The Price of Gas!

Liz was driving us over to Amy's after picking us up at the airport and we were driving up Lincoln Avenue and that's when we went by the first gas station.  I couldn't believe my eyes - $6.49 per gallon!  Unbelievable!  A few days later Liz and I went to pick up some food for dinner and she stopped to get gas. It was a really busy station so I didn't get out of the car.  When we were driving back to the house I asked how much it cost to fill up and Liz said $80.00!  Yikes!  EIGHTY DOLLARS to fill the tank?  So I did the math and she only got 12 gallons of gas.  That's nuts!  I filled up my tank before we left for California and I paid $4.29 a gallon. here in NY.  Poor Californians, with the huge STATE taxes on gas, that is just killing them!  Here are some numbers in cents per gallon:  Connecticut $0.25,  New York $0.25, and California $0.71.  There ought to be a law!

 

A Neighbor's Cactus

The houses where Liz and Sarah live are pretty close together.  I am standing in their driveway, and looking at their neighbor's cactus which is just over the fence in their neighbor's yard.  Such beautiful cacti and beautiful flowers..  I don't know the kind of flowers these are, but they are on separate stalks just in front of the cacti.  I photographed this scene a couple of times before I got this photograph.

 

Such an Unusual Landscape From The Air

Sitting at the window watching the world go by, and then suddenly I saw this.  It looks like something with tentacles creeping out over the landscape!  So this is near Terre Haute, Indiana and this tan and green landscape design was visible for miles.  The dark green tentacles are forested land!  And in between the land with trees are farmers fields and if you look closely you can see their rectangular shape in many cases.  I wondered what crops the farmers grew here and Wikipedia told me: "The landscape around Terre Haute is mostly flat, fertile farmland along the Wabash River valley, which is especially suited for large-scale grain farming.  Historically, the area has long been associated with cornfields and hog farms." How cool is it to know this after seeing the landscape from 34,000 feet! I posted an extra large image so please click on this image to see more detail.

First Sight of Home

We left Los Angeles on an early flight this morning - 9:00 AM.  Whew, had to wake at 5:30 to get to the airport by 7:00 AM.  Beautiful flight home, clear skies for more than half the trip.  We approached New York from the west then at the Hudson River, we turned south and went over Manhattan and then Brooklyn and then 25 miles out into the Atlantis Ocean before turning and heading north.  We went half way to the north shore of Long Island before turning south toward JFK for our final approach.  When the plane banked to head south, there was Hempstead Harbor in the distance!  So it was our first view of home after having been away for the week.  A sight for sore eyes!

 

The Gymnast

Vivian has been doing gymnastic training for two years now, and man oh man, is she getting good at it.  She is now working on being able to do a hand stand, which she is doing here, and then to hold the hand stand for two entire seconds.  I snapped this photograph as she was going through the handstand, without stopping and holding the vertical position.  She is almost there it seems.  What is interesting is that the coach says the handstand is the foundation of all gymnastics!  I did not know that!

 

The Venice Sign

We had dinner in a really nice Chinese restaurant in Venice tonight.  As we left and turned the corner, there was the beautiful Venice sign against a twilight sky!  The perfect time to photograph it!   Venice, California was founded by Abbot Kinney in 1905, and this sign was illuminated for the first time on the Fourth of July.  The sign was restored in 2007 with a modern day replica, and it is beautiful to see.  It is a tribute to the celebrated Venice of years past and a modern day gateway to the world famous Venice Beach.

 

Randy's Donuts

If you have been to Los Angeles and have not had any Randy's Donuts, then you have not seen Los Angeles!  I had heard of Randy's Donuts of course, but had never seen it until Liz and Amy brought us there in December of 2017.  Here is the Building that I photographed back then.

After Sunday Mass yesterday, Liz said she knew of a Randy's Donuts location in Santa Monica so we walked over and bought almost a dozen donuts, including what is called "A Texas Glazed Donut." On the tag in the display case it said that donut alone was 1000 calories!  Yikes!  I will say this, they taste really good!  I know because I ate more than my share!

 

Going To Church For Mother's Day

Kathy had heard about St. Monica's Catholic Community, as it is called, from a priest in Boston, Mass, and she has wanted to come here.  Mother's day was the day, so she and Liz and Amy and Vivian and I all attended Mass today.  It it a beautiful church, completed in 1925, and a vibrant parish from what we experienced. They gave out carnations to each of the mothers in attendance.  It was a wonderful way to celebrate Mother's Day!

