Miscellaneous

Dam Repairs

Photograph taken on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 by Henry
Dam Repairs

Dam Repairs

Henry on 'Horse Rock'

Henry on ‘Horse Rock’

I went up to Pennsylvania today to meet with an engineer fro the local electrical coop to talk about getting power to the cabin. I knew it was going to cost a lot. Even so, I was a bit blown away by the estimated cost. With the cable costing upwards of $30 a foot, it was going to be a LOT!

The work on the dam is underway, though, and that’s encouraging. The old, damaged drain pipe, which was preventing the pond from filling up, has been removed and the new pipe will go in shortly.

Dorothy and I took a walk through what we call the Christmas Tree Field to the Wet Field. Neither of them can—by any stretch of the imagination—be described as a field, but that’s what we call them. I can remember when they were fields, but now it’s hard to tell where the field ends and the woods begin.

At the northeast end of the Wet Field there are three large boulders. The one I’m sitting on here (photo taken on my phone by Dorothy) is called—by me, anyway—Horse Rock.

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Street Repaving

Photograph taken on Monday, July 17, 2023 by Henry
Street Repaving

Street Repaving

If you recall, on Wednesday, July 5 the folks from W.S.S.C. came to repair the pipe leading to our house from the local water main. They dug two large holes, both more than six feet deep in the road. By the time they were done, the holes were filled and topped with fresh asphalt. The next day a crew came and paved them more cleanly, rolling the asphalt. Well, now, less than two weeks later, a third crew came and milled about 50 yards of the road and going about the same distance up the court leading off of it. Once it was milled, the put down new paving. It certainly looks a lot better and takes care of other seams and cracks in the pavement that have accumulated over the years. This is the milling machine, grinding up the top two or three inches of the existing pavement. It’s definitely a small version, only taking up about four feet width of pavement at a time. Nothing compared to those that will mill a full lane of roadway, but it’s more suitable to a suburban street, I suppose.

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Monarch (Danaus plexippus)

Photograph taken on Sunday, July 16, 2023 by Henry
Monarch (Danaus plexippus)

Monarch (Danaus plexippus)

Mom and I came home from North Carolina today, after yesterday’s reunion. Cathy had been to church and was visiting her mom when I got home. We drove to the Ag. History Farm Park where there were a few dahlias in bloom and we walked through the garden to see them and then through the demonstration garden. In the sun it was really hot and the humidity was stifling. Sitting in the shade where there was a slight breeze was bearable, but even that was quite warm. We moved to the other parking area and walked down to the trail by the stream, walking through the woods. We were out of the sun, although the air was quite still. We saw a great blue heron, but only as it flew away. I took a few pictures, but not many. By the time we got back to the car we were drenched in sweat. This monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) was in the meadow as we returned to the car.

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New Cabin Steps

Photograph taken on Wednesday, July 12, 2023 by Henry
New Cabin Steps

New Cabin Steps

I went up to our Pennsylvania property today to meet with Dorothy and her friends. We had two things on the agenda for the visit. First, we put up the new steps on the front porch. The stringers had finally rotted so I a made new set, using one of the old as a pattern template. I made them with treated 2x12s and they fit pretty well. If they last as long as the first set I’ll be very pleased. The stair treads are untreated lumber and, as you can see, they are entirely un-weathered. They will turn grey over the next year and won’t be so stark. We actually plan to replace the decking on the porch, also, but that’s not a rush. There is a pile of 2x4s in the loft, so we’ll use those.

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Water Main Repairs

Photograph taken on Wednesday, July 05, 2023 by Henry
Water Main Repairs

Water Main Repairs

Dorothy mentioned, when we were in Alaska, that there was a small amount of water coming out the joint where our driveway meets the road. I asked her to call the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) to let them know. When we got home nothing had been done and the water was still flowing, although it wasn’t a huge flow.

This morning the workmen showed up and dug up the road, trying to find the break. They started on our side, since that’s where the water was reaching the surface. They found the pipe that left the main and supplies water to our house but the leak wasn’t in that part of the pipe. So, they repeated to digging on the other side, being careful of the gas pipe running down the middle of the street.

