Then because it was such a beautiful day, we decided to take a walk in the park. We drove to the parking area at the park so that half our walking wouldn’t be on neighborhood streets and we could get into the woods right away. It’s been quite rainy this fall and the trail was muddy in places but we managed to get through without getting too wet. I brought my camera, of course and took a fair number of pictures. This large rock on the side of Manor Run marks the spot where you can cross. Just downstream from here the stream is shallow and there are rocks that you can cross on. I think this picture turned out well. As we went around the rock there were three deer grazing and I got some pictures of them, as well. They kept an eye on us but didn’t seem particularly alarmed. We got within about 20 feet of them.

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Plate of Many Faces

Photograph taken on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 by Henry
Plate of Many Faces

Plate of Many Faces

We don’t really know much about this plate. It appears to be Japanese, although we don’t actually know where it was produced. We also don’t know how old it is. This is not the whole plate, clearly, but a detail of the center, not quite reaching the edges in the corners of the image. There is a style called “Thousand Faces” and when you search on that, you find a few images that look a bit similar to this but for the most part, that seems to indicate a very particular style (or possibly two styles). Some show many fewer faces than this plate and only perhaps a dozen faces, so I’m not sure where the name comes from. Others fit the name better but not as well as this one, perhaps. On the other hand, this may not be particularly old and doesn’t even qualify as anything in particular. It is nice, though, and I like the fact that most (if not all) of the people depicted are different from one another. In any case, that’s what I have for today.

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Lake Needwood

Photograph taken on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 by Henry
Lake Needwood

Lake Needwood

About two weeks ago I posted a photo of Lake Needwood that was fairly popular among my small circle of followers. In that photo, the fall color was a day or two short of peak. As usual, the best fall color doesn’t last very long and now, the majority of trees are completely bare. Many of the oaks in the woods are still holding onto their leaves but they have turned from rusty red to dingy brown. The beach trees often keep some leaves over the winter and they turn a beautiful copper color, but it’s nothing like the reds, oranges, and yellows of peak autumn. Some trees still haven’t started to turn or have only just started, so there will be occasional trees yet to enjoy. There are some sweet gums near work that I’m still looking forward to in their deep burgundy red glory. I stopped at Lake Needwood again this morning and it was dreary and overcast. But the skeletal trees were quite beautiful in the quiet of morning. I also startled a flock of at last 15 bluebirds that were gathered in the branches of a bald cypres, with its leaves all turned a pale orange. A fifteen minute walk by the lake is a pretty good way to start the day. I need to do that more often.

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Some Books

Photograph taken on Monday, November 12, 2018 by Henry
Two Shelves of Books

Two Shelves of Books

As I mentioned in the text on the recent photo of my reading room, I need to organize the books. We’ll, I’ve begun the process and I have a feeling it’s going to be something of an iterative process and will take a while. There’s no perfect organizational structure and since this is my library, I figure I can organize it in a way that makes sense to me. I started with easier sections, because they’re easier. I have a shelf for Shakespeare, another for poetry (with one book of Shakespeare’s poetical works there, instead of with his plays). There is a shelf for textbooks (some of which we’ll probably get rid of), four shelves of cook books, three shelves of “classic” fiction, where the stories need to have been written at least 100 years old to qualify. In this photo are two shelves that are not really quite complete. The books on the right end of the upper shelf are fourteen of my nineteen Kipling books, more books by a single author than anyone but the Bard of Avon (and copies of the Bible, which is sort of a different category). I’m a big Kipling fan and while I don’t have all of his works, I’ve enjoyed what I do have.

At the left on the lower shelf are almost all of my Modern Library books (War and Peace is too tall for that shelf). Those include older works from Homer, Plato, and Herodotus through Roman Tacitus and up to relatively recent including another Kipling (Kim) and the poems of Robert Frost and The African Queen by C. S. Forester. To the right of that are Pinguin Classics including some Greek plays, Dante, and The Song of Roland. It’s a mishmash and as I said, it may not be the final grouping. But it’s a start.

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