This is an interior of the church showing the altar.  Look at how beautiful it is.  In a way it is a shame to show all of this without the people in it - the church was packed, but it would seem inappropriate for me to photograph during Mass.

 

Our Amazing Land II

I took this photograph before I took yesterday's photo of the desert in Arizona.  We had been approaching the Rockies and then suddenly when the higher mountains appeared, their tops were frosted with snow!  What a beautiful sight!  I kept looking as we flew west and then I noticed something unusual in the loser right center of the photo - thin lines of white snow going down the mountain into the dark area below the snow caps.  So as we got closer, I zoomed in with my lens to see what it was.

My first guess was that this was most likely a ski area and these were the trails going down the mountain.  So I took several close up photographs as the airplane flew on.  After we were passed this area I looked at my iPad which has an aircraft navigation application on it and there on the map, right next to the little blue airplane icon was printed "Telluride Ski Resort!"  How cool is that to be able to figure out where I was exactly!  And what unusual "markings" on the side of the mountain.  Our amazing land, indeed!

 

Our Amazing Land

As you know when I fly on a commercial aircraft, I keep my nose pressed up against the window and with my camera in my hand, I watch the world go by us from above.  "Our Amazing Land" is all I can think of as I fly from New York to California. So many different landforms and so many different colors, and we go from flying over New York City to farmlands and the Mississippi River, and then the praries and the mountains of Colorado, and then the desert lands of the western states.  This desert area is in Arizona, and I took this photograph just east of Lake Powell, which is the Colorado River held back by the Glen Canyon Dam. And below the dam the Colorado River goes all the way to Grand Canyon.  What amazing and astounding landscapes I get to fly over.  What an amazing land we live in!

 

The Influencer

I am going to tell you a story of what I observed on the flight today.  I don't want this to feel like in any way involves any judgement at all, because that is not my intent.  I am always fascinated with the work that people do and how it works and what is involved. So here is my story.  I had the window seat, Kathy the middle seat and this woman the aisle seat.  As the airplane pushed back from the gate this woman plugged her phone into an auxiliary battery but I was not sure why.  Then holding the phone in two hands she started typing with both thumbs at a really fast pace.  Then after a while she began swiping her fingers across the phone, I am assuming she was visiting websites.  Then back to typing, and typing and typing.  The short version is that for the entire flight, from before takeoff until after landing in Los Angeles, a period of 5 hours and 30 minutes, she continued typing and swiping.  I was stunned at how hard she was working with her phone.  I have never seen anything like this in my life, the concentration and the intensity!  I guessed that perhaps she was in "influencer" who probably has a large audience and so keeps needing to feed her followers.  I asked Amy about this and she said that a really good influencer will take the time to personally answer some of her follower's questions, and who will also take the time to visit other influencer's sites and compliment them on something they posted, and usually that person will return the favor by visiting her site and leaving a compliment.  So clearly being an influencer is a LOT of work.  I mean, this young woman had to have been the hardest working person on this flight!  It was an amazing thing to see.  I was hoping that I would have time to talk to her for just a bit, but she was out of her seat and down the aisle to the exit before we got out of our seats.

Ted Turner Died Today

"Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87. As one of the most important figures in media history, he oversaw a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels."

I got to meet him in 1974 when he was chosen to defend the America's Cup, as skipper of a radically new 12-meter design by Britton Chance.  He was an astounding sailor, one of his great passions in life.  The boat was sponsored by the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and we were doing a story about him and the defense of the cup.  So I went to the Merchant Academy and thought I would be riding along in one of the other boats so that I could get to photograph him, from a distance.  We were all standing around on the dock and he was figuring out who would crew which boat.  Mariner was going to be sailing alongside Valiant, a 12-meter from years before.  You always sail against another boat to see how good your new boat is.  So he needed a crew for Valiant as well as Mariner.  So he is counting crew members and I am standing there with cameras hanging off of me, and I hear him holler out at me: "Youngblood, can you grind a winch?"  I immediately replied "Yes Sir" and with that I was going to be on the crew of Valiant for the day!  I was only needed as a winch grinder when the boat was running before the wind, and I would go down below and man a two man winch with another of the crew!  The rest of the time I was up where I could photograph to my hearts content! What a thrill that was.  He was a funny guy and kept cracking everyone up while sailing.  "You two guys go back where you came from, the pointy end of the boat." which is hysterical for a sailor who had sailed through some terrifying storms and you would think would use the correct nautical terms!  It was one of those unexpected great moments in life.