They eventually found the leak almost directly under the gas line between the two holes. They replaced that length of pipe and filled in both holes. Another crew should come to out down proper pavement but we have water again now. All is well.

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Rock Balancing

Photograph taken on Tuesday, June 20, 2023 by Henry
Brian and Henry, Balancing Rocks

Brian and Henry, Balancing Rocks

As you might guess, although I take most of the pictures with my camera, Cathy took this shot. We had driven to the end of the road and then walked to the shore just past Echo Cove. This is as far as you can drive from downtown Juneau. It was sunny and hot, which is unusual for Juneau, but we enjoyed being out. Cathy and Lisa were down near the water and Brian and I sat higher on the rocky beach and started balancing stones. It’s a fiddly thing but soothing in its own way. We each managed to get a respectable cairn built and Cathy took a few pictures as we worked on our final stones. The horse flies started to bother us, so we headed back to the car and back to town for the evening.

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Sea–Tac Airport

Photograph taken on Saturday, June 17, 2023 by Henry
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport

A few months ago Cathy and I bought tickets to fly to Juneau, Alaska. The plan was to leave here on June 17 and return July 3, allowing us to have a free day on July 4 to recover before returning to work on July 6.

Our outbound flight left Dulles Airport at 5:00 PM and we had an uneventful five and a half hour flight to Sea-Tac (Seattle–Tacoma International Airport). As is often the case on travel days, I didn’t take many photographs. I don’t think I’ll be giving too much away when I say that I took almost 2,500 photos during our trip, however, so the posts following this one will give you a very brief glimpse of what we saw and did.

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Ship Puzzle

Photograph taken on Sunday, June 11, 2023 by Henry
Ship Puzzle

Ship Puzzle

It’s time for another installment of Henry and Cathy’s puzzle collection. This one looked nice so I bought it and we finished putting it together a couple days ago. The water in the foreground and the sky were the most challenging parts, which isn’t too surprising. The stern of the ship and parts of the rigging were done first (after the edges, of course, which are almost always finished before much else has been done.

We don’t absolutely always have a puzzle going, but lately we’ve tried to. We’re running out of them, though, with only a few more on hand, so I’m not sure what we’ll do after that. We also like crossword puzzles, sometimes doing them together but more often, separately. We have crossword puzzle books, published by Simon and Schuster and The New York Times. For quite a while now, my mom has saved the puzzles from the Washington Post and gives them to me, so I work through those. They are generally a bit easier than the other two sources and I actually do them in pen (and sometimes without actually making mistakes, although certainly not all the time).

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Venice Puzzle

Photograph taken on Tuesday, May 23, 2023 by Henry
Venice Puzzle

Venice Puzzle

Our most recent puzzle adventure was this scene from Venice. As you might imagine, the clouds and sky were the most difficult part, and took us a while after the buildings had been completed and the water in the foreground got filled in. But, as it usually the case, giving it a little attention each day, finding one piece now and then, eventually it got finished. We have two more puzzles on-deck and will start the first of those shortly. We find it mentally stimulating and something we can easily do easily while chatting.

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Bible Puzzle

Photograph taken on Tuesday, April 18, 2023 by Henry
Bible Puzzle

Bible Puzzle

We completed another puzzle this week. I’m not sure where we got this one—illustrating “Great Events of the Bible”—but it’s been in our basement a while without ever being put together. It was a relatively easy puzzle, compared to others we’ve done lately. That’s partly because there is text scattered around and any piece with text on it is easy to orient. With some puzzles it’s very difficult to know which way many of the pieces sit. There also are no large areas of similar color in this one, as there are with images with large amounts of sky, etc. Still, it was fun putting it together. Next we will work on puzzle with a view of Venice, Italy.

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Lamprocapnos spectabilis (Bleeding Heart)

Photograph taken on Saturday, April 15, 2023 by Henry
Lamprocapnos spectabilis (Bleeding Heart)

Lamprocapnos spectabilis (Bleeding Heart)

Cathy and I went to the airport this morning to pick up Dorothy and then dropped her off in Bethesda, where she had left her car. Although it’s a little early for most azaleas, we decided to visit McCrillis Gardens, since we were near by. A few azaleas and rhododendrons were in bloom and there were other things to see. Fern fiddleheads were unrolling, there was quite a bit of Solomon seal (Polygonatum species). In the middle of the yard, under a large tree, there is a huge mound of bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis). It’s quite pretty and we probably should plant some, if for no other reason than that it would fill in some of the gap between the early bulbs and the later spring blooms.

