Playing with the Eclipse

As anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last couple of months now, there was a solar eclipse today.  Alas, we did not see a totality--I am not fond enough of traffic jams and huge crowds to have driven the 300 miles to see that (with no guarantee of decent weather and really no guarantee of a decent clean toilet)

We were facing this day with some trepidation--we are now in our standard weather pattern of clouding up and raining in the early afternoon--say, from about 2:00-3:00-which of course was the time scheduled for the eclipse.  One o'clock came, along with the beginning of the afternoon clouds.  The eclipse began, and we watched the solar fan dance as the sun slipped in and out, showing a tiny bite taken out of the edge.  Then, mirabile dictu , the skies cleared.  We watched (with proper protection, of course) as most of the sun slowly disappeared (we got about 86% of totality).  But while the rest of the country was looking up, I was looking down.  I find it fascinating that the tree leaves will act like hundreds of pinhole cameras, casting crescent shadows.  I had my camera (did not take pictures of the eclipse itself because I don't have the proper filters) and a piece of poster board that I would drop below various trees and bushes and snap pictures.

 

Then, gradually, the sun returned--which we didn't watch because within 20 minutes of totality, the clouds rolled in and blotted out everything.  I'm OK with that--I am just amazed and grateful that they cleared for that one precious hour.

 

 

Meanwhile, back at the farm (as the saying goes), a couple of weeks ago came that time that any rehabber/ wild critter foster parent achieve the goal that they dread: time to release.  This is what it's all about--returning them to the wild.  It's  so hard after caring for them.   So I fed the foxes one evening, and when I walked out, I left the cage door open behind me.

 

(not sure if that video will show--I tried to make it a smaller file but it's still having problems loading)   If it doesn't load, use your imagination and visualize a fox leaving the cage.

Hard as it is to let them go, the cool thing is that they're still hanging around.  I put out food for them, and set up the video camera, and all three of them are still looking pretty  good.  Eventually they'll wander off, but for now it's good to know that they'll come get some dinner while they're learning how to hunt for themselves. 

Reading:  Microshelters.  Bob picked this up while we were at the Tractor Supply store.  Basically it's riding on the tiny house movement, only these are *really* small, meant to be used as backyard retreats or lake cabins.  While I personally could never live tiny (I need my stuff) I love the creativity that goes into these little builds.



Hugging the Fishies

Bob has a thing about stingrays.  Yea--that's different.  But I've learned that if we ever go to a zoo or aquarium that has a stingray pool, I had better drag him around to see everything else first because he'll be hanging over the pool trying to pat the rays until the place closes (OK--I'll admit that they do feel rather nice, sort of soft and velvety and not like their sandpapered skinned shark cousins).   And although he's normally a properly frugal sort of guy, he doesn't hesitate for a moment to drop $5 for an ounce of fish (or $10 or $15) to feed them  (and, yeah, I'll admit that it's kinda fun to do that because they just sort of Hoover it out of your hand).

So when our friend Kim let us know last month that the Gulf World Marine Park at Panama City Beach (where we've fed the rays before) will now let you actually get in the pool with the rays, we of course had to set up a date right away.   Bob wanted to wait in the line immediately when we got there--Kim and I pointed out that we already had the reservations and the swim is limited to six people so there wouldn't be a line, so we really didn't need to be waiting an hour early.  The compromise is that we got to look around for about 45 minutes.

Of course, as a "zoological professional" I had to assure myself about the welfare of the fish.  All was well--we had to shower beforehand, and the fish were not harassed.  Quite the opposite--we all got to pose for a photoshoot where the rays on command would swim into our arms, give us a hug, and stick their heads out of the water for a kiss.  Being as there was a fish reward involved, the rays were mobbing for a chance to pose.  Afterwards we got to swim with them for about a half hour (armed with fish).  The water was lovely and cool on a hot and sticky day and I'm not sure what Kim and I enjoyed more--playing with the rays ourselves, or watching Bob being so happily enthusiastic.

As I am also a properly frugal person (OK, people say I'm a cheapskate) I wasn't going to bother looking at the photo op pictures because they charge an arm and a leg for them.  But Kim wanted to at least look at them.  And when I saw this . . . well, I just reached for my credit card.  Because how often do you get to see a 60-something dude looking like an 8-year-old?

Halfway though July

I AM OVER THIS FREAKIN' RAIN!!

There--had to get it out of the system.  I really try not to complain, with parts of the country having serious wildfire and other parts having serious flooding (wish they could get together and cancel each other out) and we're just mushy.  And I could even deal with the mushy if it weren't for the clouds and swarms of mosquitoes that make it impossible to be outside for more than a few minutes--and that require me to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt even though the temps are in the 90's. 

So--random and mostly inside stuff.