 

Flying a 727 Airline Flight Simulator!

                             

This is an incredible story!  Years ago I got to fly a TWA flight simulator, and did takeoffs and landings for three hours!  Do I look happy?  The grin says it all!  The way it happened was that we had a new visitor at one of our astronomy meetings.  He was a friend of a member.  After the meetings we used to go to a diner for coffee and dessert.  I got talking with Lou and it turns out he was a "Check Airman" for TWA which meant he flew with pilots to evaluate them.  And he also did stints as a simulator instructor!  When he found out I was a pilot he asked if I would like to fly a simulator some time.  I immediately said "Yes!" but never dreaming it would happen.  He called and said to drive down to a hangar at JFK.  An instructor for flight engineers was working with two new flight engineers, but someone had to fly the plane so the engineers could work through emergencies.  So since he was not training pilots or first officers, he said that basically all he did was fly arountd while the instructor failed systems and the engineers had to run checklists. So after we "took off" he said "the airplane is yours. Go anywhere you want.  The really nice thing was that when the engineer training was over, we stayed in the simulator and he let me do takeoffs and landings at LaGuardia airport!  Simulated, of course! 

This is a photograph of the TWA full motion simulator.  What that means is that the cockpit is up in the air in the building and is supported by hydraulic activators, moves with the inputs that are put in by the flight controls.  If I pulled back on the wheel the whole sim pointed it's nose in the air.  If I pushed foraward on the wheel and turned left, the sim pointed down and tilted left!  It was so realistic that it was not funny!  And of course for this kid, fascinated my whole life by airplanes, it was the dream of a lifetime.  What an incredlbly generous gift Lou gave to me on that night!

From My Archive I

I have been digging around and finding old 35mm color negatives, which, when you look at them, is hard to know exactly how good the photo is.  So I have this system where I photograph those negatives with my SONY camera and macro lens, and then open the image in Photoshop, and then do an "Invert" which makes the whites black and the blacks white - so I am making a "postive" from a negative. So fortunately these negatives in an envelope mentioned where this was taken.  Mt. Ascutney in Vermont.  My friend Mike Terenzoni and I hiked up here on one of our visits to Stellafane in 2001.  I thought this would be more interesting than another photograph of the harbor down the street.

 

Ferns in the Ivy

We have ivy all around the property, and most obviously on the front bank from the lawn in front of the house, down to the street.  But those ferns are not up yet.  But some of them have migrated over underneath the Japanese maple tree.  They are pretty, rooted within the ivy because they sit isolated and surrounded by the ivy.  I tried this photograph in color but the green ivy blended into the green ferns.   So I got out my modified old SONYcamera that is sensitive to infrared light, and photographed them with that.  I love using this camera from time to time because it sees the world, and particularly plants that have clorophyl in them, in a completely different way.  Those plants reflect more infrared light and you can see the effect, above, that they appear brighter white in tone.

 

Judy's Dogwood

This is the Dogwood tree in Judy's yard, our next door neighbor.  It is such a joy and a beautiful thing to see in early spring each year.  There is a history of Dogwoods between three houses next to each other.  We had two Dogwoods in our yard when we first bought the house.  One was next to the garage, growing out of the ivy and it was gorgeous!  We had another one on the west side of our property right by the front porch.  Our neighbor for so many years, Larry, had one on the other side of our property line, near our back door.  In the spring it seemed that there were Dogwoods everywhere.  Well, there was some kind of disease going around.  We lost our largest and most beautiful tree by the garage first. Then Larry lost his by our back door, and finally we lost ours by the front porch.  It is amazing that Judy's tree survives and we are thankful for that.

 

Good as New

The Adirondack chairs are done!  I finished putting the last parts on the second chair today.  For the second chair, on the right I had to repair two of the vertical slats that make the back.  The bottoms of the slats had rotted and so I cut off the bad parts and glued in replacement wood.  For the seat, I had to make two new slats that had completely rotted. But now both chairs are as good as new.  I never realized how much work it would take to do the repairs!  That was a surprise to me. But there's a great deal of satisfaction in restoring something to make is look like new again.  By the way, there are some faint shadows on the chairs, so they don't look perfectly white in the photo.

