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October 22, 2009 Thu

What a fine turnout at the Senior Ukulele Ensemble this day!
A stitch - yes, wide, I know...

Speaking of 'stitched' photos - Chicago Union Station, main waiting room, seen from the mezzanine.

Try to ignore this cat - just try...

October 21, 2009 Wed

Interesting day - drizzle, sun, drizzle, etc. At least when it was nice it was quite nice and we got out on two wheels.

We located the source of that unmistakable sound of pile driving - part of the waterfront cleanup/improvement going on at the end of our street. The sound comes right up the hill...

Edit: Ann got home with the other camera, and here are those pilings as seen from the house~
The work is being done a short four blocks down the hill. Sorry about the last one - no tripod.

Okay, how BIG is Antarctica? Do you have a mental picture? No? Well, here it is, courtesy NASA.

Started out the day with a trip to the rental shop, procuring an impact drill. They have an interesting policy: get it back in two hours or keep it for 24 - and pay accordingly. We managed, just, to get it back under two hours. In that time we carted it to the Swinomish Police Department training room to drill and install mollies for those eight or 10 pictures that did not fare well using stick on hangers. The cement walls of the Police Department are bomb hardened, you may recall. Ann, who was upstairs at the time, said the impact drill shook the building, causing mild consternation amongst some of the employees. She assured them, 'Oh, that's just my husband.' Not real sure just how comforting that might be...

October 20, 2009 Tue

A couple days of serious loafing - well, at least not too much else going on..  We did get in some rehearsal time both days~

Updated the Police website~
Current Events page

Also got the news that the pictures we hung with sticky tabs (mentioned earlier) fell off the wall. We'll be drilling and using molly's, after all...

Here's is a wonderful page that walks you through the history of the various stages of the growth of the country - showing when which states joined the union, seceded, and rejoined. Clears up a lot of history, making it easier to understand and visualize.

Carving pumpkins - Evelyn carved the shape of a Siamese cat~!!

Do you remember this game? Frogapult~~ You may
download it from this page

October 18, 2009 Sun

Word is that my youngest, Jacob, will be moving to IL to be with his fiancée. This means we will now have to visit three states to touch base with all three kids. Fortunately, Ann's daughter Fae is moving back this way from Texas, making that visit a bit easier.

It must be the fall weather - everyone's on a cooking jag. For us it started yesterday morning with homemade pancakes, followed by a homemade beef stew. It continued today with Ann peeling apples for applesauce, and a batch of homemade brownies. For dinner we enjoyed some of Laura's homemade chicken soup along with our leftover Southwestern casserole from the other day. Eating well are we~~  note Chico waiting hopefully for something to drop on the floor..

What were we doing six years ago? Patting ourselves on the back for having rebuilt the workbench in the old shed - which was at that time, the only shed.

some signage - firstly, from the 'abbreviations we really didn't think through' department:

From the dogs, 'I love you too, but...'  department:

Here's a toilet that cost more than most houses - it's in orbit above our heads as we speak~

October 17, 2009 Sat

I am such an idiot. Duh.

Oh, that Tommy Thompson -

Yes, Anacortes has their very own Tommy Thompson after whom they named the trail, part of which caught fire yesterday. Mr. Thompson was locally famous for making an entire train including the steam locomotive - by hand - and then laying tracks for it around Anacortes and giving folks rides.

The train is in storage somewhere down by Seattle, I'm told. How our fair city let such a tremendous and interesting tourist attraction get away from them is beyond me. The tracks are still in place around town.

Here's the embarrassing part -- a few years ago we were so fascinated by Mr. Thompson's achievements we devoted a webpage to him, which was posted to the railroaddave website. For some reason (I'm guessing old age and up the onset of dementia) this information escaped me yesterday.