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Proverbidioms Puzzle

Photograph taken on Monday, April 10, 2023 by Henry
Proverbidioms Puzzle

Proverbidioms Puzzle

We finished another puzzle in the last couple days. This one was much, much easier than the previous couple. That’s not to say it was simple, but nothing like the Dahlia, Mandala Stone, or especially the William Morris, “Garden of Delight” puzzle. Some of the proverbs or idioms in the puzzle are obvious. Others are either obscure or were unfamiliar to us. Nevertheless, we enjoyed trying to make sense of the illustrations. As is usual in a large puzzle, the large areas of sky with little to differentiate them was the last to get finished. Next up is a scene of Venice, which will be a little more challenging than this one, I think.

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My Office Building Lobby

Photograph taken on Thursday, March 30, 2023 by Henry
My Office Building Lobby

My Office Building Lobby

The building my office is in has a somewhat dated look. It’s exterior is red brick and glass and is even referred to at my company as ‘RB’, which stands for ‘Red Brick’. The lobby had a red brick floor and built-in red brick planters along the front windows and on the interior walls. It wasn’t beautiful but the large plants were pretty nice, as that sort of thing goes. With a two storey height, the fiddle-leaf figs (Ficus lyrata) were especially impressive. For what seems like an eternity, it’s been undergoing a makeover. The new, modern lobby is nearing completion and I can’t say I’m overly impressed. As you can see, there are some plants in containers against the far windows. I assume those will be placed around the lobby once it’s done. But it’s fairly stark, in my view.

Uptate: They added some furniture, so it isn’t quite so empty now. But it feels very artificial and not somewhere I’d go to sit and chat. Time will tell, I suppose.

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Great Falls, Maryland (from Virginia)

Photograph taken on Sunday, March 19, 2023 by Henry
Great Falls, Maryland (from Virginia)

Great Falls, Maryland (from Virginia)

We met our good friend Jean today and went to the Virginia side of Great Falls (which are in Maryland, because the state boundary is the Virginia shore line). It was a chilly day but beautifully clear. Most photos were taken with my long lens, including one of a heron across the river and an immature bald eagle flying overhead. I almost got a good photo of a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) fairly close overhead but it’s only about 60% in the frame. Tracking and focusing such a large, heavy lens on a moving subject is still more than I can do reliably. I switched to my 100mm, which I carried in a pouch on my belt, for two sets of images that I stitched into panoramas. This is one of those two, which I’ve also cropped down and will use as my site’s banner image for a while. The previous banner, of Portland Head Light in Maine has been the banner since late 2015 so I thought it was time for a change.

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Another Puzzle

Photograph taken on Thursday, March 16, 2023 by Henry
“Garden of Delight” Puzzle

“Garden of Delight” Puzzle

As mentioned, we’ve been doing puzzles recently. We started one with a photo of succulent plants while at the beach last summer and finally got around to unrolling it and finishing it early this year. The next one, the 1,000 piece Dahlia Puzzle (Friday, January 20, 2023) was considerably harder. Then we did the larger, 1,500 piece Mandala Stone Puzzle (Monday, February 6, 2023). We didn’t exactly plan for each puzzle to be harder than the one before but this one, although only 1,000 pieces, was considerably harder than any of the preceding three. It’s a photo of a tapestry called “Garden of Delight” made by William Morris (March 24, 1834 – October 3, 1896). He was, according to the bio on the box, “a British textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist.” There were times when we despaired of ever finishing it, but, eventually we did. There were times when I basically picked up every piece and tried it in every available spot until I found where it went or put it aside and went on to the next piece, starting over once I had been through all the pieces. In that way, eventually, it came together.