This was what the second chair looked like before I began my restoration process.  As you can see it was in pretty bad shape, 

 

Personal History I

I have never been good at carefully keeping track of my photographs and negatives, until the digital age. Back in the age of film photography, in this case in the early 1990's  I attended three photographic workshops with a photographer from Arizona. He took us to really interesting areas.  One year part of our trip was to the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range.  There was an important archaeological area that was a buffer around the bombing range and so the US Air Force was required to allow visitors during certain periods.  There were a group of maybe 14 of us, many who were using 4x5 view cameras as I was.  We camped for a week in the desert areas, one of which was the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Area, which is right on the border with Mexico.  I am sure that now that would no longer be possible because soon after that trip, they shut down The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument because of migrants using those areas to come across the border to the United States.  It was a great trip, though.  I found some negatives in my darkroom today and this was one of them.  Man, who is the cool dude with the aviator sunglasses?

 

Stan's Talk About Photographing the Space Shuttle

Stan came out from the city this afternoon and we got to hang out and talk and look at photographs and the try out the old Leica lens on my new Sony camera.  Then I fixed Mediterranean Salmon for dinner which is a favorite - he says its the only reason he comes out!  And then we were off to the Astronomy meeting where he gave a spectacular talk and slideshow of what it was like for him to photograph all the Space Shuttle launches and landings for the last 5 years of the program, for Agence France-Presse where he worked.  He had a lot of "behind the scenes" photographs which was wonderful - not the kinds of things we usually see having to do with the shuttle program.

This was one of the photographs in the presentation.  One time he got to go way up on the gantry that surrounds the shuttle until just before launch.  He said it was amazing to be so close to the shuttle and to be able to look down on it when it was on the pad where it was launched from.  It was an amazing talk which everyone loved! (Photograph Copyright © by Stan Honda)

 

"Mare's Tails"

It's Tuesday so we were down at the beach as usual with our coffee, tea and two Dunkin' Donuts.  I was kind of idly looking at the sky and then began to realize the presence of these Cirrus clouds moving in.  They are just spectacular in their beauty in a blue sky, so I quickly jumped out of the car and snapped a few photographs with my iPhone.  These clouds are high clouds, usually seen at between 20,000 and 66,000 feet.  They are made of ice crystals, as you can imagine because they form so high where the temperatures are very cold.  On a standard day the temperature at 25,000 feet is about -30.0 degrees Fahrenheit!  But what this is really all about is how incredibly beautiful nature can be!  What a beautiful thing to see on an ordinary day!  Oh, I nearly forgot - these clouds are also known as "mare's tails, which would be easy to imagine, given their appearance.

 

Blue Sky, New Green Leaves and the Sun

I have checkpoints where I record my times as I ride around my ten mile bicycle route.  This spot is one where I stop and record three times before continuing.  Today I looked up and of course saw the beautiful blue sky.  Then I saw the dark silhouettes of the large trees then the light green of the new leaves, with the sun shining through them.  Something so beautiful with all these things together.  It made my day special to see this.

 

Kathy's Doll

This is Kathy's doll which sits on top of a clock on the chest of drawers in the dining room.  She started making dolls for Vivian, and the earlier dolls were smaller than this one.  The origin of this one is interesting, we visited our friends Dick and Trauti in Rhode Island and Trauti had some dolls that Kathy admired, so she took a few photographs of them and use one of those photographs for making this doll.  She made one for Vivian first, and then decided she wanted one for herself, and this is the result. What is amazing is the hand stitching on the face, of the smile and the glasses.  She was really proud of how the stitching came out.  She is such a cute doll, isn't she?

 

Lilac Tree Blossom

I needed a blog photo today, and it was raining out.  But I saw these Lilac blossoms on the tree right next to the house in the back.  So I grabbed my SONY camera and got the old Leica lens which I had adapted for this camera, just to try something different that just a really sharp image.  I posted before about this lens being adapter and you can see that post Here.  This seems like an appropriate subject to use my old lens on, where only a small part of the whole image is in sharp focus.  I do love that it is Spring and every day we are seeing more things blooming.

 

Night Light

On April 10,  I photographed a single trailer illuminated by a spotlight late at night, which was located on the property of the old power plant.  When I got back home and pulled into the driveway I saw this scene.  Kathy had just finished with clients and she had left the back spotlight on which cast a shadow of the lilac tree on to the garage. I just thought that these shadows on the garage were so interesting.  Something just a bit different.

