Street Map

I saw this the other day and it stopped me in my tracks!  A map of local streets?  Well, no.  I just think it is such an interesting graphic image.  Any ideas what it might be?  I had to take my car in for a NYS inspection and so after dropping it off a couple of miles away, I decided to walk home for the exercise.  I saw two men on ladders working on the side of a building with some kind of electric chipping tool.  I didn't give it another thought, until several hours later when I walked back to pick up the car.  Then I realized what they were doing when I saw this.  It is a concrete block wall, and the workmen were chipping out mortar in cracks between the joints.  And then they used most likely some epoxy and concrete mixture to seal the cracks they had opened up with their tools!  So to me it looked a bit like a street map.  But it's an interesting pattern that may even have some flavor of a Native American design.

 

Strange Fireworks

The fireworks were different this year on July 4th.  They started shooting them off earlier than normal, when there was still light in the sky from sunset.  We didn't think much about it until a short while after it started, and suddenly all the black smoke from the explosions, made this giant black cloud against the fading light of day!  If the sky had been black, we wouldn't have seen the smoke, and if there was some light on the smoke cloud  from the front, the smoke cloud would have been white.  The black cloud sure was omninous looking!  It looked like perhaps a boat had exploded and burned!

But then as more mortars were fired, the colors of the fireworks were really pretty and the dark cloud became less obvious, and the display seemed much more normal.  It was a wonderful evening with friends watching the fireworks over the harbor.

 

The Cloud Over The Tree

After I did the self-timer exposures of Kathy and I having coffee, I had the camera near my chair because I was too lazy to take it back to the car.  Then I happened to look up at that tree that is nearly on the end of the point, and noticed the little bright cloud above the tree!  Actually, it is the top of a cumulus build-up poking up above a different cloud between that build-up and me.  There was just something that made me think that this would make an interesting photograph.  So here you are!

 

Birthday Breakfast

So today may be my birthday, but it is a Tuesday!  And you know what happens on Tuesday, right?  Right!  Dunkin' Donuts at the beach!  It was warm enough that we brought some sand chairs and a tiny white table one foot tall, to hold our coffee and donuts off of the sand, and so we sat and went through our Tuesday ritual, and really enjoyed ourselves!  It was a lovely way to start my birthday!

 

I Am So Thankful...

I am so thankful!  A month or so ago I was part of a Zoom meeting that had to do with early Moon maps presented by a member of the Antique Telescope Society, who lives in Vermont.  He was having some difficulty at first setting up his Zoom connection and he apologized for his difficulties by saying, "I am having troubles adapting to this new technology since I am an octogenarian." And that hit me like a brick!  I am an octogenarian!  And have been one for a year now!  That word made me feel really old when I only feel as if I am perhaps 60 years old, or so.  I am thankful for my health that allows me to hammer out a ten mile ride 3 or 4 days a week. And I have friends who have been friends all my life and I have younger friends who are so much smarter than I am, but who inspire me.  I have a wonderful wife who is so loving and so talented and a wonderful family with two astounding daughters and their partners and an amazing 3 year-old granddaughter, and three lovely sisters, and Kathy's brother and his wife and nieces and nephews as well.  I have so many interesting things to do involving photography, of course and then astronomy and now flying a plane again.  Life at this late stage is filled with riches beyond imagining. Who could ask for more?

 

The Masks Are Finished!

 

So this is Kathy's finished Mask!  Just beautiful, isn't it!  Kathy spent parts of three days painting it.  She wears it well, don't you think?

This is Liz and Kathy putting on another layer of the white material, on top of the blue shop towels that you saw in the photographs yesterday.  The white coating is made up of Elmer's glue and plaster of paris and water and a bit of vinegar.  There were several coats of that coating, and then after that dries, which takes a few days, then the wolves heads were painted.

What is funny is that Kathy brought her cardboard wolf's head with her on the airplane in a plastic bag!  It got through the X-Ray machine without anyone asking.  And she had to take it back through security to get it home in one piece. Once she was home, she started painting it.

The Wolf Mask Grows

 

It was fun for Kathy to get to California and work on her Wolf mask with Liz.  Kathy loves craft projects but they are even more fun when done with someone else.  When we went to Rochester the last time Kathy and Jo Anne worked on dolls, down in the finished basement sewing together.  Here Kathy and Liz are set up on the dining room table.

This is the second stage of the process, where they are using "shop towels" which are heavier and are blue colored, along with a paste made from Elmer's glue and I believe some plaster of paris mixed in.  So the paste is applied by brush and then the towel is applied and another coat of paste over it.

You can begin to see the wolf's outline better now that it is nearly completely covered in blue towel paper.

Here they are working together on each of their wolf heads.

And at the end of the day, here are both wolf heads, further along in the construction process.  Stay tuned.