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Glenstone Museum

Photograph taken on Saturday, March 11, 2023 by Henry
Glenstone Museum

Glenstone Museum

Dorothy’s friend Tony got five tickets to the Glenstone Museum (https://www.glenstone.org/) for today asked Dorothy if she wanted to be one of the five. She said she did and asked if I could be the fifth. They’ve both been a few times before but this was my first trip to the museum. It’s on a 51.9 acre property on Glen Road in Potomac, Maryland. As art goes, I can’t say that I was particularly impressed. The landscape is very nice, even now, before spring has come, it’s quite lovely. The ‘Pavilions’ (sic) is an interesting building but not at all my style, except for the water-filled courtyard, which I like quite a lot. This room, however, room 7, appropriately called the Viewing Gallery, is very nice. Not so much for the room itself but for the view. The front wall and a portion of the wall on the left is filled with a single, very clean pane of glass. In the room is a lovely, curved wooden bench that is wonderful. I could sit there for a long while. Overall, the landscaping is fairly young but nice and it will improve as it ages. I’d love to go in summer and see how different it is. Again, not so much for the art, which I can take or leave (and would probably leave). But for the outdoor areas. Regardless, I enjoyed myself and I’m quite thankful for being included.

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Mandala Stone Puzzle

Photograph taken on Monday, February 06, 2023 by Henry
Mandala Stone Puzzle

Mandala Stone Puzzle

After the Dahlia puzzle (see Friday, January 20, 2023) we decided to put out a new one. This time it’s a picture of painted mandala stones. At a glance Cathy and I thought they were Murano (Venetian) Glass Paperweights but looking a little closer, they clearly are not glass. Ravensburger’s title for the 1,500 piece puzzle is simply “One Dot at a Time.” This turned out to be even harder than the Dahlia puzzle. We’d go for long stretches without finding any pieces and then we’d get a bunch all together. Each stone became a separate entity, although a few of them were similar enough that it was sometimes hard to know to which a certain piece belonged. Especially without the box to look at (because that would be cheating).

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Dahlia Puzzle

Photograph taken on Friday, January 20, 2023 by Henry
Dahlia Puzzle

Dahlia Puzzle

Cathy, Dorothy, and I have been putting together puzzles lately. The first one we’ve done recently was started at the beach over the summer but wasn’t completed. We rolled it up then and it’s been in that state since then. We finished that a while back and put out this as our next. I was pretty challenging. Nevertheless, we made continual progress on it and finally finished it this evening. It’s a 1,000 piece puzzle.

Our family is in the “you don’t look at the box” camp. Yes, that makes the puzzle somewhat harder (and sometimes considerably harder). But it also gives more satisfaction and gratification when the puzzle is eventually completed. I know we were all pretty pleased with ourselves when we finished this one. We have put it away and put out our next one, which promises to be at least as hard. It’s also larger, with 1,500 pieces.

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Rooster

Photograph taken on Monday, January 16, 2023 by Henry
Ayam Kampung Rooster

Ayam Kampung Rooster

Chickens are thought to have originally been domesticated from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) native to multiple regions of southeast Asia. The Ayam Kampung chicken is a breed from Indonesia and Malaysia. It is a dual-purpose breed, raised for both meat and eggs. They are considered poor performers in terms of their egg laying ability, providing somewhere under 100 eggs per year. Of course, this one, a male (rooster) won’t lay any eggs at all. He’s a handsome bird, though, I think you’ll admit.

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Woodland Detritus

Photograph taken on Saturday, January 14, 2023 by Henry
Woodland Detritus

Woodland Detritus

We’ve walked the Kengla Trail a few times, always in the winter. We took this trail from Muncaster Mill Road (MD 115), under the Intercounty Connector (a.k.a. the ICC, MD 200) and then up towards Norbeck Meadows Neighborhood Park. There isn’t a lot to see, honestly, although I wish I had brought my long lens, because we had a flock of bluebirds in the trees just in front of us for a little ways, moving further ahead as we got closer. I took a few photos but nothing of outstanding beauty, I’m afraid. I do like the patterns in these fallen branches. There is one point north of the ICC where the trail crosses a side stream where the steam goes between two very large sycamore trees whose roots have grown into a solid mass of wood. I’ve taken photos of Cathy there on each occasion but decided to go with this photo instead this year. We really should come back and walk this trail in the summer, though.

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