We awoke to clouds and fog, but mild temperatures. Intermittent rain, occasionally heavy. Heavy enough to fill the rain barrels to overflowing.

rapidly greening backyard

Have you been following the adventures of the 17-mile Large Hadron Collider that loops beneath the French-Swiss border just outside of Geneva and that is moving back towards operational status? Briefly, researchers hope to prove the existence of the theoretically supposed Higgs boson, (among other things) a subatomic particle smaller than a quark. There have been some interesting speculations about what might happen if the collider is actually able to produce one of these particles. Namely, that it could cause fluctuations in the space time continuum. Here's a glimpse of the area around one of the large superconducting magnets - the general area that failed over a year ago. Here's a bit more...

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science - the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of distinguished physicists (Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs. Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen's late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya's new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions - the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

And, there you have it.

October 16, 2009 Fri

Thanks to Niomi, and Ann ~
There is a walking trail that runs across Fidalgo Bay to the refinery -- Marches Point, I think they call that...
The only Tommy Thompson I can think of was a former governor of Illinois and a one time member of the Amtrak board of directors. How he got his name attached to this trail is a mystery - perhaps someone will enlighten me?
Part of the trail is built over the old railroad trestle, which somehow caught fire yesterday. One of the first responders was the Swinomish Police Department fireboat. Here are a couple pictures and a video.

Speaking of the Swinomish Police Department, Ann took some pictures and had them framed for the recently completed training room. I offered to help mount them, knowing that the intended location would require drilling and the use of 'mollys' - those plastic inserts that will hold a screw.

One of the officers had offered the use of stick-on picture hangers, which I had pooh-poohed in favor of the more substantial screw and Molly set up. That is until I tried to drill into the wall.

Even using a brand-new carbide tipped cement drill I ran down the battery in the drill and the muscles in my arm to produce a hole 3/16 of an inch deep. Apparently the police station was constructed with bombproof ultra strong concrete...

Somewhat sheepishly, I gladly reached for the stick-on picture hangers. If all the pictures are still in place on Monday we'll call it a success. Photos by Ann~~

The Andromeda galaxy is the closest to our own at 2.2 million light-years away.

Around the Internet~
Fortunately, automobile batteries rarely explode - but when they do...

Thanks to Facebook~ (and Niomi)

October 15, 2009 Thu

Let's start with the barometer. Ann got me a nice one several years ago. I felt that any house by the water should have one - and I keep a close watch on it. Tell when storms are moving in, and all that. Low pressure drops the barometer's needle, and high raises it. Since keeping track, I've added a 'mark' everytime a new high or low is reached.

Two things we've noticed. The swings between high and low aren't as drastic one might suppose, and even a radical drop from high to low (usually signifying a change in the weather) doesn't necessarily mean we're in for a storm. It can be very low pressure and sunny.

Still - a couple days ago we watched it swing to a new low mark, and it dropped fast. What happened? Well, TJ got hit with 15 inches of rain in CA. Altogether different pressure system, though. Seattle got nearly an inch - and we got a few sprinkles and locally gusty wind. Nothing major. We really haven't had any rain to speak of for many months. However, this is expected to change, and soon.

We'll still keep watching the barometer~~  in this picture the needle has started rising again as the low pressure system drifts off to the East. It did drop to nearly 29 inches of mercury - and we applied a new mark. One manually aligns the gold needle over the barometer's indicator to keep track of whether it is rising or falling.

October 14, 2009 Wed

Somehow yesterday got away from us... we'll try to do better~

First some news from here and there~   we find this lady inspiring.

words of wisdom, yes - but, of a religious nature?

This space map shows everywhere that we have sent exploratory satellites. Perhaps use the control key plus your scroll wheel to make the map a bit larger... and hopefully therefore readable.

Evil Jasper...

Almost time to get out your sharp knife and a have at that pumpkin. Re-posting this webpage that allows you to carve your pumpkin online~~
We are pretty sure you can do better than this...

Perhaps you will recall that words printed in blue and underlined may be 'clicked on' and will take you to the webpage in question.

What on earth could be the meaning of this terrible face?

One must chip and peck at the soil, with pointy instruments. Then lift out the loose stuff and sift it through the screen to recover any useful dirt. Each foot of depth yields about an equal part of dirt and rock.