OK--this was outside--but on the beach with a good breeze blowing.  We went to Mexico Beach for the 4th--Robert and Amanda are back from Italy (and trying to adjust).  The young man getting a good view from Bob's shoulder's is our great-nephew Zeke.

From safely indoors looking out the kitchen window we spotted three deer--two were eating lichen from a stump, while the third was on the alert and obviously not happy about something.

 

 

 

But looking around we could see the predator she was eyeing.  We've tried to explain to Wilhelm that a deer might be just a *little* too big for him, but he doesn't believe us.

 

My little foxes continue elusive.  As soon as I go anywhere near their cage, they disappear.  And that's good--I want them to be afraid of people.  On the other hand, I do need to see them once in awhile to make sure that they're doing well.  So we set our game camera up in their cage to see what they do at night.

 

They seem energetic enough.

From time to time I've posted about a shawl I've been knitting from yarn that's I've spun on my daily walk.  At this point I'm about 6 1/2 panels into the 7 panel shawl--and I've stalled.  See the opening comment about those blasted mosquitoes--I haven't been able to spin for this for three weeks!!   I know I won't be able to wear this for another 5 or 6 months, but it's just so darned frustrating to stall this close to the finish.  Grrrrrr.

 

Not that I don't have other stuff to do.  A few posts back I talked about getting some fleece from a local shepherd.  She doesn't spin (and I don't know if she knits) so she doesn't have anything from her own sheep.  I decided to rectify that and made a small cowl to wear in the winter when she tends her animals.  Of course, one of these days I should actually mail it to her (although, again, there are a few months until it is wearable.  (Her sheep are multicolored white, black and gray, so I wanted to put in all three colors)

 

 

A few years ago I made what I called my Harpy Puppet.

 

I wore him for the Halloween Howl, and in the next couple of years he was just a static prop.  But time, humidity, and cockroaches sort of did a number on his face, and last year at the Howl he fell off of where he was mounted and got stepped on.  So, alas poor Harpy--into the trash he went.  But I realized that I missed him.  In between Howls he hung from the ceiling of my cottage.  So when the Halloween Forum had it's annual "Prop under $20" challenge I made a new harpy (her name is Esmeralda).  I still need to make a harness and put on the control sticks for her arms (couldn't fit all that into the $20 budget) but she's going up on the ceiling soon.

 

 

My favorite thing about her is her eyes.  It's an interesting technique of painting nail polish on the back of a glass cabochon.  The trick is to paint on a color, then scratch most of it off, and repeat about 5 times.  I really love the effect.

 

 

All in all, enough to keep me busy until it's safe to go outside again.  Alas, the poor garden is suffering between getting drowned and then stewed in the heat--but at least it doesn't need much tending!

 

 

Reading:  Made it through the first Dragons of Pern book.  Sorry, fans, but I'm skipping the next 22.  Uneven writing, clichéd characters and talking dragons just doesn't do it for me.

 

Current read is really nerdy:  Now I Sit Me Down--A history of Chairs.  Yep.  But think about it.  Thrones.  Executive  chairs.  Archie Bunker's chair.  Didn't everyone growing up have a "Dad's Chair" (usually the recliner).  There's a lot of status and social history of chairs.  And he's a good writer.

 

June Cliff Notes

When last I posted, we were preparing to go to Scott Con--the modeler's convention in Georgia.

It got off to an iffy start.  It's about a 3 1/2 hour drive there.  At about three hours and 20 minutes the transmission suddenly started racing and wouldn't shift.  We pulled off into a parking lot and turned the car off and had quiet panic attacks.  It's a Saturday--no one would be able to work on the car until Monday.  We made emergency plans--we spotted an Enterprise rent-a-car--realized we'd have to rent two so I could go home and take care of the animals and Bob could stay in town and get the car fixed.  Then we tried turning the car back on and it worked just fine.  So then we have the decision--do we turn around and go home, or go ahead to the Con and hope we didn't have a breakdown late Saturday on the way home.  We went to the Con.  So, admittedly we were not in the best frame of mind when we walked in.

And it sort of went downhill from there.  This Con takes place in an air museum in one of the hangars.  We walked in, and then stopped to let our eyes adjust.  And kept trying to adjust.  None of the auxiliary lights were on.  And then the sweat started beading up because the AC also was not working particularly well (or they couldn't afford to run it much). 

The first thing you do when you walk into a Con is to eagerly look over at the vendor tables--and, compared to previous years, there wasn't much to look over.  Vendor numbers were really down.  The other thing you do is look at everyone else's models--and those numbers were way down too.  In general, it was rather a disappointment.  To top it off, I suggested we go to the museum's snack bar for lunch (and to hope they had AC) -- we went to the next building where the snack bar *used* to be . . . .    There are no eateries close by, and we didn't want to risk breaking down and not being able to retrieve the models so we were stuck in the dark, sweating and hungry, waiting the four hours for the judging.  Fortunately, I know that I am subject go getting "hangry" so I had a stash of almonds and craisins with me.

