Two Nice Days / Week

That's what we get this time of year. Yesterday was nice, today was nicer, next 3 days are storms. So Deb ran off to lunch with a high school friend, and I drove into the Boston MFA to see some stuff that I thought would be great. I was wrong. I had a good day, but what I went to see was blah.

Did see some strange, edgy stuff by a Japanese guy, whose name I forget. Then I cruised the classical European galleries, and that always sets my mind right.

Ate vegy health stuff in the cafeteria (on the right there), shopped the bookstore (bought 3).

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This classical European painting looks as good even in B&W -
(mouseover to see it).

In these classical religious scenes, clothes, robes, fabrics were flowing and windswept, and blended in with the clouds. It was all part of "being in heaven among the clouds".

Almost done - my 3rd scrap wood porch table.

Used these new (to me) brass finish screws. They tighten by a star shaped driver. Left the heads exposed - they are very small.

Self-Appointed School Guardians

Day 1 - these guys showed up to "protect" the local school.

Day 2 - these guys showed up to help out.

Day 3 - these guys showed for backup.

Day 4 - these guys showed up to work off their community service sentences.

Day 5 - these guys showed up as 2nd team backup.

Day 6 - these guys showed up as part of the local "work for food stamps" program.

Day 7 - custodian accidentally knocks a full trash can down 2 flights of stairs.

It's been a bunch of years since this displayed on my screen.

I was messing with my camera and the top monitor, and ..... it's a long story, but I ended up kicked out of desktop mode and even "CTRL-alt-F1 / CTRL-alt-F7" wouldn't get me back. I nearly called Mike, but then I thought "he'll yell at me" so I toughed it out.

All is well.

Invasion of the Stink Bugs

For the last 4-5 months, these bugs have been quietly popping up inside the house here. Everywhere! One at a time. When you least expect it. It's been kind of spooky, as it is winter - shouldn't they be cocooned outside in the garden dirt ??

So I am glad to see The New Yorker bring up this topic.

These uniquely versatile bugs are decimating crops and infiltrating houses all across the country. Will we ever be able to get rid of them?

The species is not native to this country, but in the years since it arrived it has spread to forty-three of the forty-eight continental United States, and -- in patchwork, unpredictable, time-staggered ways -- has overrun homes, gardens, and farms in one location after another.

. . . . a wildlife biologist in Maryland decided to count all the brown marmorated stinkbugs he killed in his own home; he stopped the experiment after six months and twenty-six thousand two hundred and five stinkbugs. Around the same time, entomologists documented thirty thousand stinkbugs living in a shed in Virginia no bigger than an outhouse, and four thousand in a container the size of a breadbox. In West Virginia, bank employees arrived at work one day to find an exterior wall of the building covered in an estimated million stinkbugs.

The first sighting outside Pennsylvania came in 1999, in New Jersey. By 2003, stinkbugs had arrived in Maryland. By 2004, they were in West Virginia and Delaware. By 2007, they were in Ohio and New York.

Often enough, they simply come in through doorways, around which they tend to congregate in autumn, but they have dozens of other ways of entering: down chimneys, around utility pipes, underneath the flashing on roofs, beneath cracks in the siding, through the vents in air-conditioning units, via imperfectly sealed windows, in the gaps below door sweeps.

Sadly, scientists have no solution yet. They are still experimenting with ways to get rid of these bugs, and are not hopeful that it will be anytime soon.

Out with the Old, etc etc

The old one lasted 10 years. (See my April 2008 page - about the middle of the page.)
New one is scrap wood & shellac (real old fashioned shellac - clean up with ammonia !).

The excitement continues....

This was 13" of wet slush. The snowblower exit chute kept jamming up. Progress was measured in inches.

GIF's Forever !

I think that I finally perfected my GIF of the gunfight from Shane.

St. Patrick's Day - The Temple Bar, Dublin

A very famous place and, thanks to Earthcam, I got a live screen snap today.

We will be visiting there in the Fall. (Mike and I were there for a short cold windy rainy memorable day in 2009).

In 1599, Sir William Temple, a renowned teacher and philosopher, entered the service of the Lord Deputy Of Ireland. In 1609 Temple was made Provost of Trinity College, Dublin and Master Chancery in Ireland and moved to this country.

Sir William Temple built his house and gardens on newly reclaimed land here on the corner of Temple Lane and the street called Temple Bar. In 1656, his son, Sir John Temple, acquired additional land, which with reclamation made possible by the building of a new sea wall, allowed the development of the area we now know as Temple Bar.

In the 17th century 'Barr' (later shortened to Bar) usually meant a raised estuary sandbank often used for walking on. Thus the river Liffey embankment alongside the Temple family's plot became known as Temple's Barr or simply Temple Bar. Later this evolved into the present thoroughfare connecting this whole area from Westmoreland Street to Fishamble Street.

Been chasing a new vision for some pictures. Stuggling with where I'm going and how to get there. This is one of my favorite older pictures from the MFA, with some of this new processing I'm trying.

It's a picture of a guy taking a picture of a guy painting a picture of a picture.

With this much post-processing, I can't say that it's a "photograph" any more (which is neither a good thing nor bad). It *is* a lot more interesting looking than the original photo, however. (Mouse-over for colorized version.)

Hmmmm .....

Until we get it right ....

Money and Power

Back in 1954 my parents had saved enough to buy a nice little home in Coney Island. Working middle-class neighborhood; familes were nice, no crime (that I ever heard of - I was 10 when we moved there), we could play outside (and we did) day and night.

Four or five years later, a powerful, crooked, greedy POS real estate developer bribed the right political POS city fathers and judges and our entire neighborhood was forceably sold to this developer. My parents went to court to fight the politically dictated selling price - the judge wouldn't even look at pictures of the house and neighborhood.

We had to move out before the $$$ was handed over to dad, so we went into this POS apartment somewhere. More than a year later, dad hired a lawyer (mom's cousin Duke) and went to the developer's lawyer. "Where's the money for their house?". The lawyer opens his drawer pulls out a stack of checks, finds dad's and says "We mailed it out a year ago but the Post Office said it was undeliverable. Here it is." (They mailed some checks out after the people moved out and their houses had been demolished. They just tossed the returned checks in a drawer until people hired lawyers to come get them. Lawyers? - we could barely pay the rent!)

Sadly, dad became extremely bitter about "the bigs guys crushing the little guys". Up to that point, he had a lot of faith in the American Dream. That pretty much ended there. He was 38.

We lived at 2756 West 5th Street. Here is a picture of what it looks like today.

Thanks to Google maps - X marks the spot.

The guy on the right (below) is Fred Trump - the real estate developer in our story.

We are in Virginia at the moment. Our house sitter reports all's well back home. Full report after the break.