 

Fog in the Morning

When I get out of bed in the morning, I always walk into the front bedroom and look out at the street, and then look at the side yard.  It was foggy this morning and I thought I saw some possibilities out both the north window and the east window.  This is the east window, looking toward the rising sun, and I loved how the fog gave depth to the photograph because the fog separates the pine tree from the closer trees.  Not a great shot, but a little bit interesting, and atmospheric I think.

 

Off to London and Zurich

These are contrails over our house and they are "condensation trails" from the water vapor coming out the engines of high flying jet aircraft.  So of course many of us look up with a feeling of wanderlust, and wondering where airplanes like this might be going.  Well, now there is a simple answer.  It is an App (of course) for our cellphones.  It is called "Flight Radar 24" and you can get it for free.  I will leave out the technical stuff, like it receives  ADS-B transmissions from aircraft, showing where they are going, what their altitude is and how fast they are flying.  All on our phones

So there are two contrails over our house in the photograph.  I watched the first airplane fly over and looked it up on Flight Radar 24, and then when I saw the second airplane fly over I looked that up.  So here are the displays for both aircraft.  They are both flying at 33,000 feet and doing about 560 MPH.  If you look closely you can see the type of aircraft, one a 777 and the other 787 and you can even see what time they will arrive at their destinations!  What an amazing thing it is these days to be able to see where airplanes are going!

 

Hosta

I love watching the Hostas come out of the ground in the spring every year.  Little pointy things purple and green in color come out of the ground where the plant was from last year.  It seems to happen so quickly where the pointy things get taller and then they begin to both unwrap themselves, and continue to climb skyward.  There is something beautiful to see all these leaves unwrapping themselves as they continue to grow.  I photographed this early one morning and there are water drops on all the leaves. So this is a photograph of an early stage in the growth of this plant, so far.   Please click on this to see more detail.

 

Four Eyes

I was sitting at my big desktop computer in the basement.  Years ago when I built the desk, I covered it with white formica.  So today I set my bifocals down and picked up my computer glasses.  I have a small LED spotlight on a flexible shaft and I happened to put my glasses in the light.  I love the shadows here and particularly the fact that the close-up part of the bifocals make a brighter image on the desktop.  I was looking at it for a bit an then decided it would make a photograph.  I called it "four eyes" because when I was a kid, that's what some people used as an insult to other kids wearing glasses!  That's terrible.  But here there are four circles, and it just came to me!  This photograph is all about the light, and the shadows.

 

Fair Weather Clouds

These are Cumulus clouds, often called "fair weather clouds" because they usually don't bring any rain.  They are formed when the sun warms the earth and so the warmed air begins to rise - warm air rises - and as it rises it moves up into cooler air.  Because of the nature of the atmosphere, the higher you get from the ground the cooler the temperature.  The air is cooler by 3 degrees Fahrenheit every thousand feet.  So when the warm air rises into the cooler air, then it condenses and "makes" cumulus clouds.  Aren't you glad I am a pilot and know this stuff?  :-)  I just thought this scene was so beautiful in just blue and white.  It lifted my spirits to see these colors.

 

Fixing The Fence

I put up this fence probably 40 or 50 years ago.  Our nighbor Larry had it built for me from cedar lumber.  The fence has been painted over and over again, and some pickets have been replaced when some of them deteriorated.  Well this winter, when the plows came by and pushed the heavy wet snow to the side of the road it broke loose two of the sections which fell down.  So I reattached the two sections and today started scraping and painting the whole fence.  It took several hours to do two sections.  I have two more to do.  You can see that the fence here definitely needs painting. But I am ultimately going to replace the fence.

So I started here on the right side of the photograph and I am just finishing up the second of two sections which I painted today. Do you like my little white seat I built?  I made it to hold binoculars when observing because I couldn't put them down in the grass.  But it is a perfect painting seat!   I have discovered that no one makes wooden fences anymore.  Everything is now plastic fencing which much of looks cheap.  SO...  I will buy the lumber and cut the pickets and attach them to the "stringers" that connect to the posts that hold the fence up.  It will be a long lasting job to do because of all the other work around here, like painting the west side of the house this season. But I will get this done.  Stay tuned!

I set my tools down and the paint and then realized it was an interesting photograph.  There is the scraper I used on all the wood, then the paintbrush to the right which I use to brush off all the scrapings, and then my paintbrush and can of paint, and my well used painting gloves.  A nice composition I thought!