After digging the rather large holes for the doggy septic I had then spread the sifted dirt into the low spots of the yard. Out of habit I was doing the same thing again until Ann reminded me I would need some dirt for backfill, in this case. Duh.

October 12, 2009 Mon

Fall photos by Ann~~

OK, they are not quite the same - but at a glance...

October 11, 2009 Sun

Here's the gurlz and their dates heading out to eat~  in a Ford Fairlane 500 w/351 - a hotrod!

Today the nice folks at Dakota let the public onboard the second of a planned and hoped for five Candies vessels. The third is under construction at their location, and we toured the second. Last year we attended the launch of the Grant Candies, the first one built. It had one bow thruster, this one (the Ross Candies) has two - and the next one will have three. Can't have too many bow thrusters, it would seem.

This ship, as will all, is on its way to service oil rigs in the Gulf. Unlike the first one, the Ross has a hole through its decks and can lower equipment on a huge cable to depths of over a mile. Thus that tall 'tower' that we couldn't figure out in earlier pictures. At any rate - here are pix from today:
Many thanks to Richard, who kept us company and took most of these many fine photos~

Who do we run into? Barb and Paul, along with their son Eric and his family, Debra, Gideon and Judah.

Trying to fathom the unfathomable... three stories of engine room.

Trying to impress Ann by making up stuff about the engines...

Titanic impression - standing on the bow...

Trying to make sense out of what we are seeing. The technology is sufficiently advanced as to be mostly unrecognizable and easily confused with magic.

Lifeboat holds an amazing 75 persons.

My sister asked that I send her a high resolution copy of the sketch Lou Gothelf did of Dad. This is where she has it framed and displayed - which is on a sideboard off their dining room.

October 10, 2009 Sat

Well, here's an amazing thing - our local high school football team won its first game last night that I can remember since Evelyn's been a student. And it was the homecoming game at that -couldn't pick a better time to pull one out. Hail Mary pass in the last seconds wins the game for the home team.

Tonight, it was off to the homecoming dance. Here's Evelyn and Lynzee, awaiting the fellows~

Evie and her date~

In other news - we managed to get the front and back lawns whipped into shape - weed whacking, trimming, mowing. Since there hasn't been much in the way of rain the grass still hasn't taken off for this season.

Used the excess energy to finish scraping and painting the dormer - a chore that is now done for another year. We're still not sure why that paint never stood up very well, since we used primer and quality paint... Fortunately, the places we scraped and painted last season are wearing okay and didn't need any additional attention this year.

Cat's line is: Okay, this was not a good idea.

Thanks to Jake for the following three pictures.
Signage, of the 'Anywhere you want to sit is fine' variety.

Jake's nephew, my grandson, Hogan~

Jake and Sylvia - now engaged.

These are the pumpkins Ann selected for our porch~~

An interesting oddity we ran across this day~   Petrolia.

The girl in the middle is not alive. Look at the position of her hands...
"This is a Petrolia post mortem photo by Robson. It was extremely expensive to have a photo taken during Victorian times. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury. If a child or other loved one died it was a common practice to have a photo taken either alone or as in this case with the family, especially if there was not yet a living likeness.

If you look closely you can see a base behind the girls feet and a post would go up from that with clamps at the waist and neck. The clothing would be open at the back. The arms would have stiff wires running at the back to hold them in place. Also notice the strange placement of the hands. The pupils are painted on the closed eyelids. It was not until after ca.1900 the introduction of Mr. Eastman's film process that photography became available inexpensively, as we know it today. Post mortems were very common in Victorian times and if you look closely at portraits from pre ca.1900 you may have one of these photos. This photo ca.1888"

October 09, 2009 Fri

Thanks to Jarvis -
THE WIDER VIEW: Taking shape, the new bridge at Hoover Dam~

Creeping closer inch by inch, 900ft above the mighty Colorado River, the two sides of a 160 million dollar bridge at the Hoover Dam in America slowly take shape.

The bridge will carry a new section of US Route 93 past the bottleneck of the old road which can be seen twisting and winding around and across the dam itself.