There were some plusses.  Bob is very very good at his models.  Combine that with a lower turnout and he placed 4 of his 5 models (my Valkyrie loom didn't place, but I didn't expect it to, so that was all right.)

 

The other plus was the raffles.  He bought a string of 30 raffle tickets, and because there weren't a lot of people there, by the time we left he had picked up 14 prizes (the prizes were still being distributed but we wanted to go ahead and leave in case the car broke down so we gave the rest of our tickets away)

 

 

And the car worked fine on the drive home.  Sadly--we probably won't be going back.

 

Otherwise--random June:

 

River has taken to guarding the letter tiles when we play Scrabble.

 

I think one of the chicken may have hurt herself laying an egg.

 

 

The garden is still going a bit crazy

 

 

 

We had a large softshell turtle lay eggs in our yard

 

 

And I'm fostering three young foxes

 

 

That's enough to have kept us busy.

 

 

Reading:  Anne McCaffery, Dragon Rider.  This series actually started in the late 60's, in the fantasy heyday of Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia.  And I had never ready them.  From time to time friends will mention them and be surprised that I hadn't.  Now that I've started the first one, I'm thinking that maybe I've started them before and gone "meh" and put them down.  I'll finish the first one and that will be enough.  I know there they're popular (there are 20-something books in the series) but I find the characters and the plots to be both uneven and clichéd.

 

And Now It Be June

Bob ended May with a bang.  Robert and Amanda (plus teenager, toddler, German Shepherd and cat) have returned to the State from Naples.  In fact, Robert retired from the Navy, so the return got a little complicated (really?  The military, complicated?)  It seems that Robert had to return to Norfolk for outprocessing,  while Amanda and the rest needed to go to Mexico Beach, where the crowd will be living with Bob's sister while they job- and house-hunt.  So the issue became--how to get them down here?  Problem is large dog crate--too big to go on small planes that fly into Tallahassee or Panama City.  And Virginia to Florida is a heck of a long drive for Amanda to make on her own.  So Uncle Bob went to the rescue and flew up to Virginia.  Oddly enough, it made more sense to break the family up even more at that point.  In order to fit everybody, they would have had to rent a minivan (which is about $100 more a day than an SUV) and because of the toddler they would have had to take two days to come back (so hotel and meals).  It actually cost less to fly Amanda and Zeke home and have Bob get an SUV for the dog, cat, and Dane.

And there were minor complications.  They were due to fly in on May 26, but the flight got changed to the 27th.  Doesn't seem like much, but it meant that Amanda of course would miss her flight.  And Bob had to stay an extra day--usually not a problem but because it was over the Memorial Day weekend his hotel didn't have a room for the next day--in fact, no motel anywhere near had a room for Saturday night, so he had to book at another hotel for the two nights and cancel at the first hotel.  Made the call.  The person at the hotel said that because Bob had booked through Delta, he had to cancel through Delta.  Couldn't do that online.  The nice people on the help line couldn't do it.  Long story short--two computers going, two phones going, and two hours later I finally found a nice robot that could cancel the room.

Everything was easier after that.  Dane was very impressed (and was emailing his friends on his phone) that his Uncle Bob found his way home using a MAP.  A folding paper one.  It reminded of us when Bob took him out in the truck when he was about seven years old, and he was fascinated that you could roll a window up and down with a crank.

Meanwhile the garden is flourishing.  Look back on the entry for the end of March.  Two things there--starting the garden, and collecting worm compost.  Put the two together and you get this:

 

We're eating well.  Bob makes an amazing ratatouille out of whatever vegetables need eating (with the judicious addition of bacon or chorizo).  Yum.

The model conference is this weekend, and I actually finished the 'Loom of the Valkyries" model.  I don't expect to win anything--compared with the skill and talent (and practice) that most modelers put into this hobby, my model is a little klutzy.  But it has it's own bizarre charm.

 

 

I'm especially happy with this dragon head, which is about 1/2" across.  And the little hands holding the staff

 

Notice the wee nasal helm as well as the sword in the mud.

Wonder if the judges will leave me any comments?

 

Reading  W.H. Hudson, "Green Mansions."  I really enjoyed his "Long Ago and Far Away."  He has the love of descriptive writing of the turn of the (last) century without the ponderous verbiage of the Victorian writers.  I have read it before--but it was in Reader's Digest's Condensed  Books when I was in high school--so I don't remember all the details  :-)

An Unexpected Date

Bob and I tend to hang onto things.  We've had out Honda for 17 years and it recently turned over 200,000 miles.  Although it was running just fine, we took it in just to have an allover checkup and tuneup.  It was a bit pricey--a lot of the seals were wearing out, the timing belt needed to be replace, odds and ends.  But worth it, because it's a perfect car for us.