And last but not least, a photograph of the finished painted part of the fence.  This is deceiving because it looks perfect, but many of the pickets are rotting in place and so are some of the stringers as well.  The third picket to the right of center is partially rotting away, if you look closely.  But at least the neighbor's won't dislike me because our property looks rundown.

 

A Rainbow!

It was just before suppertime that I went to the garage for some reason.  I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a small part of this rainbow.  So as I started down the driveway toward the street where I hoped to be able to see more of the bow, our neighbor came racing across out front lawn, iPhone in hand, with the same idea!  So we both marveled at our great luck to see this much of a rainbow.  It was still sprinkling on us at the time, which was not unusual because it is the water drops that make the rainbow in the first place.

After I got the overall photograph, then I tried for a closeup which included this gnarled treetop just up the street.  I thought that added a special quality to the photograph, with that tree.

 

The Bus Stop

Back around Christmas time, someone added two colorful pieces of fabric, one on each side of the door from top to bottom showing two "nutcracker" soldiers as decoration for the holiday.  It was wonderful to see this small shelter brightened up.  It made me feel good every time I walked by it.  Well, it has now been completely painted and decorated with a flag and flowers and some bright colors.  If you want to see what this structure looked like for 50 years, click Here.  Quite a change.  It will be interesting to see if the decoration changes again in the future.

 

A Seestar Evening

Tonight's astronomy meeting was different.  It was supposed to be an observing night but it was partly cloudy so instead some members decided to make it a night where members who owned Seestar telescopes could gather and help each other learn to use these amazing instruments.  The three white things up on the tops of the tripods are called "Seestar all in one smart telescopes."  They are an amazing breakthrough in amateur astronomy.  As the light pollution gets worse and worse each year, these devices can photograph objects in the night sky that can't be seen by our eyes.  You set it on a tripod and then connect to it with an iPad or smartphone and you run it wirelessly.  You choose an object that you want to see, and it automatically goes to that object and starts taking photographs and each photo is added to the stack of other photos and suddenly the object appears on your phone or ipad!  It has changed amateur astronomy!

We had am amazing turnout tonight with perhaps 6 or 7 of these telescopes and a number of people who just came to observe.  This photo, above and the two below were actually taken in darkness!  I used my SONY a7 III camera with a "film speed" setting of 12,800!  The normal setting for the camera is 400.  And look what I can photograph with this incredibly sensitive sensor in the camera!

Here Don, one of our members is seated and running his Seestar which is up in the tripod behind him, from his iPad. One of the two members behind him also brought her Seestar and it is running off to one side while she is talking with another member.

Here Bill, on the left is discussing the operation of his Seestar with Mak, on the right, who is also running his telescops.  There were lots of questions and answers tonight as members more familiar with their telescopes were helping people who had only recently gotten their own scopes.  It was such a great evening with everyone helping each other learn this amazing new device.

 

The Sycamore Trees, a Different View

 

You are all aquainted with my photographs of the line of Sycamore trees along the sidewalk at the harbor's edge.  I have photographed them so many ways, but pretty much all in a line.  So on the way back from my walk the other day, I paused and looked up at this scene.  It is part of the line of trees, and instead of them all being in a line, there is one tree behind another behind another.  I had never taken notice of the trees seen this way, and it fascinated me.  So what we have here is a jumble of tree branches and you can't really tell where one tree begins and another ends.  I guess I liked the texture, and the design with branches going every which way.  A new way of seeing a familiar object.

 

Fixing The Adirondack Chairs

When my sister Joan moved from the family house to a condo, she had no room for two beautiful Adirondack chairs that she had for years.  So she gave them to us, and you have seen them in blog posts showing the back yard.  They sit up on the top of the little hill, and we sit there with coffee or cold drinks and relax under the shade of the trees and look out over our little world.  Well, the weather got to both of them, and we hadn't noticed until I sat in one and one of the slats in the seat broke!  So the water had caused rot in some parts of the seat.  So I got some new wood and made new slats, and replaced the front part of the piece of wood that the slats are screwed to.  Then I painted the chair and it looks good as new!

So, one chair done and one to go.  This is what the second chair looks like and there is actually less repair needed to this one.  In a few days this chair will look as good as new as well!  Easy peasy!  Thank you Joan for our wonderful chairs.  I am taking good care of them!