When complete, it will provide a new link between the states of Nevada and Arizona. In an incredible feat of engineering, the road will be supported on the two massive concrete arches which jut out of the rock face. The arches are made up of 53 individual sections each 24ft long which have been cast on-site and are being lifted into place using an improvised high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons.

How's your 'Eye'? Try and align these common shapes...
Here's a chance to find out -

This score was my first attempt...  the guy before me was in the sixes.

And yet a third from Jerry the V this day - many thanks!
This guy is a one man Coyote Exterminator...

Toga Day at the highschool~
Evelyn and Talyn - photo by Ann

This is one of at least two projects going on by the water at the foot of our street.

Serious dredging occurs~

October 08, 2009 Thu

Thanks to Tom - brought us some souvenirs from his recent travels to Denver. They ate on this train~

What else happened this day? Things went well at 'OOK' practice.

Climbed around under my car, to make sure the muffler and tailpipe are REALLY falling off.
They really are. Someday in the near future. Dang.

Learned about QR code, thanks to Greg. In brief:
A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.
QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. Moreover, most current Japanese mobile phones can read this code with their camera.

Here's one we made this afternoon. The idea is that information can be imbedded in this image, and then translated (read) by software either online or on a cellphone.

The QR matrix above contains the message: thanks Greg - now to see if my phone can read it!

For the record, Blackberry (RIM) does not incorporate the decoder, yet. Phones that do (Nokia, Sony) will display the encoded message after taking a picture of the QR matrix. This idea is similar to Barcoding, but faster and easier to read, I gather.

Here we go - signage!

Religion. Well, you got your 'Old Time Religion', that's one kind. Then there's ...

Here's another. Try to read it. G'head - try...

October 07, 2009 Wed

You know, you fancy yourself a computer guy, and you try to keep them running.

Dick has had a printer problem since last christmas, and as his computer guy I've been trying to help. We've addressed this problem more than once - each time finally giving up. Tried it again today. It prints OK from the main tray, but blurry from the 4 X 6 photo tray. Finally thought to turn the 4 X 6 photo paper over. Voila! Problem solved. Man, that took a long time...

October 06, 2009 Tue

Perhaps we've mentioned a photo organizer, viewer, editor called Picasa? It's a free download from Google. The latest version has facial recognition, allowing you to sort your photos in a new way - by face. The software also sorts by date, subject and folder name.

I don't know about you, but we have been terribly lax about sorting and naming digital photographs. We tend to just store them by the month they were taken, keeping whatever designation the camera gave them. Believe me when I say, trying to find a certain picture from four or five years ago using the camera's designated image number will seldom work.

The Picasa photo viewer is excellent for looking at your photos and trying to find a certain one. But still, going through 20,000 plus photos is apt to take a bit of time. With facial recognition having sorted your photos by face/individual, you may then only need to sort through those in which that person might appear. No help for scenery/landscape.

A fun attribute of the software is making collages~~   these are all Dick

You know you live in a small town, when~~~
Well, perhaps when Hedgehog Day gets a banner over Main Street~
Thanks to Greg

the Fidalgo drive-in used to be an A 'n W before they decided we were too small a market and took away their franchise. Still the best root beer around...

October 04, 2009 Sun

Hope you enjoyed this splendid Fall day. Just lovely, near 70. Full moon tonight. Harvest moon?

We've been learning Picasa 3.5 - the version with face recognition. Allows sorting of your pictures by face, thus - by person. A bit time consuming the first time around - with 22K pix to sort and name. Fortunately, as the software 'learns' faces, it begins to group them for you.

This was in today's paper - so proud of Evelyn, are we~~

Ann said nothing about that, due to both custodial parents living in town, etc. They later apologized and issued a correction.

October 03, 2009 Sat

The fancy 'new to me' computer has an 'A' drive, even though they are now antiquated - however, the first time we went to use it, didn't work. That was several months ago, and I've been meaning to look at it ever since. There is one piece of software on a floppy that we occasionally want to load on another machine. In this case, the computer at Ann's work - which means putting the software on a thumb drive, since her work computer doesn't even have a floppy drive. We decided today was the day to see what might be the problem?