You know that old saying--if it ain't broke, don't fix it?  A week later we're driving and smell that hot oil smell and it's smoking under the hood--and dripping oil underneath.

Nuisance and bother--have to take it to the shop again.  We took the other car so we wouldn't have to wait at the Honda place, but it didn't seem worth the driving to go home and then turn around and come back in to pick the car up (it's a 30+ mile round trip).

It was still early and we hadn't had breakfast, so we went to the coffee shop at the grocery story--and that's where the date began.  After the busyness of the last few weeks, we suddenly had enforced idleness.  There was a Scrabble board there, and next thing we knew we had played for 3 hours!  We did a bit of grocery shopping after that, and pizza for lunch at a new pizza place with wood-fired ovens (crispy crust).

We could have been angry, or frustrated, at their mistake in the first place (turns out that a gasket had gotten pinched when they installed the oil pan, hence the leak) but somehow we had been given the gift of a few hours just to enjoy each other's company.

We've been together for 45 years now--but it's still nice to have a date from time to time.

And the Painting Goes On and On

The professional painting went well.  Then came our turn . . .

After the porch was painted and the new screening put in, we needed a new screen door.  No problem, right?  Go to the store, get a nice white vinyl screen door, and hang it.  Except that the door opening was not standard size--we'd have to cut it wider, or build it in narrower, and make it a wee bit higher.  Sigh.  So we start taking the screen off the old door to repaint it--and discover wood rot.  Yet again back to Home Depot (projects are described by how many trips to the hardware store it takes to do them) to buy a wooden door that we can cut down to size.  Do that, paint it, hang it . . . maybe we should have cut it just a wee tad narrower . . . take it down, plane it down a bit, repaint, and hang.   At least the front door was easier--and we even had a nice, low-humidity day to do it.  Here's the before and after porch

 

And it feels more open now--the contractor said that the middle supports weren't really necessary so out they came.  Now the porch isn't quite done--the old storage units aren't going back in and what we want is a bench or two with storage but haven't found them yet.

 

Meanwhile while all this was going on I taught two more workshops.  First one was handspinning (again, no photos, but I carded up all that pretty dyed wool from the last post that we didn't use for felting and used that for the spinning).  Then a workshop on making worbla--a mixture of thermoplastic and sawdust.  It's much used by cosplayers, but I've never experimented with it because it's *way* expensive.  Then I saw a video on how to make it.  I figured that other makers would be interested.  It's fun stuff to use--I've started on a bird mask.

 

Despite the fact that I have enough spinning fiber on hand to last most of the rest of my life, and that I had a few other things I should have been doing (like paint the back deck) I found out that a farmer in Quincy had babydoll sheep and fleece available.  I've never worked with this breed before, and every now and then I get the urge to work with a raw fleece rather than wool that's been processed and ready to spin.  And it was a lovely day for a drive, and the people were great, and the sheep adorable.

 

I came home with 12 pounds of fleece.  Apache and Wilhelm helped me sort through the first batch.

 

The second batch will have to wait--we lost our excuse for not working on the back deck.  We didn't have the painters do it because, well, honestly, we have a lot of stuff (I really want to say crap) back there, and chickens living there (special need chickens) and the living room is already full of the stuff from the front porch.  And besides--we had a wren nest with babies out there.  So obviously we couldn't paint until the babies left the nest.

But, alas--it happened.  And we were lucky enough to see the fledging.  This grand moment is exactly that--a moment.  It takes only a few minutes for the parents to coax the young out and into the trees, so it's something we rarely get to witness.

With the excuse having flown the coop, I've spent the last three days sweeping down cobwebs and painting.  It's been gratifying to see a transformation but not much fun--the temps are in the 90's and the biting flies are out (the mosquitoes I can ignore, but those damned flies . . .)   I still need to do the trim and ceilings.  I was going to start with that--and I did--but ran out of the first can of paint and when I went to open the next found that we had accidently bought interior rather than exterior paint.  We went back today to exchange it and their power had been out--no computers means no sales transactions.  Fortunately it came back on.

This will drag on a bit more--I'm working the next three days and getting a crown on Monday so not much painting will be done.  And then, of course, all the crap has to be organized (trust me--much of it is going away)

But still reading.  Finished American Gods--complex and convoluted and thought provoking.  Then read one of Gaimen's "Dr. Who" children's stories, which was simple and straightforward and fluffy.  The guy is amazing--he can write in all formats (including poetry and "graphic novels" which we used to call comic books)

Now I've started W.H. Hudson's "Far Away and Long Ago."  This month's Smithsonian had an article on him and praised his beautiful and evocative writing.  Ah--the joys of the e-book--I thought it would be interesting, pulled it up, downloaded it, and started reading.  While it's not the same as holding a real book, I have to admit it's convenient and doesn't take up any shelf space.