Before opening up the case, scrounge up a couple old A drives, in case replacement was in order. Locate a can of compressed air, to blow out the dust. Gather up all tools that might be needed, including wire nippers and new tie wraps (keep the wires inside tied into neat bundles). Flashlight, glasses, magnifying glass...

All this prep took longer than fixing the dang thing. The power wire had never been connected. The data cable, yes - the power, no. Plugged it in, and almost refusing to believe the problem could be solved that easily - turned it back on. Yup - now there's an 'A' drive where it should be - insert floppy - success. Wish they were all that easy.

What else, today? Got the oil changed in two of the three vehicles. Found out that rattle means my car needs a new tailpipe - may as well replace the aging muffler at the same time...

Recall the saga of Ann's old Casio digital camera? It had been acting weird, would not turn 'on' in a simple and normal push of a button fashion. I gave her my Oly and started using hers, having discovered accidently that random pushing of the various control buttons would eventually turn the dang thing on. Not an ideal situation - but I couldn't stand the thought of simply tossing an otherwise working 6 mega pixel (fine for my internet purposes) camera. Then it started shooting out of focus, and I thought - that's it - all over with this camera.

Then, while sitting and waiting for a long download, I was fiddling with it again, and realized that the lens didn't seem to be popping quite all the way out when it turned on. So I gave the lens a bit of a tug, and voila! It takes fine pictures again...

I took these this morning at the Saturday Market, Dick and Laura, Barb and Paul, Barb Larsen, Wendy, Pete and Dottie, Melissa - Paul's new tenant.

Ran across these crayon colors that never made it into production~

Too windy today to get on the roof and scrape. Sunny, though, 60's. Did some office organizing instead. Actually carried some computer stuff to the shed. This means within a week or two, I'll need whatever I took out there, never fails. Nice to gain a few square feet of floorspace, though...

October 02, 2009 Fri

Nice day for putzing around - got sunny and pleasant around 11 AM. Ann worked pretty hard in the back yard, trimming the rose bushes, the Fir tree, and the Fig tree. Here's the old rose bush, before:

my job was to compress the cuttings in the yard waste bin. This is the after...

For some reason, the old rose bush loves this abuse, and grows back bigger and fuller everytime~

If you are 'on Facebook', then you know that some time was also spent watching and waiting while Ann made Tapioca!

The Mayflower Society newsletter arrived, featuring an article about Ann's admittance to this fine old institution - the ceremony for which we had attended a few months ago...

While Ann was slaving away cooking and tree trimming I was to get after the peeling paint on the dormer. I got as far as replacing the rope on our extension ladder...
The old rope had completely rotted through, to where when I grabbed it to raise the ladder, it came off in my hand. A trip to the hardware, etc. and sure enough - time to quit!

We did fit in a stroll by the water - I was curious to see what progress was being made in cleaning up the beach area at the end of our street, and find out what other construction was going on? We now think it might be a marine research school...

Then, while riding home, we found the missing building - it had migrated about four blocks and now sits behind Mickey D's, right on R Ave. House movers had picked it right up and carried it off - after substantially strengthening the wrap around porch~

Some signage, from the blatantly obvious department~

We also ran across this sterling example of that old adage, 'If you're not smart enough to figure this out, then maybe you shouldn't own one.'

More Hubble images

Source: Hubblesite.org

October 01, 2009 Thu

After a pretty decent week, conditions deteriorate. In other words, it's been a bit gray and there have been sprinkles. We must face the fact that summer is actually over. The consecutive days of having the top down topped out at over 100.

It's only a matter of time now until the grass turns green and starts growing like crazy. We'd better face the music and get up there scraping and painting the dormer. But first, a bit of nonsense from around the Internet -- bad grammar and bad word warning!

signage, of the 'good intentions -- bad grammar' variety~

Yes -- but is it art? Mr. Wenling is definitely making a statement...

Oh look -- it's my youngest, Jacob, posing ( in more ways than one) for an official 'portrait'.

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